Nov
29
Having a rotten cold is never fun, but if you’ll allow me to be complainy for a second, having a rotten cold while also enormously pregnant is sucky to the extreme. Being felled by some rampaging virus (thank you RILEY) in the third trimester takes your average everyday discomfort and cranks things up to the Pray For Relief And/Or Death level, and I’m officially nostalgic for the days when jimmy legs and sciatic flareups were the most annoying physical symptom I had to deal with.
Also, I am just going to go ahead and say this: I now fully understand the benefit of doing one’s Kegels on a regular basis. It’s got to be better than grabbing your crotch like Michael Jackson each time you feel a sneeze or cough coming on.
On the subject of health, have you seen Sicko yet? I’m not the world’s most rabid Michael Moore fan, but I recommend renting this movie if you haven’t already. It isn’t a perfect documentary, but it is infuriating and disturbing and yes, depressing.
JB and I are phenomenally lucky in that his workplace offers one of the best healthcare benefits programs I’ve ever encountered. We don’t take this for granted, it is every bit as important as salary to us. I take medication to manage a health issue (not mental, I don’t know why I feel the need to clarify that but I do) and recently I looked up what those drugs would cost us out of pocket: $50 a day. Over 18K per year in medications alone, never mind periodic doctor’s visits, and of course everything related to pregnancy (over 25K for that last c-section!), etc.
With JB’s insurance, I don’t have copays, and at least so far I haven’t encountered any HMO hassles over seeing specialists that may or may not be preferred providers. The only limitation I’ve run into to date is that Regence doesn’t want me to get ahead with the medications—they won’t refill a prescription until the current prescription is in theory 75% depleted, even though we’re not talking about controlled substances here. But obviously on the problem scale that one is way over in the Nearly Painless zone, because hell, at least they’re paying for the drugs.
I don’t have any kind of knowledge on whether or not the way Moore represented healthcare in other countries is a fair and accurate portrayal, that’s not really what impacted me most about the movie. Instead, it was the woman whose little girl died because the hospital she brought her to wasn’t covered in her insurance plan, and the HMO executive physician who testified that she was actively and repeatedly encouraged to deny coverage to sick patients. These things I believe happen all the time in our healthcare system.
I have family members who currently have ‘catastrophic’ insurance because they can’t afford comprehensive coverage; their regular visits, preventative care and medications are not paid for. Some of you probably don’t have insurance, or your coverage is stingy as fuck. I guess none of us want to subsidize healthcare for people who deliberately destroy their health, or pay higher taxes so everyone who wants a boob job can get one, but when it comes to basic care and treating illness, it doesn’t seem like it should be a privilege to have access to our country’s health resources. It seems like it should be a right.
Anyway, see the movie if you have a chance, I don’t think you’ll regret it.
Nov
28
Hey, thanks for voting in the handy dandy poll thing yesterday. That was way easier than tallying up comment votes and creating an Excel pie chart, although I do find it mildly questionable that the polling website flat out says “poll results are subject to error and are for entertainment only.” Maybe that’s how Bush got re-elected.
Today is one of my days home with Riley and I’m typing this while he’s studiously involved with placing the mouth, eyes, and nose in all the wrong places on Mr. Potato Head. It’s a good thing Mr. Head doesn’t come with physiologically correct bodily orifices because he would definitely have some interesting below-the-waistline anatomy.
It’s a gray day outside and our backyard is a sodden Raisin Bran mush of wet leaves and trampled dog poop. My little vegetable garden is in complete disarray, dying tomato vines hanging in tortured loops from the various hoists and pulleys that kept them upright during the hot summer months. Dog’s muddy pawprints are smeared up and down our sliding glass door and all my container plants are an unruly mass of weeds, puddled water, and piled-up fallen leaves. The pretty, tiny magnolia tree in the corner of the yard has transformed into an ugly skeletal brown hand, stuck frozen, held up towards the flat sky.
I feel I should do something about all this entropy but it’s warm and dry inside and some of us are in our pajamas. Okay, all of us are.
Riley gave me his cold and I’m tired of hacking and snorting and wheezing (even more than usual) but on the upside he politely tells me “Bless you Mommy” every time I cough up a lung.
It sort of breaks my heart that this is the last two months where it’s just him, you know? Where on these days it’s just the two of us, rattling around the house playing with crayons and reading books and making sock puppets and building Lego towers and listening to that oddly wistful “This is how it rains” song on Blue’s Clues. Soon there’s going to be a baby brother and life will be bigger and richer and everything about this is a wonderful thing, but still. Still.
Okay, I need to help my boy put some lips on Mr. Potato Head’s left ear, but I thought I’d show you this:
Ignore my goofy pose (and loud Target attire) and check out that big old belly. JB told me that when he picked Riley up from daycare yesterday, a couple of the teachers asked him if I was pregnant. I would have guessed this was a total no-shitter, but I guess when the alternative is making a presumption that is in fact wrong, it’s best to err on the side of caution.
-
My product review site:
[