Things to discuss when we have the time and energy:
1. Postcards to Voters. Is it a great way to manage those evenings when one’s mental health is not what it should be? (I recently managed a very bad brain day by alternating doom-scrolling and postcard-writing.) Or is it a giant waste of time and money, and a way to FEEL like one is Doing Something when one is Not?
2. Follow-up biopsy feelings. I still have a bruise, and in fact it’s a little larger now. I also still have irritation from the adhesive. It’s been nine days.
3. Follow-up cat kidney issues. The vet got back to us and said that the kidney stone analysis shows they are the kind that can’t really be prevented, so Repeat Issues are very likely. The STARTING recommendations (prescription food, regular x-rays, regular urinalysis) are $$$ per year; each surgery is several thousand dollars; I don’t know yet if there are procedures between prevention and surgery, or what they cost. At what financial point does a person decide that a 12-year-old pet should not be…er, sustained? What if that particular cat’s Support Person is leaving for college in a year and we were all already kind of worried about how he would survive that, considering how weird and clingy and yowly he was when she went to camp for two weeks? Well. Prescription cat food for thought.
4. Follow-up Paul kidney issues. He has a second procedure a week from now. Maybe let’s wait for the follow-up until after that.
5. I have been panicking. I wish to re-tell you the story about the time I was seeing a psychiatrist, and I was explaining in a fraught, breacking voice the weird side effects I was having from a medication (for example, seeing pedestrians and feeling certain that Something Bad was going to happen to them) and she listened carefully, and then said in a very calm, almost bored, diagnostic tone, “Panic.” She wrote it down. She prescribed some short-term medication. I have been once again having a rather extended session of panicky feelings. Also: I got together with friends, and it seemed to snap the panic streak. I recommend having friends, if that’s an option where you are.
6. Henry has been doing a summer youth theater thing, and I am so happy he is Finding His People/Interests and so forth, but also I am so exhausted by this. The transportation alone!! IT CONSUMES MY LIFE. And it is nowhere NEAR what parents manage for a kid in sports!! This reminds me of high school and college, where we as students would complain that every teacher/professor acted as if their class was your ONLY CLASS. Every kid activity acts like it thinks they are the ONLY ACTIVITY for your ONLY KID.
7. Henry has a rash spreading over his face/torso/arms/legs. Trying to get this looked at has been such a surprising hassle. Our (Catholic) pediatric clinic has switched to a (Catholic) health management system that has RUINED EVERYTHING. It used to be that if one of the kids was sick I would call the pediatrician phone number, and I would say “Oh, good morning, may I please speak to a nurse?,” and then I would tell the nurse what was going on, and either they would make me an appointment or else they would tell me what to do instead. NOW, I call an automated phone tree, which gradually allows me to select the numbers that indicate I wish to make a Sick Child appointment for an Established Patient—but then I talk to the same receptionist who answers allllll the calls ANYway, and she LEAVES A MESSAGE for the nurse, who calls me back HOURS LATER, and if I can’t answer the phone at that moment (driving; at an appointment with another child; in the bathroom; at work) they leave a message and I have to call back and LEAVE ANOTHER MESSAGE and WAIT MORE HOURS. HOW IS THIS BETTER. Anyway, the nurse told me it sounded fine and he didn’t need to be seen, and to give him benadryl and use hydrocortisone cream. And the rash continued to spread over the next couple of days, so I had to call back and do the entire system again, and the second nurse was quite alarmed that the rash was also on his face (“It’s not on his FACE or anything, right?,” she asked, despite me having told the first nurse that it was on his face and around his eyes); and eventually I got an appointment for him for this morning, and the doctor thinks it’s a result of contact with some kind of poisonous plant—BUT HERE IS THE THING: HE HAS NOT ENCOUNTERED ANY PLANTS. So. I mean. I will give him the steroid. And maybe it will work! But why did NEITHER the nurses NOR the doctor think my REPEATED “No, he has not been in nature” answer was relevant for the diagnosis of “contact with poisonous plant”???
8. One reason I emphasize “(Catholic)” in the previous item is that the medical center itself is emphasizing it. I used to give NO THOUGHT AT ALL to the “St.” part of the medical center’s name. But now there is a new, large poster in the pediatric waiting room, explaining that this is a CATHOLIC medical center, and as such they must HONOR their CORE VALUES above ALL ELSE. Isn’t that ominous, in the current climate? My loose plan is to MOVE US ELSEWHERE. Religious institutions can KEEP IT.
9. Some summers feel kind of languid, with lots of time for fun—or possibly I am misremembering, and they ALWAYS feel as if they OUGHT to feel languid with lots of time for fun, but ACTUALLY they are SO BUSY and we have NO TIME FOR ANYTHING? In any case, this is a summer when we have not even had time to discuss what we want to do this summer—and now it is almost August.
10. Rob got a job in Seattle! It is…fully remote. I am concerned he is going to LOSE HIS MIND if he is living AND working in a one-room studio apartment in an expensive big city where he has NO NEED TO LIVE for a fully-remote job. But he is a grown-up and this is up to him to figure out.
11. Next week I am taking the twins on a two-day road trip to visit a couple of colleges, including the one Rob went to. I am REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS. Hotel room! (I got one for the twins, and another for just me.) Car snacks! A couple of days away from home!
I’m chuckling because my older kid does theater and the productions are such a mess for driving! It’s definitely the worst activity as far as getting kids there. I understand.
My (former cop) wife was trained to never take a sexual assault victim to a Catholic hospital because they may not provide appropriate medical care to prevent pregnancy and that’s really all I have to say about that. Wtaf?
I don’t have panic issues (just regular anxiety), but I’ve been impressed with what EMDR has been doing to turn down the reactivity of my brain.
Panic sucks! I wonder if scanning Hope and Help for Your Nerves by Claire Weekes or When Panic Attacks by David Burns would be useful. Those books have helped me so many times.
The Weekes book has a very old fashioned tone, but she was a psych pioneer in mid century Australia, so I give her grace for that.
I was reading your pediatrician description and thinking this was what happened when our doctor’s practice was first bought out by a local hospital. After a year or so, everything smoothed out, the triage line option came back and job distribution was sorted back out. So, I was going to say you might just want to wait it out, if you really like your doctor. By the end of your description I was thinking “hell no.” It doesn’t sound like you really like and trust your doctor, for starters. And then there was the “please be very aware this is a Catholic institution” bit…
1) I do Postcards to Voters, too (though not as much as I used to). I kind of wish I’d done the Kansas campaign you mentioned recently. But I have the same reservations about how much of a difference it makes in relation to the cost of postcards and stamps. I wonder if I should just write large (for me) checks to Dems with close Senate races instead, which is what I did about a week ago. But in the fall I will probably gear up my postcard writing again.
3) I think in your place I’d put trying to make a long-term plan on hold for a while and see how the starting recommendations go. It could be the cat will do better (or worse) than predicted and that will resolve the issue.
5) I’m sorry.
6) Is this the kind of youth theater that keeps the kids in rehearsal until late at night? Because I have experience with that and it’s the ONLY thing I don’t miss about the fact that the theater where my youngest did plays for a couple years went out of business.
9) Same. And it makes no sense because the kids have fewer camps and activities than they did when they were younger, but we were recently trying to figure out how to work in a several-day trip to an amusement park a few states away and we realized between a week of sleep-away camp, a business trip, and a vacation in August it was impossible to do before school starts. I’m sad about that not because I was dying to go (there’s a closer one we’ll probably visit) but because my oldest wanted to go the summer after he graduated from high school in 2019 and we didn’t get around to it and then there was covid, which kept us away for two summers and now we haven’t gotten around to it again and anyway, I feel disappointed for him because he rarely asks for this kind of thing, or anything, really.
2. I am sorry you are still in pain, but very glad it was benign. Treat yourself!
3. “Prescription cat food for thought” ha ha haaa!
6. I am SO EMBARASSED when I think about how much my parents drove me around for stuff (Girl Scouts, band, orchestra AND youth symphony, etc) and how much I took it for granted. But it’s so great that Henry found his people!
7. Doctor’s office phone systems are so incredibly irritating. Ours will call, text, and email to say I can now view a message in the patient portal, to which I must log in for HIPAA reasons. The message turns out to be a reminder to make the specialist appointment that I have already been to, because when you get referred to a specialist the main office has NO IDEA whether you actually went! Which must be frustrating for them, but perhaps they can read between the lines and see that my issue was resolved, because they have not heard from me since. I’m on the verge of changing doctors because I hate the patient portal so much, but the changing is such a hassle.
9. This summer there have been some pleasant, languid times, and lots of pool time. But I planned badly: nothing in June, allll the things in July, so that now I am exhausted and should be happy for two weeks or so off before school starts but I am also dreading the unstructured time. Whoops. Good news is we’re getting chickens, which will be a great distraction for the kids (ages 7 and 4). My younger daughter calls chickens BIK BOKS.
OMG, BIK BOKS! I love this!
BIK BOKS!!!!!!!! 😍
3.) “Prescription cat food for thought” made me giggle. Ugh, though, to the situation.
5.) The panicking sounds awful. I am so sorry you are going through it and I hope it smooths out some when some of these MANY stressful issues are in the rearview.
7.) I have many thoughts about hospital system scheduling/answering services, both as a patient (or parent of) and as the wife of a physician whose schedule/patients get continually screwed up by the SUPER EFFICIENT systems, but none of those thoughts are helpful and most of them translate into ARRRGGGGGHHH so I will just say that I empathize GREATLY and I hope the steroid clears up Henry’s rash quickly.
1) I have done Postcards for Voters. I bought these postcards on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Postcards-patriotic-compliant-mailable-unused/dp/B078T25FSN and I write & try to get my children to decorate the blank part of the front…or when they get burnt out I doodle something or just write VOTE! in block letters. Involving my children helps me fight some of the doubts about effectiveness, because even if we don’t get anyone else to vote I am teaching THEM that I think voting is very important. Then I post a picture of the cutest cards on Facebook, because I am not above being passive aggressive at my non-voting friends and want to show solidarity with the friends who are doing more than I am (they generally don’t have young kids, or know actual swing voters). I think the issue is that doing something is better than nothing, but none of the things you can do are actually satisfyingly effective (unless you happen to have a lot of friends who do not vote normally, but will if you nag them). Last election there seemed to be a consensus that actually going door to door canvassing makes a real difference…but it’s definitely not for everyone. Donated money gets spent all kinds of different ways – including on consultants to brainstorm new ways to get you to donate more money, so I always find that a bit disheartening. I think if I had enough initiative to do it, the things I could do that would make the most difference would be either watching someone else’s kids so that they could do door to door canvassing (especially – in my area – if they spoke Spanish, or came from a group that tends to have lower voter turnout) or could donate money that would specifically go to paying community college students to help with the campaign instead of working in other minimum wage jobs. But I do think that in an election people might not even realize is happening, which is most of what Postcards to Voters tends focus on, a postcard could actually make a difference. At least I hope.
6) I am a Girl Scout leader and yesterday I got asked to give a ride to someone ELSE’s kid, even though the meeting was at my house so there’s no universe in which it was on my way (technically they did not ask me specifically, but no one else volunteered), AND giving this particular ride involved parking at a house with an F*** Biden flag. And the dad was home. I resisted the urge to ask why he was unavailable to drive, because honestly I am doing it for the girl not the family, but I am taking this as my opportunity to rant a little bit.
8) Our only hospital within an hours drive is a Catholic one, and I don’t actually know how that effects the care available there (my sister-in-law once worked in L&D at a different Catholic hospital, and she says they did not withhold care from women on religious grounds), but I was pregnant with my second when that woman in Texas was being kept on life support in a Catholic hospital against her family’s wishes in order to gestate a fetus with severe medical complications, and it really is shocking that access to a public, secular hospital is not a right in this country. I would also like to be able to give birth in a room with no crosses on the wall, but that is a minor concern compared to worrying that a hospital could decide to put my family though emotional and financial hell based on religious beliefs I don’t share and me having no choice but to go there in an emergency.
Huh…all of this seems to be overwhelming negative. But I actually don’t mean it that way. I think it’s kind of hopeful that we can brainstorm ways to make a difference and agree that hospitals should respect our values instead of imposing their own.
At least it wasn’t a MAGA flag?
There is the F*** Biden flag, a Don’t Tread on Me flag, I think at least one Trump flag, and a lawn sign saying they’ll shoot anyone who comes to the door to force them to get vaccinated. There used to be a handmade cardboard F*** Newscum sign too, which I’m embarrassed to admit I thought was even more obscene than it actually is until I remembered that scum is a word – the kerning is also really bad. I feel so bad for the little girl that her parents have turned her home into something I wouldn’t even let my kids walk past. But apparently this is what conservative family values are now? Surrounding your children with obscenities?
I have a friend who has one child. When our kids were small-ish, she had her child in 2-3 enrichment classes. My friend wondered how parents with multiple kids do it. I asked how many activities she and her siblings did growing up and how many of them had more than one sibling in it. That’s how parents with more than one child do it. Also you carpool, a lot.
Also, Henry will be driving soon. While that doesn’t help for this summer, hopefully it will make things easier down the road.
We have a catholic hospital system in our area and there is no way I would ever go there for anything. They don’t need my money or my insurance money.
I am very much looking forward to a small road trip of my own. I’m dropping my daughter off for an awesome Young Women in Stem program that involves sailing on a research ship for 3 days in the Great Lakes. We need to head to the drop off place the day before because it’s just far enough away that trying to leave the morning of would be punitive.
I got a letter this week from my obgyn saying that he was moving to a new practice, along with two of his other colleagues in the practice, and the letter cited “offering the best care for women” as the reason for the move. I mean… that could mean a lot in this climate, or nothing! In either direction! Difficult to know!
Catholic hospital systems can screw themselves. They will never see a penny of my money or a moment of my business. It is a travesty that a Catholic hospital might be the only option for some secular people. NATIONALIZED HEALTHCARE (from a secular government) FOR EVERYONE.
NATIONALIZED HEALTHCARE FOR EVERYONE!
OMG, YES PLEASE.
3) I know this is scandalous but I don’t believe in spending a lot of money on elderly pets because they can’t consent to surgery or painful treatments and it feels unethical (TO ME) to put pets through things they don’t understand just to sustain life.
10) He got a job! He’s not going to starve! He’s LAUNCHED!!!
I agree and especially for cats who hate the vet and hate being poked at, it might be better to have a slightly shorter, happier life without bland food and vet visits.
1. I would personally be happy not to receive any postcards about voting. We just had an election here which landed at least three campaign postcards in my mailbox every day, and all I could think about was the wasted paper, effort, and money, as they all went directly into recycling. Obviously, this is a local response; but, frankly, the more candidates spend on campaign materials, the less inclined I am to vote for them. As for simple cards, saying, “Please vote,” if that is what we are talking about, I don’t think they would annoy me in the same way that campaign materials do, but I don’t think they help either.
5. Panic is horrible. I’m sorry. If I can remember to breathe, or step outside for a minute, it seems to break the downward spiral (sometimes). Can you see the therapist again?
10. What Rachel said! YAY! This is the moment to be proud! Rob sounds awesome; hoping my kids get to that stage someday!
My mother, A CATHOLIC, refuses to use our town’s Catholic hospital after a friend (ALSO A CATHOLIC) had a Very Bad Experience there with a family member’s end of life experience. Who are these institutions even for?!?!
OMG, enjoy the heck out of that road trip!! Please update with snack choices, etc. I wish my family had seen the sense in separate rooms for adults and kids. Would have saved us all a lot of sleep and sanity.
Congrats to Rob! That is awesome. Full time remote is omg and it will be interesting to see how that plays out for him and in the long term, society. I love hybrid myself.
Would be interested to hear if the hotel on your trip is cleaner this time around. My last two vacations I have found the rentals gross tbh. I can’t figure out if it’s cause we’re renting something different as the kids age/size of group changes or if because that’s just how things are. now but I am so icked out at this point.
I feel lucky to not deal with panic issues but, like everyone, have had my own shit to deal with of late and let me just second the value of friends. Like seriously. So good. Making friends/strengthening friendships has been my 2022 goal and it’s totally awkward and totally worth it.
1. I loved doing postcards to voters because it felt productive in a real way and also in a gratifying to my anal side way, filling up the shoebox and going to the post office on the correct day and whatnot. But from what I’ve read, it’s become counterproductive because a mailbox full of postcards from strangers is just annoying. Now I give token amounts of money to candidates I admire, just to show the Democratic party that these people can fundraise and should be given positions of power within the party machine. It’s not as gratifying as the postcards, though.
3. Our much-lamented good boy had kidney issues, and we switched the food and did regular blood draws, but in his case (different, I know, because (A) a dog not a cat and (B) not the same animal anyway) the kidney issues were part of a general decline. They didn’t decline particularly rapidly, and if they had, I think we would have taken that as a sign rather than as something we should treat. Although I say that and then think about the cats we used to have and how they got about a jillion meds plus subQ fluids for years, so maybe I am not as rational as I think I am. But the food change wasn’t terribly expensive and offered no logistical challenges.
5. I ran into a friend when I was staggering around the farmers market this weekend (she was three feet away from me and had to call my attention to the fact, definitely get friends who are not offended by your zoniness) and now we have plans!
10. Yay for Rob! Here’s to all the commenters who were sure it would all work out! Rob does have interests, right? It’s surprising how many friends you can make if you just start going regularly to a running group or game night or whatever.
11. My husband is taking our youngest to look at a couple of colleges over the coming weekend, and I will be more or less alone in the house, because the only kid here keeps vampire hours.
Postcards: I prefer postcards to our elected officials, because as a super voter (I vote in EVERY election I’m eligible for) and a political canvasser, I’ve received some of the postcards to voters, so I don’t think they are well-targeted. THAT SAID, if they were better targeted, I think they could be super successful.
Catholic Heathcare Systems: The signage is DEFINITELY a message about the types of services they will provide. If you are able to, find a different provider. (I also think the phone tree is a way to control the providers).
Seattle and remote work: I think he’s going to have a blast, going out and finding his people outside of work hours.
I think that Postcards for Voters is more about keeping the writer engaged with the cause than any real effect it would have on the recipient. We don’t receive any, but we do occasionally receive handwritten letters Enjoining Us to Come to the Lord. They go into the recycling bin without even making it into the house, along with all of the other junk mail that doesn’t need to be shredded. I think for people who receive the Postcards for Voters, it’s probably similar. I suppose there could be some people who would be swayed by receiving mail… but as someone who receives mail from evangelicals and Jehovah’s Witnesses, I think for most recipients, it’s more a mild annoyance.
I am very curious whether people who receive hand written voting postcards (as a Californian, I am unfamiliar with the feeling of getting to vote in elections that might actually have a national impact) get more than one of them, or get them for the same things they’re also getting dozens of mass produced mailings. When I’ve written them, my impression has been that most of the campaigns that use them have very little budget otherwise for additional mailings or careful targeting towards sporadic voters – its people running in long shot races who probably won’t win, but if they beat expectations maybe more people than just the postcard writers will start paying attention. Poking around on the internet I did find a couple of small studies suggesting they are effective at increasing turnout. It’d be nice to have something more definitive, but I personally trying to be more skeptical of my skepticism…one thing I know about myself is that my natural inclination is to find “well it probably doesn’t do anything/is counterproductive/just annoys people” to be a more satisfying, common sense, needs no further investigation kind of answer than anything optimistic or hopeful, and that I often err in that direction.
I’m also very curious if the hand-written nature of them makes a difference. In thinking about how I would feel to receive a hand-written postcard for a candidate I support or am considering supporting, I think I would feel like, “Oh, how nice, I’m not alone in this vast red wasteland!” But honestly most of the time I think the postcards mean more to the writer than to the recipient.
Wouldn’t it be nice if by “honoring their core values” the Catholic medical center meant treat everyone with the procedures they need, with dignity and kindness, for a very low price or free because it seems to me (lapsed Catholic) like that’s what Jesus would do AND YET we all know that’s not what they mean…
I’ve had a bunch of pets in my adult life and as is the way most of them have become old and I’ve reached that point where I’m wondering how much is too much to spend/take them to the vet/fiddle with expensive treatments. I’ve generally come down on the side of doing as little as possible when they are old – enough to make them comfortable and to ease the end of their life, but not much more because early on when I had my first pet I did too much and waited too long and I ended up with much less money and a pet scared or in pain and it sucked. So, for example, I’d try prescription food but surgery or expensive testing would be out because both would involve a lot of $$ and trips to the vet that would stress my cat out. I’m so sorry about cat health issues because the very worst part of having a pet is the end.
I only have a comment for no. 3: one of my cats had surgery for kidney stones five years ago (when he was two years old) and the vet told me I needed to get him special food (only available at the vet) for 6 months and after that I could change to that same (expensive) brand for the rest of the cat’s life. And, he said, I would “probably have to come back for the same procedure once or twice a year even with the special/expensive food.” I switched to the expensive food and the cat never had kidney stones again (he died recently after being hit by a car). I loved that cat almost as much as I love my child, so I probably would have paid all the $$$ if he would have had to go back for surgery that often, but I do think there would have been an age limit to that – probably, depending on his overall health, sometime after his 10th birthday.
Not really an answer to your question, but maybe a little bit.
5. My husband has struggled for years with anxiety and depression and takes medication to manage it all, but has found CBD gummies to be very helpful for those times when regular meds just aren’t enough. They seem to be very calming, and they are the kind that won’t influence a drug test.
10. Congratulations to Rob!! That’s a big deal, and I know it feels good to get a kid off your payroll LOL.
Checking back in to see how your biopsy site is doing?
Better! Bruise is going away, soreness almost gone, irritation from adhesive almost gone!
YAY!
Well Kansas voting numbers are much higher than usual in primaries. And (knock on wood), no is winning. The postcards probably helped.
“No” WON!!! WOOT!!!
I think postcards feel good to do when you are excited about a candidate or have strong feelings about an issue that needs turnout. I vote every time, so I don’t need the encouragement. I agree that it seems like long shot candidates who get people to do postcards—but here in Ohio, the only reason they’re long shots is because of gerrymandering. So far I haven’t seen a postcard campaign get a specific person elected, but I don’t know any data on whether it has raised the voting turnout.
The bruising and irritation from the adhesive lasted quite a bit longer after my biopsy than I expected – I didn’t really realize how big the needle would be, which was dumb in retrospect.
Yeah, as a former Catholic, fuck the Catholics. We had a priest who molested altar boys. We had people who defended the priest. I tried to go to church with my mom at Christmas a few times after I stopped going just to be a good daughter and I felt physically ill. One of my friend’s has an anecdote about her grandmother giving birth in a Catholic hospital, looking up at Jesus on the cross and saying “it’s nice to see a man suffering”.