Barely promoted

New: comprehension

"Tabitha? Can you bring the banana to mama?"

Scoot scoot. Grab. Turn. Scoot around the corner of the bed, past the ever-tempting shoes. Hold up the banana with a grin.

I offered her a piece as I was eating it, but, as always, she refused.

Hypocrisy and Phlebotomy

The only time I've ever made anyone angry, truly angry^* with this blog was when I said mean and sniping things about those who choose not to vaccinate their kids. I meant the things I said at the time, and I'm still appalled, just appalled, at the number of people who think that avoiding important and successful public health measures is good for their kids.

So why did Miss T. not get any shots at her 12 month checkup? Because I was too afraid of dealing with a feverish and sleepless baby with Beaker not around. And when I mentioned my selfish concerns to her pediatrician, he pointed out that several of the vaccines were live virus, and were perhaps not the best thing to administer to a little drooler who was spending quite a bit of her time visiting a children's hospital. (Yes, pediatric pulmonologists care for CF patients, even adult ones.)

We'll start back up at the 15 month appointment. But I realize the contradiction, yes.

Miss T. did get blood drawn for a second lead test. They stabbed both arms to get enough, and on the second they poked and wiggled and OH MY GOD I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY'RE DOING THAT TO HER ARM IF IT WERE ME I WOULD HAVE PASSED OUT ALREADY AND I'M GOING TO CRY TOO until they hit the vein. The level came back at 4.6. At 9 months it was 4, so yes, it's gone up a bit, but given the change her mobility has wrought in her exposure to floor dust, given the amount of work we've done around the house (mostly devoted to removing known lead paint), and given test-to-test variability, that small of an increase doesn't feel like a failure.

I asked for a test on me, too, but her doctor apparently can't open my file to place the order. Sigh.

^* S., formerly of C.W.—are you still out there? You moved blogs and I lost the link! So I don't know if you went and built your yurt, or how you and your wonderful baby R. are doing. Please send a link if you read this!

Wallowing in sentimentality

I. The most beautiful thing I've heard in a long time: myself, singing "Happy Birthday" to Miss T. We just had a tiny little celebration at home—a frosted cream puff with a "1" candle played the role of the cake. Beaker was about to go inpatient, and it just wasn't the right time for a party. We took pictures of our little sweetie bathed in the golden glow of the sunset and glazed with chocolate goo.

II. Driving home from the hospital tonight I listened to Prairie Home Companion. The part where Garrison reads out his audience members' wishes for their dearest alternated crazily between the just-married and those past their 90th birthdays, but in the middle there was a couple who'd flown to St. Paul to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. Twentieth, I thought, I want to have a twentieth anniversary. We're more than halfway there, we're years and years past what I'd dared to hope for when we married—and Miss T. would be all of nine then.

III. Beaker gets lung function tests Monday. If he's doing better, then he stays for more treatment. As long as there's improvement from the antibiotics, then they keep on administering them. Plateau equals go home. So I have to hope he stays for a while yet.

IV. So far as I know, no doctor has ever brought up lung transplantation with Beaker. The Times tells me that they've recently redone the way they run the lung waiting list, in ways that make it easier for people with CF to get organs. This must be good news, right? But it simply highlighted the fear behind my hopes, both large and small.

Spreading confusion

(with apologies to Laura for the title)

ITEM Does the author of this piece honestly, honestly believe that kids' hanging out at Starbucks and drinking mocha Frappucinos is as bad as she makes it out to be? Obesity epidemic, addiction, eating disorders, overcommercialization, blah blah blah. (In Oakland? In Oakland, they're worrying about this?)

ITEM I tend to give the commentors over at Crooked Timber the benefit of the doubt. For one thing, I'm not an expert in many things that get discussed. But the discussion following this piece, on the difficulty of getting epidurals during labor in the Netherlands, betrayed such ignorance and misjudgement.

My goodness—pain was so not why I was interested in having (although not obsessively committed to) an unmedicated birth. I didn't want drugs for the same reason I didn't want to be induced: I was hoping to avoid a C-section, and one way to do that is to avoid unnecessary medical intervention in the early stages of labor. Nothing earth-mothery about it.

At least I learned from the original piece that one issue in Holland is the cost of intervention. I would have appreciated a nice bouquet from my insurance carrier the day after.

ITEM A few days later, Crooked Timber sent me to David Velleman's article on why people who have children using donor gametes may be doing something Very Wrong. (Because an important, or perhaps primary way to make sense out of one's own identity, according to him, is by observing and hearing about one's genetic relatives.)

Um, as someone who (a) was fathered via donor sperm the old-fashioned way (also known as "abandonment") and (b) spent several tens of thousands of dollars trying to bear the genetic child of her husband, but (c) would have switched to donor in a heartbeat if it all hadn't worked out, um, well, um.

At the end of the paper he argues that people who hate their (biological) parents illustrate his analysis nearly as well as those who love them. But I have to wonder why he never addresses the actions of the donors. Are they doing something Very Wrong, too?

Where I was

Nebraska. No, really. My pre-tenure sabbatical had just started, and I was visiting some collaborators for a week. We went to a cafe for breakfast and the barista told us he'd heard something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I pulled out my laptop. The cafe had free wireless—it was the first time I'd used my new computer someplace other than home. The CNN site somehow wasn't down.

I called Beaker. He was in the hospital (same one as he checked into today, and this is the first time he's been back since) and glued to CNN. I tried to call my foster father, but couldn't reach him.

Debts to society

My mother believed, until the very end, that she'd make it out on her own again. She tried to sock away as much as she could of her government benefit checks. Paying the rent at her adult homes ate nearly the entire amount and was painful, every single time. There were a couple of times that the government didn't immediately catch on that she'd gone in-patient, and an extra check was sent. So she'd accumulated a bit of money.

A few months before she died, we convinced her to write me a check for $2500 out of her account, so that she wouldn't lose her benefits. I don't know how much was in the account when she died. The bank wouldn't tell me without proof that I was executrix, and she (of course!) had no will.

Back in November 2004, I tried to file the paperwork for people who die without wills. The county insisted on getting a copy of her divorce decree. I wrote away to a Prothonotary in Pennsylvania, and discovered that she wasn't divorced—hadn't been divorced?—it was his idea, I think—until 1969, when she was pregnant with me. (They hadn't lived together, or even seen each other, for at least 5 years by then.)

In mid-August I flew to Weatherwood with the baby, without Beaker. Rented a car. Miss T. was tense and weepy the whole time. I think she could feel my unhappiness being there. I lay in bed at nights plotting out blog entries about what an IDIOT my uncle is, about how No-Exit-y the entire situation in that apartment is. I spent my days listening to each of the three occupants, one at a time. Marina worried about whether my uncle is not only an idiot, but a dnagerous controlling idiot—he feels threatened by her going for a GED. My grandmother is old and frail and in pain and hates everyone, except occasionally Ricky—he's all right when he feeds her fears. And Ricky himself, always confused about the news but angry nonetheless.

But on my last afternoon I managed to make it back to the county probate department, divorce decree in hand, to be declared executrix. Look, I know it doesn't matter; there can't be more than $1000 in the account. But I didn't want it to get swallowed by the bank, or the state, or whoever gets accounts abandoned by dead people. I figured we could toss whatever scraps are there into Miss T.'s college account, and let that be a gesture from Annajane to the granddaughter she thought we didn't even want.

There was an extra little twist—the estate account had to be at an in-state bank—but I managed to get that opened before we got on the plane.

Flash foward. Back in Ohinidinois, classes starting, outbuildings falling down, Miss T. eating everything in sight and scooting fast enough that we're starting to babyproof, busy ordinary life. And then a giant envelope arrives, registered mail, from the county Social Services department.

It's a bill, to my mother's estate, for some $360,000, addressed to me as executrix. It cost over $9.00 to mail, thanks to the enclosed printouts listing every single Medicaid charge from 1996 on.

The bulk are hospitalization charges—some $280,000. There's medication, there's outpatient care. One can see the physical complaints—all minor, though—accumulating in her last few months.

Oddly (even to me), opening the envelope didn't raise my adrenaline level at all. I understand that Republicans expect the government to try to make this sort of recovery—and that families with more money and accountants and lawyers and shit counter-scheme, to try to keep money for the descendants. I have faith (and even more after talking with my lawyer father-in-law) that they're not actually billing me.

My own debt to various institutions, what with the undergraduate financial aid and the many years of graduate fellowships, and the illegally cross-border high school education too, that (adjusted for inflation) totals in the mid-six-figures.

This new bill just quantifies another portion of what society has given, that's enabled me to enter and remain in the comfortable middle class. First an education, and later the (at least professional, if often impersonal and sometimes unpleasant) care that my mother required. Both were necessary to where I've ended up.

But if the debt ate at me, if I felt honestly guilty all the time, I wouldn't be able to function.