Science – Page 2 – Don't Gel Too Soon

Women’s Health Care Takes the Stage on the Hill

It makes sense. On the heels of the announcement of a new committee (H/T Writes LIke She Talks and Punditmom) to oversee protection of women's rights, the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Operations and
Organizations, Human Rights, Democracy, and Global Women's Issues, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) have introduced the “Health Care for Women Resolution.” The resolution outlines a "new framework
for women’s health" and ensure that women’s needs are a key part of the
national health reform debate. At a newsconference today, where they announced the resolution, members of the Columbia
University Mailman School of Public Health released a report that makes it clear why such a resolution is necessary.

The report, “Women’s Health and Health Care Reform: The Key Role of
Comprehensive Reproductive Care,” explores the importance or reproductive health in women’s overall health
and urges that the promotion of reproductive
health be part of any national health plan. Thirty-eight of fifty deans of
schools of public health have endorsed the recommendations in
the report.

At a news conference announcing the resolutions, Rep. Schakowsky said:

"Any debate on national healthcare reform must address the healthcare
needs of women who are often the primary caregivers and decision makers
for their families," said Representative Schakowsky. "We know that
women face exceptional challenges and have a very personal stake in
fixing our broken health care system — they know we need to act now.
The current economic crisis is not an excuse for delay; it is a
persuasive argument for an immediate response.

With new leadership on the Hill and in the White House, let's hope these are the first of many positive developments.

NO POWER (TO THE PEOPLE, THE LAPTOP OR THE MICROWAVE)

This is a boring photo – I know. But I’m not about to post a picture of a dead squirrel (as far as I can tell I could get somewhere around 138,000 different ones on Google Image Search) and the squirrel is the star of this story. Here’s how it went:

Since we’re just back from Israel we’re completely screwed up as far as time is concerned. I woke up at 3, watched the Tivos of the last House and the last two Heroes and then decided that since sleep was out of the question, I’d go to the store to get milk and some stuff for breakfast. Wandering toward my car, I saw, on the street next to the curb, a — yes — dead squirrel. Extremely unattractive — and I wondered how he/she had ended up dead outside our nice, harmless little house. I was tired though — this was too hard to consider — so I got into the car and took off.

When I got home, I opened the front door to dusk — all the lights were off. Wouldn’t turn on. Ditto the coffee maker, the oven, the (GASP) computer and everything else. Checks with PEPCO, our local electric company, produced, after very long hold times, the information that, 45 minutes after their first customer call, they were still in the process of dispatching a crew to figure out what was wrong but "hoped to have things back on line by 10."

The hour drew near. Since I had to decide whether to wait it out or decamp to the local coffee house (free wireless) and write from there, I called again. Got even less information than the first time. BUT – and here’s where it gets really interesting — just as I sat down at my desk and looked out the window, a PEPCO truck pulled up right outside. Or squirrel-side.

Former reporter that I am, I tore out the door to see if the PEPCO guy knew what was up. Boy did he. Our entire neighborhood blackout had been caused by that one dead little rodent. Apparently when a squirrel leaps onto, and subsequently is electrocuted by, a transformer – the transformer responds with great sympathy and, basically, dies too.

He fixed it in about ten minutes — grinning as he explained that "this happens all the time." He had just triangulated all the calls reporting the outage and figured out where the problem was. Cool, huh?

Now I’m here in my office talking to you, the lights are on and I even made soup. Not much meaning here but somehow there’s an oddity about the entire event – reminding me as I returned to our own "natural habitat" from afar that going home to the same old house is no guarantee that things will be the same — there or anyplace else.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH AND OUR FUTURE

OK. So I’m way behind a lot of people – including the Oscars voters, in finally seeing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. It’s a horrifying presentation, scary and fascinating. As a video producer I’m knocked out by the craft that makes such a dry topic so interesting. As some one who’s always been politically involved, I’m mortified that this film still needs to exist and bewildered that I haven’t been more drawn into this issue. It sounds crazy, but I’ve always been so obsessed with human rights and civil rights, education and integration, war peace and poverty, that I kind of left all this to someone else.

You can’t watch this film, though, and remain untouched. A friend says that the research is too new, that other "natural" phenomena come in cycles and that we haven’t had time to be certain that this is not just part of the next one. I respect this woman enormously but I watched this film, thinking of her, and of the power of modern technology compared to the "natural" impact that generated previous cycles and I can’t make myself believe that this isn’t an emergency.

I read a lot of science fiction, and much of it is dark and apocalyptic. Resource wars, water wars, data wars — it is the future that causes the pain. But it’s also the future that’s made by us – and if even half of this film is true, we are permitting what appears to be a horrific future to emerge, despite our ability to prevent it. I’ve followed Al Gore a long time. I remember his honorable environmental advocacy all the way back to his days in the House. He’s for real, using his position in the world to turn this huge air craft carrier of an issue around. In his film, he uses the history of the smoking issue (More Doctors Smoke Camels ads that ran just after the first Surgeon General’s Report) ont he dangers of snoking, to prove that we can change minds.

He’s won the Nobel Peace Prize for his commitment and impact. Some say the Nobel committee is just poliical and that this is a lefty-gesture. But I say hats off. Where else do we have political leaders consistently leading on an issue that has no personal reward, where the only "up side" is that we might stop cooking our planet? I haven’t seen any latery.

WILLIAM GIBSON, NEUROMANCER, THE WEB AND THE NEWSPAPER

I’m a big William Gibson fan. His new book Spook Country —
just arrived and I’m struggling to wait to start it on an upcoming beach
weekend instead of plunging in like I did with Harry Potter. It was
he – and his book Neuromancer,
published in 1984, that led me onto the Internet in the early 90s, well before most of my
friends. Once I dove into cyberspace (Gibson coined the word) I never
looked back.

Neuromancer was Gibson’s first book . Much of his early work was a dark view of a connected
world full of data pirates and megacities ("the Sprawl" in the US and
"Chiba City" in Japan) with skies, in one of his most famous quotes, "the color of television, tuned to a dead
channel."
I believed as I read Neuromancer and then all of his subsequent work that it was a preview of a
possible future and that parts of it were already on their way.

This appeared in Reuters today: U.S. consumers this year will spend more of
their day surfing the Internet than reading newspapers or going to the
movies or listening to recorded music, according a study released on
Tuesday. The report comes from the highly-regarded private equity firm
Veronis Suhler Stevenson, which examined consumer behavior to inform investment strategies. Where would future ad money (hence revenue, hence good investments, I assume) go?

When I began working online, I encouraged clients to include
their URLs in their ads and on their business cards. In the 90s, a major LA newspaper ran ad trailers in local movie theaters. Of course I urged them
to include their website URL at the end of the ad. Concerned about cannibalizing the print product , they declined to do so. I tell you this just to demonstrate how much has changed and how little many thought leaders realized what was going on around them (I also once heard Michael Eisner – on a public panel – call the Internet a fad – but that’s another story.)

The study goes on to report
that TV still rules: “in 2006 consumers
spent the most time with TV, followed by radio, which together combined for
nearly 70 percent of the time spent with media. That was followed by recorded
music at 5.3 percent, newspapers at 5 percent, and the Internet at 5 percent.” It then predicts that this year “the Internet will move up to 5.1 percent,
while newspapers and recorded music each move down to 4.9 percent.”

Except for the fact that it appears to have omitted consideration of the many of us, particularly younger people, who multi-task and have the TV, radio or music playing while we’re online, it makes sense. More and more, our lives are online — and our identities too. More and more the world emerging from the imagination of William Gibson is becoming our world.

Here’s a final thought – a little out there but not totally unreasonable considering the Gibson constituency. Wikipedia tells us "in his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack goes as far to suggest that Gibson’s vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the internet developed, (particularly the World Wide Web) after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks: What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"

Scared and Grateful

You know how the US health care system is allegedly dead? Mangled beyond recognition? Well — don’t you believe it. There are places here where the true wonder of good health care is visible in abundance. The best of them, in my opinion, is the Cleveland Clinic. I need to tell you why.

When someone you love – and live with – is sick, it’s scary. When they’ve been through open-heart surgery, a shattered shoulder repair and a lengthy illness, it’s very scary. That’s where I am right now. Scared.

My husband’s heart surgery was in 2002. Five years later, he began to feel sick. Many of the symptoms were similar to those from his initial illness, congestive heart failure caused by a faulty aortic valve. The fear: that his valve was again failing — that the repair had not held. So we went one more time to Cleveland to the remarkable institution where he’d had the surgery, to find out what was wrong.

After many tests, all perfectly scheduled and wonderfully administered, we learned that his heart is in good shape – at least the part that had been repaired. The trouble was that the arrhythmia – irregular heart beat — sometimes very fast — that had also been dealt with in the surgery, had returned. Now he’ll take a medication that, at least initially, is like being kicked by a horse. If medication can get his heart back into rhythm, he can avoid the thing that scares me most. It’s a surgical procedure, far less invasive than heart surgery, but still with some risk. And it’s not fair. He’s had enough to deal with – and frankly – so have I. But apparently, higher powers have declared that not altogether true and this is our next mission. So we’re on it.

The thing I try to remember and I want to tell you though, is how blessed we are to have access to the best that health care can deliver – and how remarkably common-sense a lot of it is. This hospital is declared number one in cardiology every year because it is excellent. The staff standards are high — and the hospital is headed by one of its top surgeons ( who operated on my husband.) His standards are demanding and every surgeon who is hired "from Hopkins or Harvard or anyone else" still is vetted in action by the Director. In addition, the nurses are empowered to make decisions and raise issues with physicians, the morale is positive and energetic and there’s not a nasty or impatient person behind any desk or lab coat.

All of these truths add up to a single truth: there’s no mystery. To get good health care we need a nimble, well-educated, trained and motivated staff and leadership to keep it that way. Of course the equipment and endowment matter too. But somehow in the insurance mess, the malpractice mess, the escalating cost mess – all provoking defensive driving by doctors and hospitals, we’ve weakened quality control and management in service to these other issues. It’s a tragedy — one made far more real to me by our experience with the best – something that used to be true of our health care system altogether and sure isn’t anymore.

I’m desperately grateful for what we are able to do to keep Rick healthy but every time I walk into the Clinic I remember again what’s going on in so many other health care sites and seeing what could makes it all even more tragic.

AND YOU THOUGHT YOU ALREADY LOVED THE INTERNET

OK. So I’m writing the script for a benefit I have to MC and I can’t find my stopwatch – anywhere. I was a TV news producer for more than 20 years so I have stopwatches all over the place – just not right here where I need one.

You can guess what’s coming, right? I type "stopwatch" into Google and, for the very first post, comes this. There’s just nothing that’s not here, is there? I’m so happy! PS If I knew how to save a web page as a JPEG (I don’t have time to go look it up) I could also show it to you instead of just linking to it. If you know how – let me know. Please.

GREY’S ANATOMY, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, MEMORY AND ME

Research shows that I’m hardly alone in this, but I have a deep and abiding fear of disappearing into the fog that is Alzheimer’s disease. I’m approaching my 61st birthday, which, these days, is young. Horrible to contemplate, but NOT old. Actually even for the last generation it’s not much – my dad lived to be 78 and my mom 80. So even in WWII generation terms, I’d have a good crack at at least 20 more years. And when I think about dying I really worry more about the sadness of those I love than anything else. No one wants her life to be over, but unlike many of my friends, including those far younger, I’m not terrified.

Alzheimer’s is different though. If you read the statistics, the odds are pretty scary for all of us. Today the New York Times reports (actually I think a little late – if you don’t have Times Select try this story on amNewYork) on a new awareness program by the Alzheimer’s Association. Here’s the video (short.) That’s good.

And it even includes Kate Burton, Meridith Grey’s mother (Grey’s Anatomy for those of you not addicted already.) Her character, in a series of almost unbearable episodes, suffered from Alzheimer’s. There is so much written about this disease and the risk to our nation’s future, one person at a time, but if the documents are to be believed research is far behind potential.

As usual it’s a question of money. And I know I should care about that. I guess I do. But what’s tougher for me is to face, almost daily, the small memory losses and forgetful moments of aging and not fear that they are all connected to the disease. People my age even joke about it – calling it “old timer’s” disease or “senior moments” but all it is is awful. To lose a word, see know the star of a classic film and not be able to retrieve the name, work a crossword puzzle (recommended to maintain brain “muscles” and besides I love them) and KNOW the missing word somewhere in your brain – but no place where you can get to it…. it’s all terrifying.

Think about it. Spouses who’ve shared years of generating memories suddenly seeing you lose yours; knowing daily that your access to those moments is disappearing. Children who’ve struggled to build strong and independent lives burdened with the emotional obligations created by a wasting disease in a parent. Friends self-conscious and uneasy on visits they know they should make – if they even have the strength to make them. Can you imagine anything worse – except the painful, protracted ending that cancer often brings?

As I write this, random thoughts wander through my mind. Most dominant are lyrics from a Bruce Springsteen (of course) song.

I don’t wanna fade away, Oh I don’t wanna fade away, Tell me what can I do what can I say, Cause darlin’ I don’t wanna fade away.

Yeah it’s about the end of a love affair but it’s playing in my head as a kind of Alzheimer’s anthem so you have to listen too.

The other things are really corny but right now I think I need to be corny. This one is part of what we read at the beginning of our wedding almost 36 years ago: In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it. It’s from William Saroyan’s play The Time of Your Life.

The other is from Our Town. And I know it’s old fashioned and sentimental. But as I look this terror in the eye, I know it’s what I have to do to keep it at bay.

Emily: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?–every, every minute?
Stage Manager: No. Saints and poets, maybe–they do some.

I guess the answer to all this is to aim for the saints and the angels. Nothing is going to prevent the future from happening; not faith, not love, not Hogwart’s magic, not even the miraculous gift of children. So each day I need to be as present as I can. Whatever happens it’s a blow against the unknown and a prayer of gratitude for the privilege of being present and aware.

UNKINDEST CUT

I’m having a very hard time. For a project, I’ve spent most of Wednesday reading infertility, IVF, adoption and other blogs written by would-be parents who are unable to conceive. This 25-year old photo is of two boys, my sons, conceived in no time. Granted there was a miscarriage in between that hit us very hard, but the blessing of these two little boys came rapidly and without incident.

I’m familiar with this issue – I have so many friends with adopted kids — but the articulateness of these women and the agony of repeated technical failures they describe, is unthinkable. It’s so ironic – years spent in your twenties worrying that you ARE pregnant, then this.

I can’t imagine many experiences more painful — though they existed even in biblical times (remember the pain of Sarah, Hannah and Rachel?) and they’re for a lifetime. "Do you have kids?" is the classic ice-breaker. It just reminds me one more time of the blessings in my life. It’s not that I don’t appreciate my kids every day; as my sons will tell you I’m a bit over the top where they are concerned. And I’m tiresome on that fact that they’re a blessing and a joy.

What I don’t often consider is the fact that we had them so easily – that they are, quite literally, a gift. My heart breaks for my sisters not blessed with this privilege – and I won’t soon forget their pain.

LIVING ON THE EDGE – FUTURE TENSE

Some radical thoughts about the future from people who actually might know what they’re talking about: I have always been fascinated by the smart, smart people who live from the center to the edge of the cyberthinker world. Because I was present in LA for much of the early conference/thinker gatherings when they weren’t so exclusive and you could get a press pass if you knew your way around reporter vocabulary, I met many of them — often humbling but exhilarating experiences.

Over the years one of their most resourceful thinkers, John Brockman, has built a foundation called The Edge, where thinkers gather to "ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." The annual question founder Brockman has asked this community of thinkers (albeit more than 6 times more men than women) is "What Are Your Optimistic About? Why?" It’s worth a look. Some of those I know the most about, and respect, whose ideas might intrigue, include Whole Earth Catalogue publisher Stuart Brand, Microsoft pioneers Linda Stone and Nathan Myhrvold , Jaron Lanier, the man who named "virtual reality, Howard Gardner, the Harvard professor who has had such an impact on how we see learning differences and help the kids who have them, and one of the earliest Web thinkers, Esther Dyson.

Take a look; you might actually find a route to some optimism yourself! I was surprised by how much "good news" these people deliver. If we can just get some political leadership to follow up on it we’ll be better able to leverage these possibilities but either way, it’s nice to get some good news once in a while. Happy New Year.

MIRACLE CENTRAL

I know it says “Miracle Central” up there but this is NOT about religion. At least not exactly. I’m at the Cleveland Clinic – one of the most amazing hospitals in the world — so my husband can have his yearly checkup. Why do we fly to Cleveland every year? Even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame wouldn’t bring us more than once.

We’re here because at this hospital four years ago a doctor cut open his chest, and then his heart, and saved his life. It pretty much was a miracle. So we like them to get a look at him once a year — to make sure he’s ok. It’s harder for me to walk into the hotel here than it is for him, I think. He was in congestive heart failure and scared but kind of beyond reality the day we arrived, and then he stayed in the hospital while the boys and I stayed at the hotel. After the surgery he was on medications and then struggling to get his strength back. The small details of illness, and families hoping for the best, were lost on him. Two years ago, when we made an extra trip to go through the same surgery with a good friend and his family, we were so focused on the particulars of his situation that the human dramas beyond them faded well into the background.

But tonight, sitting in the “club lounge” of the hotel attached to the hospital, listening to people with cancer and heart disease and weird combinations of neurological and heart problems and their families – and watching them laugh and tease one another and struggle to be brave, I was just knocked out. First of all it’s a beautiful thing to see — we see it every year when we come here — the way families take care of one another and support each other — and the other families they meet over breakfast or coffee — through what is a truly terrifying experience. Until you see a loved one on a gurney, being wheeled down a long hall toward life-and-death surgery, as alone as he will ever be — as you stand with your kids trying to smile for him — you can’t imagine.

Secondly – it’s an outrage to see such magnificent health care and realize how few people get it. This hospital is run so brilliantly and with such pride; each staff member so competent, confident and gracious that you just want to hug all of them. It’s still possible to offer good health care in the US — and it’s as much about good management as it is about money. I wish you could see it. We should NOT be allowing the wonders of American health care to fade away without a fight. If you want to see what we’re losing, come to Cleveland. Don’t give up those miracles without a fight!