A serial number I’ve been wishing for . . .

After many false starts, I finally submitted the U.S. Trademark Application Form for Street Smarts and the accompanying tage lines: “Cancer ain’t crazy. It’s serious.” and “Be Street Smart and Survive.”

While it didn’t take more than an hour to work through the entry form, the instructions were consistently poorly communicated. Hmmm–kind of makes you wonder whether the government wants people submitting applications for trademarks and patents!

I have now officially earned a serial number for my submission. While approval of the trademark is pending, that 8-digit serial number feels like an accomplishment! Stay posted for updates!

Soup and popsicles

Yesterday afternoon was the day Edwina had been waiting for. I picked her up (along with her big sister, Linda) and drove to Cahaba Valley Health Care for the free dental clinic that takes place there on Sundays twice a month. With just eight teeth remaining in her mouth, most of them bruised or decayed, Edwina had been trying for some time  to find a dentist who would pull them without charge.

The last time I saw Edwina nervous was as I stood beside her in pre-op at Cooper Green, waiting for her to be wheeled in for a mastectomy. She was scared that the doctors would put her to sleep and not bother waking her up afterwards. Yesterday’s visit, though, was different. Edwina knew she’d live through the ordeal, but she was scared of the pain and embarrassed to walk out of the clinic without any teeth. She also confided that she was worried about getting false teeth ”for them holes,” since dentures are costly and the poor and uninsured aren’t offered any breaks.

After several hours of Linda and me waiting in the reception area, checking the tiny examination room every so often to see how our sister was doing, Edwina walked out with a towel she’d brought along to the dentist draped across her mouth.  Her sister grabbed one arm and I grabbed the other, slowly walking Edwina to my car.

Before we left the building, Edwina grunted at me to stop. I turned towards her and looked as she moved away the towel and pointed to her top gums, swollen and stitched. The bottom teeth, it turned out, couldn’t be pulled during this visit. They were too deeply embedded, too painful to extract at the same time.  

The car ride to Walmart to pick up Edwina’s prescription, some soup and popsicles was quiet, as was the final jaunt to Edwina’s apartment. While I drove, she laid her head back against the head rest, breathing through the pain and anticipating the next trip to the dentist to deal with the teeth that remain.

Bad girls

Bright and early Saturday morning, I picked up Edwina and Lisa (Brown) to head to Huntsville. Our friend Rachael Martin, former pastor at Church of the Reconciler, had invited several of us from Birmingham to participate in a talk she was giving tentatively called “Bad Girls in the Body of Christ.” When I heard we would each be asked to wear a black t-shirt with “Bad Girl” scripted in red across the front, I knew I was in.

The talk took place at a Charismatic church–a bit of a stretch for a Catholic girl like me who’s used to subdued celebratory ritual–during a women’s conference. Rachael was the featured speaker, and her message was a simple, yet powerful reminder: It doesn’t really take all that much effort to go to church or to convince someone to go to church. Getting somebody to hit the streets and move outside their comfort zone, on the other hand, is a mighty big task.

The crew from B’ham represented ”bad girls.”

Elaine, an associate professor of nursing at Samford, tends to the homeless and drug addicted, providing them with basic and emergency medical care.  I once saw Elaine run to the rescue of a mentally ill pregnant woman who tried to take her own life by slicing her wrists. Elaine talked her down and got her the help she needed.

Dawn, the “interior designer for the homeless community” as Rachael referred to her, is the one who transports the homeless and near-homeless to appointments and is first in line to help someone who finally has a place to call their own with furnishings to make it feel like a real home.

Ann, a hairdresser by trade and interpreter for the deaf during services at Church of the Reconciler, is a woman with a wide and generous spirit. She showed up, unannounced, at Street Smarts to cut and style women’s hair. She found the time to locate a bed for Edwina when she first moved into her apartment, and she cradled Mike Campbell, a homeless Vietnam vet with mental illness and COPD. as he passed on from this world last week.

Edwina and Lisa are “bad girls” of another sort. They defy what the world has told them they must be, by turning away from a life of drug addiction, crime, prostitution and just about anything else you can imagine happening on the streets. Now, they serve other women much like them while teaching the rest of us wanna-be bad girls how hard it is to change a life.

The women at the conference chuckled as Rachael described each of us crawling around in homeless camps down by the railroad tracks on the wrong side of Birmingham or sitting alongside a homeless woman who’s never seen the inside of a doctor’s office as she waits to hear her prognosis. We’re bad girls, Rachael said, because we go into those dark corners where “good girls” aren’t supposed to go, at least not the kinds of girls who come from reputable families and go to church.

Yet, we do go and we see things and get to know people so unlike us only to find how like us they really are. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Juggling

When I was a kid, I used to make fun of the moms and dads who got their children’s names mixed up. Bruce’s joke is that he got so used to hearing his mom holler “Dou-Bruce” (beginning with his brother Doug’s name and ending with his own) that he developed a bit of a complex. Well, I must officially be one of the laughables, because more times a day than I can recall, I shout for “Cel-ena-Bru.”

Juggling leads to exhaustion which brings on confusion of the linguistic sort.

While I hold down a job and travel a fair amount alongside taking care of a house and two kids, I have to admit that the load I’m carrying isn’t as heavy as I sometimes lament. At least, not by yesterday’s standards.

A family that once lived next door to my grandmother Helen Ryan had 19 kids. Not quite the size of the Duggar clan, but close to it. If the family had been young in the age of reality TV, they might have even had their own show!

If Mama Roseanne of the “19 and counting” crew could manage it all–the laundry and the cooking and the bathing and dressing for church and school–why do I struggle to fit everything into a day? I’m thinking that juggling might be to blame, the tendency of moms like me to divvy up their days into the ”have-to’s” and “want-to’s.”

Weekends at my house are a case in point. I rush about trying to get all of the back-up work from the week done so that we can do something fun with the girls: an afternoon at the park, movies and popcorn, a trip to the zoo. My time, my life for that matter if I’m totally honest, is compartmentalized: work (as in on-the-job work), housework (you name it, from paying bills to scrubbing the bathtub to grocery shopping to hauling the pile of stuff that somehow made it upstairs downstairs once again), family time, and, if I’m lucky, some alone time to rest, reflect, and prepare to do it all again.

I’m doubtful Roseanne segmented her life in this way. And that’s not to suggest that she didn’t work really, really hard most of the time every single day when her children were growing up or that she never stopped to smell the flowers and share a laugh with her little ones (assuming she had the time to plant anything in the first place). But I’ll bet some of those 19 kids traveled along beside her, throwing clothes from the hamper into the washer and clearing their plates on the way to finishing up homework. Maybe it was less “let’s get this done so we can do that” and more “let’s take on today, the gottas and the wannas, together.”

De-compartmentalize is going on my next list of to-do’s.

Some tough questions

Last Saturday, I headed to the ballpark with Helena for her softball team’s double-header. As we pulled up to the field where the Xtreme team was slated to play, we saw a blood mobile parked alongside the field and signs just about everywhere announcing Lauren Green Day. Lauren is a six-year-old from another team who was just diagnosed with leukemia.

All of the players attended a brief ceremony honoring Lauren and then they wore green wristbands in honor of their friend. Lauren stuck around the ballpark for a bit, wearing a mask across her nose and mouth since she’d already undergone a couple of treatments and was already at risk for an infection.

On the way home, Helena asked a lot of tough questions, prefacing her thoughts with the statement that I must know something about Lauren’s situation since I know a lot of stuff about cancer.

“How did she get the leukemia?”

“Could Celia or me get it?”

“Will she be OK?”

“What will the doctor do to help her?”

“Why does she have to wear a mask?”

It was Helena’s first encounter with someone who looks a bit like her and who likes to play softball just like her facing a serious health crisis. I wish I could have offered better answers to Helena’s tough questions.

Caring for the poor, at home and abroad

My op-ed on cancer care in Nepal and the possible insight it offers to Cooper Green’s woes, particularly for those who visit Clinic E: Oncology, appeared in today’s Birmingham News. Take a look: http://blog.al.com/birmingham-news-commentary/2012/04/viewpoints_poor_shouldnt_pay_u.html

Cancer hits the streets . . . in Philly

Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer published an op-ed I wrote about the direction in which cancer research is going, and the need for survivor-advocates to follow. Take a look!

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20120426_Time_to_cut_the_pink_ribbons_.html

Health care woes

Cooper Green, Jefferson County’s Hospital offering the only care for those in this part of the country lacking the income and resources to seek private care, is struggling to keep its head above water. The implications for folks like Edwina are huge.

The two departments being slated for closure are oncology (Clinic E, where I’ve spent a good many days with Edwina, Lisa, Charles, and Roderick) and ob/gyn. Since these are apparently the most expensive departments to run, the hospital is being forced by county commissioners to shut them down or go without any backing whatsoever.

There’s a lot of blame going back and forth in the local media, some saying that the hospital is mismanaged and others saying the hospital was doing ok until government folks got too far into administrators’ business. Regardless of where to point the finger, though, the outcome is the same. People needing cancer care, or prenatal care, are going to be out of luck unless they can find a way to get help elsewhere. And while Cooper Green is working hard to place its current oncology patients with facilities throughout the city, chances are that many patients who would have gone to Cooper Green now won’t seek any sort of care. Folks simply slip through the cracks.

I’ve been working with one of the key people at Cooper Green to hold the next Street Smarts event there. The program would be the same as when we held it at Church of the Reconciler, but we were hoping to offer participants this time around an opportunity to register as a patient at the facility and an optional breast exam by a doctor or nurse. The fate of those homeless women we might have reached is now uncertain.

I’ll be publishing an op-ed in The Birmingham News a week from today comparing the situation at Cooper Green with the tiered health care system in Nepal. Whether we want to admit it or not, care in America also operates according to tiers–the more a patient has money and insurance-wise, the better the care.

Reality check

I had a couple of “duh” moments today that made me think I need to pay more attention to my own blog posts. Feeling sorry for myself that I still haven’t heard anything from the editors currently considering my story on Autism Care Nepal, reality smacked me swiftly in the face.

A student who has been in many of my courses came to see me during office hours. It turns out that with a new baby (her third) and a demanding job requiring close to 13 hours a day (plus weekends), she’s fallen too far behind physically and mentally to keep up with school. She’s planning to take a break before attempting to inch back into classes–spacing them out in hopes of graduating a few years down the line (as opposed to next year as originally planned).

When I arrived home, an email awaited me from a friend and fellow breast cancer survivor in my exercise class. As she was getting ready for work this morning, she received a call from someone at her temp job telling her there was no need to come in today. She’s been laid off with no back-up plan in sight.

The world of work for many women is unpredictable. I feel like a heel for mourning a disappointment that really isn’t much of one in the grand scheme of things.

The mommy wars

Some debates never go anywhere. Since Hilary Rosen spoke out last week on national television asserting that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life, cries of outrage have aired 24/7 in the media. As a stay-at-home mom raising five children, Ms. Romney certainly does work. The point, Ms. Rosen said half-apologetically, isn’t that stay-at-home mothers don’t work, but that some women are in a position to make a choice, while others are restricted by their economic position–they must work outside the home to make ends meet.

I’m less frustrated by the fact that we find ourselves engaged once again in the mommy wars–the conflict reflects a vital discussion that should be on our radar regardless of political timing–than by the sad reality that the issues around which the conversation evolves never seem to shift. It makes me wonder if we’ve learned anything. Perhaps we need to expand the terms of the debate beyond those women in our own communities living with choices, free or forced, and consider how the discussion looks from outside the US.

Two things struck me this week as I listened to Republicans, Democrats, and Independents conversing (loudly) about what Rosen meant, or didn’t mean, and whether there’s any truth to whatever she meant, or didn’t.

First, in many parts of the world, earning a living outside the home and caring for children aren’t mutually exclusive activities. And I’m not referring to the widespread scenario that dictates women should bring in the crops or sell the wares they make and then come home to the second shift–cooking, washing, and tending babies until they fall asleep. Rather, I’m referring to the many, many women I’ve observed in Africa, Nepal and India heading to “work” with a baby, maybe more than one, strapped to their back. Toddlers and older children are also often in the picture, trailing along behind their mother and carrying their own load into the fields or marketplace.

And second, the definition of “choice” in this public dialogue seems quite limited. Yes, there are those who do or don’t have the liberty of choosing whether or not to work inside or away from the home. But I think we often overlook what the work itself means to us. I am grateful to do work that I love. I feel for my friends who feel stuck in a job, sometimes a life’s career, that they perceive as pure drudgery. They count down the hours until the workday ends and the years until the work ends altogether–they retire from a company or their children head off to fend for themselves.

It seems to me that there are bigger issues to talk about that do mommies on all sides of the debate justice.