Does It Matter?

I'm going to start re-publishing some of my old posts. I'm afraid that blogging is a sickness.

This is one of my favorites.





Edit--My attention-seeking behavior is garnering, well, some attention:

Chicago Tribune.

Bible Belt Blogger



I commented on another blog about how I cannot take content seriously when it is delivered in an unattractive manner. If a person can't take the time to use correct spelling and grammar, then I'm not going to be able to take the time to consider what he or she has to say.

Here is part of the response I received:

The realities of online communication are that spelling and grammar are not the focus of many (especially younger) users. To them the concept of ideas is much more important than language rules (which themselves are seen as fluid and arbitrary in our postmodern age). It’s not about being lazy or dumb - it’s often a learned form of communication....Yes, this bugs some other people. Yet the online language of each person is part of who they are and how the communicate. I will not create barriers for those people or exclude them from the conversation because they do not “speak” formal English.

Well. Let's address these points individually, shall we?

1. Spelling and grammar are "not the focus" of many users.

* Saying this does not make it acceptable. Going outside when the weather is cold isn't exactly my dog's focus, either, but that doesn't make it okay for him to crap in the dining room.

2. The "concept of ideas" is much more important than language rules

* What, there's not room for both? This isn't an either/or deal. Shocking, perhaps, but there are actually people at this very moment expressing ideas online while using correct grammar. Hold your amazement.

3. Language rules themselves are seen as fluid and arbitrary.

* Wow. So all that's necessary in order to do away with any rule I don't want to follow is to label it fluid and arbitrary? Hey, I'm going to use that. It works for me.

4. It's often a learned form of communication.

* Then stop the madness already. By perpetuating this form of supposed communication, it is only going to get worse.

5. The online language of each person is part of who they are

* Yeah, I can tell you who they are. They're people who are either lacking in intelligence, or don't care that they appear to be. I'm interested in the opinions of neither.

Look, I'm no English major. I've never even taken a college-level English class. I'm totally aware that my writing is not perfect; at any given moment, I could be violating rules I didn't even know existed.

But I try. I make the effort to keep my writing both civilized and aesthetically pleasing. To me, this effort is not wasted. I wish everyone else who feels the need to publish online felt the same.




(I'm going to post the original comments as one long comment. It is too time-consuming to separate them.)

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The Natives Were Restless

As is my faith. Something about spending the past three nights trying to console drug-addicted babies who were, in fact, inconsolable has caused me to question some key verses of the Good Book.

Like Jeremiah 1:5 --

5 "Before I formed you in the womb I knew [a] you,
before you were born I set you apart;

Says the screaming baby, "Really? So You watched while my mom snorted coke and smoked both pot and cigarettes, knowing that the nervous system You were creating was already addicted to those things and that I would go through a brutal withdrawal after being born? Hey, thanks."

From Jeremiah 29:

11 For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

Baby, again, "Wow. So my being raised in an abusive home is part of your plan? Cool. And then when I spend my brief adult life as a criminal before dying in jail, or being shot in a robbery or, perhaps, gang-related incident, this is all in order to prosper me? Who knew?"

Don't start with me on the whole God allows suffering because blah blah blah. Or that sickness is part of the fall.

Couldn't an omnipotent God have designed a nervous system for a baby that didn't involve all of this? Better still, could He not have designed a human brain that could withstand addiction?

I don't get it.

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Tales From The O.R.

The atmosphere in the NICU can swing from very quiet to somewhat chaotic. This is a snapshot of a particular night shift.

It started well; good staff on, which is highly important, and we had enough babies to keep us busy, but low enough acuity to keep the stress level down.

Around 1 a.m., Winnie, our practitioner, said she was going to go downstairs and look for something to eat. She had no sooner walked out than the phone rang, and someone frantically yelled, "We need the practitioner in O.R. 1, NOW!"

Shit. I bolted out of the unit, but Winnie was gone. So I ran back in, yelled to the other nurse to page her and the respiratory therapist to relieve me in the O.R., and ran back, donning a surgical mask, hat, gown, and shoe covers, which I swear only come in like a size 5. Something you don't know about me if we've never met is that I have some giant feet, similar to those of a clown.

Anyway. I'm sweating by the time I get in the O.R., where a massive woman is being prepped on a cart. In the yelling and chaos I hear that she just walked into the treatment room from home, they couldn't find heart tones, and she's twenty. four. weeks. along.

Shit. Did I say that already? With apologies to Woody Hayes, there are three things that can happen at an imminent delivery of this sort, and two of them are bad.

The first, of course, is that the baby dies.

The second is that he lives. This is a kid on the murky edge of viability, and there's nothing good about this. (I wrote about the sort of course that could be expected in extreme prematurity in the post below.)

Winnie and Val, the respiratory therapist, finally get in there, and I am relegated to hauling around heavy equipment. First I have to get them the transport Isolette, which is kept heated and ready for a moment like this.

Then, I go back into the unit, hauling a big unwieldy ventilator behind me. Theresa, another R.N. on, has already preheated a warming bed and is setting up monitor leads, IVs, stuff to draw blood, suction equipment, etc., leaving somewhat of a mess of empty wrappers. I manage to get the vent hooked up to both power and oxygen; this is Val's job, but he didn't have time to do it.

And then, we wait. And wait.

The waiting isn't a good sign; in an optimal situation they would get the baby stablized and over to the NICU in a hurry. The environment in the nursery is much more conducive to procedures than the crowded O.R. is, but if they can't get the baby stablilized, they can't transport him. So the lapse in time leads us to think that things aren't going well.

Finally they walk in, still in their surgical garb. Without a baby.

Which brings us to the third thing. The obstetrician could decide that the ultrasound technician was mistaken, that there are, in fact, heart tones, and, in this case, the baby can stay right inside Mom, where he belongs, for another sixteen weeks.

Hey, you think it's anticlimactic reading it, try living it.

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What I Do

(This is one of the first posts I wrote. I'm republishing it to give context to some of my work-related posts.)


Because, you know, most people don't get it. They think I rock babies all night, and feed them bottles.

I wish. Seriously, when that happens, it's the best part of my job. It doesn't happen all that often, though.

Here's the thing: technology has far outpaced our ability to keep up in an ethical fashion. What I mean is, we have scientific capabilities for many things that are entirely questionable from a moral standpoint.

And I stand at the forefront of all of this as a nurse in an intensive care nursery.

I first felt the twinges of moral ambiguity some time ago, when I was attempting to start an IV in a baby smaller than my hand. Her veins were thinner than the line one might make with a pencil, and I was supposed to introduce a catheter into them, enabling us to provide fluids which would maintain her life.

As my hand was poised with the needle, my co-worker whispered, "Say a prayer."

And I thought to myself, what if the answer to prayer is that I don't succeed?

I mean, really, who am I to thwart God's will? Is it, in fact, His will to torture babies who weigh less than two pounds with needles, tubes down their throat hooked to ventilators, and countless painful procedures, only to send them home months later with a poor prognosis?

You take a kid who weighs around a pound or so and keep him alive artificially until he can be sent home with his parents, and I guarantee that the majority of the time, those parents are signing up for lifelong care of a child who may not ever even, like, speak. Or walk. Or become potty-trained. Don't you think that it may, in fact, have been God's will for this child not to have lived?

And yet. Yet. Let me tell you about some of the most frustrating cases I've ever dealt with. Babies whose parents promise a dysfunctional home life at best, involving drugs, low socio-economic status, no prenatal care for the mother because it's not an option for her, or because she's just not interested.


A baby like this is likely to come into the world prematurely, sometimes on the edge of viability, say, 23-24 weeks of gestation. He may be addicted to the cocaine he had in utero.

Doctors may have told his mother to stay on bedrest, that she was at high risk of giving birth prematurely, but she didn't do it. Maybe she had other children and no one to take care of them.

Maybe she didn't want to be on bedrest, didn't want to use that disgusting bedpan.


Or, perhaps, she just wanted a cigarette.

And so she gets up, does what she wants.

And so her baby is born suddenly, extremely prematurely.

This little guy enters the world weighing about a pound. His eyes are fused shut, and his skin is so fragile that merely placing the leads for his heart monitor causes it to tear and bleed.

His nurses manage to get IVs in him, and start the fluids that will keep him alive. A tiny endotracheal tube is placed in his throat and hooked to the ventilator which will breathe for him.

He doesn't really want to live, though. His nervous system is so immature that his heart repeatedly forgets to beat, and he has to be vigorously stimulated to bring him back to life.

His skin peels and scars under the electrode leads. He has to have repeated blood draws, because his lab values are so out of whack.

His nurses fight back tears, sometimes, when they approach his bedside, because they know they are going to cause him more pain, and really, wouldn't it be the more humane thing to just let him go? What they are doing to him is torture, and all in the name of modern medicine.

Day after day this goes on. No one wants to take care of him, because it is so frustrating. Not the fact that the nurse has to jump up every few minutes as his heart monitor alarms, but because the whole thing is such an exercise in futility. Why are we doing this, tormenting this child, when he is only going to end up moderately functional at best?

And yet. A year later, the door of the NICU opens, and here comes the little guy, toddling and smiling while grasping the hands of his mother, who has, in fact, learned to be one.

"We just wanted to say hi," she says.

And in that moment, all of the bad outcomes are negated. There is no black and white here in the intensive care nursery. Go ahead and spit out your dismal statistics, but the real truth is in the toothless smile of the baby anyone else would have given up on.

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Are You Freakin' Kidding Me, Hillary?

It's a good thing comments are closed in this CNN post.

No one, I mean, no one who hasn't done it has any idea what it means to work nights. For her to claim that she knows what it's like for your life to revolve around sleep, to travel through your days with a screwed-up body clock and a personality to match is ridiculous and insulting.

This is what it's like to be a night-shift nurse in my world, Hill. You spend evenings headed to work, tired already, and put in a full 12 hours taking care of critically ill babies, all the while knowing that if you make a mistake, you could end one of their lives.

You stagger out in the morning so exhausted you can't scrape the snow off of your car, so you navigate the drive home by peering out of a little hole in the windshield ice as you slog through rush-hour traffic and a deluge of school buses.

When you finally get to your house, you find that you will not be tumbling into bed, because the babysitter has canceled, and you will be staying up all day, bleary-eyed, nauseated, desperate for sleep, while little Chelsea eats potato chips and watches TV for hours.

You ever done this, sweetie? No, I didn't think so.

Give me a giant break.

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Note to Planned Parenthood: Get Your Bloody Hands Off My Child

I realize that the issue of parental consent for an abortion has been written about in many other places. But the idea that the courts and organizations like Planned Parenthood believe they are better suited to make medical decisions regarding my daughter than her father and I are has hit home now that she is a teenager.

What arrogance. This is not a political pawn in someone's feminist game; this is my child. How dare you.


Ohio Rev. Code Ann. §3730.06

Tattooing and Body Piercing-It is illegal to tattoo, body pierce or pierce the ears of anyone under age 18 without the consent of the minor's parent, guardian or custodian. Requires the consenting individual to appear in person at the business at the time the procedure is performed and sign a document that provides informed consent.

Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 2919.121.

Performing or inducing unlawful abortion upon minor.--No person shall knowingly perform or induce an abortion upon a pregnant minor unless one of the following is the case:

(1) The attending physician has secured the informed written consent of the minor and one parent, guardian, or custodian;

(2) The minor is emancipated and the attending physician has received her written informed consent;

(3) The minor has been authorized to consent to the abortion by a court order issued pursuant to division (C) of this section, and the attending physician has received her informed written consent;

(4) The court has given its consent in accordance with division (C) of this section and the minor is having the abortion willingly........

.........If the court finds that the minor is sufficiently mature and well enough informed to decide intelligently whether to have an abortion, the court shall grant the petition and permit the minor to consent to the abortion.

Planned Parenthood conveniently keeps access to judges and hooks these girls right up, and something like 96% of the requests are approved. I'm infuriated by the idea that my 14-year-old would need my consent to get a tattoo, but there are judges under P.P.'s feminist thumb who would rubber stamp an abortion, a risky and gruesome procedure, for her without my knowledge.

I cannot believe that anyone thinks this is okay, and if you're someone who does, know this: you sicken me.

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Dirty Talk

Stop scrolling so frantically. I don't mean the kind between consenting adults.

I'm talking about the offensive filth that kids are putting out on Xanga and MySpace.

I was going to provide links to some of my 15-year-old's friends' sites. But I decided against it, first of all because no one needs to look at that, and second, because one of them is that of a 14-year-old girl, and I don't want to be responsible for promoting it to people I may not even know.

You'll have to take my word for it, unless you've seen it for yourself: it's bad.

My parents are the most moral people I've ever met. When I was a teen, I knew without a doubt that my privacy was secure; I could leave out notes from friends, a diary, whatever, and I knew, I knew, that they would never read it. So I've always been a big defender of my own kids' privacy.

They don't call it the world wide web for no reason, though. If someone is looking for privacy, the internet is not the place to post his thoughts, you know?

So I don't feel guilty for reading this stuff. What I do feel is nauseous, to the point where I want to ban these kids from my house, my son.

But then I start to think. I mean, how many of you, as teens, were guilty of sneaking a look at the Playboys on the shelf at Pangle's Supermarket?

Okay, unless you lived in Lima, it wasn't Pangle's. Still, it was somewhere.

Did you cuss around your friends? Ever joke about sex acts, even when you weren't even sure, exactly, what they involved? Did you ever claim to do something racy, even though it wasn't true?

What about the time you were babysitting for your cousin Lynn's kids after her divorce when she rented that apartment above your dentist's office? When you found that stack of Penthouses in her bedroom, did you look?

Okay, you may not have had a cousin Lynn. You may not even have had a dentist, although if that's the case I have to say I'm not all that sure you're someone I want to know as an adult.

But you had a similar scenario, and most likely, you shared what you had read with friends.

So is this different? I think it is, for a lot of reasons. First of all, I hate the fact that so much filth is so readily available online. I truly believe it is desensitizing and coarsening our kids.

Second, they're putting it out there for anyone to see. The girl I mentioned claims to drink, smoke, and to be sexually active. I know her, and I have a hard time believing this. One thing that never goes out of style for teens is to look cool in front of their friends, and perhaps a lot of this talk is just talk.

There are registered sex offenders living in this community, though, who may take that stuff a bit more seriously. I told my son to please, tell her to take her site down, and he says kids know it's out there for anyone to read. They just don't think anyone will. It's the whole classic teens believe they are immortal syndrome.

And third, my parents were naive. If they had known some of the stuff I was into, they would have been horrified.

Not only that, but the things I saw were harmful to me. I didn't need to see that sort of thing at such a young age, or, well, ever.

Thanks to MySpace, I know what my kids are doing. And so I've (well, we've; there are two parents here) done something I never thought I'd do. We've told our son he is no longer allowed to associate with certain of these kids.

You all can disagree with me if you want; I don't much care. I won't be a party to having his mind, his very person, corrupted. Isn't this how a parent is supposed to feel?

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The HPV Vaccine That Would Not Die

(I'm republishing this post from last year because the infuriating debate rages on. And I lumped all of the original comments under the first posted one; it's too much work to separate them.)








So. Shall I, or shall I not? Take on the vaccine debate, that is. Oh, I think I shall. I'm in that kind of mood.

I wasn't, actually, until I read this, from the Columbus Dispatch.

Merck & Co., bowing to pressure from parents and medical groups, is suspending its campaign to persuade legislatures to require that adolescent girls get the company’s new vaccine against cervical cancer as a requirement for school attendance.

The drug-maker had been criticized for quietly funding the campaign, via a third party, to make 11- and 12-year-old girls get the three-dose vaccine in order to attend school.

I got in trouble over at Bible Belt Blogger for saying this: I don't like being mandated to put any chemical/virus/whatnot into my children's bodies.

I am very cautious when it comes to vaccines, and believe that the responsibility for that decision should be mine and my husband's.

I overlooked the larger point there, though. Or maybe I didn't. A third party is lobbying legislatures on behalf of Merck?! My kids may be required to receive vaccines in order to allow a pharmaceutical company to build on the $235 million in revenue it has already received from this vaccine alone?

Here's how I feel: hey, lobbyists, leave my family the hell alone.

Now, I'm not an anti-vaccine nut. (I am an anti-circumcision nut, but that's for another day.)

And by nut, I mean those who choose not to have their children vaccinated on the basis of dubious information. For instance, the autism/MMR link has been disproved by many acknowledged studies, and yet the myth continues.

(I do believe something in our lifestyles/environment is causing the giant increase in autism. It is mere coincidence, though, that the onset is normally around the same age the MMR is given.)

My children received all of their recommended vaccines, and I have already decided to have my daughters receive the HPV vaccine.

My point is that I don't need the government mandating me to do so, especially at the behest of lobbyists who are assisting Merck's bottom line.


I believe there are only two reasons for the government to mandate vaccines for schoolchildren, and neither of them involve lining Merck's pockets:

1. In order to prevent a disease which is communicable by the sort of everyday contact involved in a school day, or

2. In order to entirely eradicate a disease such as smallpox or polio from society. If this is possible, I believe societal good should trump individual decision. According to the CDC, however, this particular vaccine is not capable of doing that.

What does the vaccine not protect against?
Because the vaccine does not protect against all types of HPV, it will not prevent all cases of cervical cancer or genital warts. About 30% of cervical cancers will not be prevented by the vaccine.

This is a sexually-transmitted virus. Kids aren't going to get it from not washing their hands at school. Mandating this is not warranted.

Edit: another article from the Columbus Dispatch:

Meanwhile, documents obtained by the Associated Press show that Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s chief of staff met with key aides about the vaccine on the same day its manufacturer, Merck & Co., donated $5,000 to the governor’s campaign and $5,000 to eight other state lawmakers.

Texas became the first state to require the vaccine against human papilloma virus earlier this month when Perry issued an executive order requiring it for girls entering sixth grade........Merck had waged a behindthe-scenes lobbying campaign to get state legislatures to require 11- and 12-year-old girls to get the three-dose vaccine against the virus that can cause cervical cancer as a requirement for school attendance......The New Jersey company stands to make billions if Gardasil is required nationwide.

No, okay? Just no. If any legislation needs to be passed in this regard, it should be something making that whole scenario illegal.


Oh, and one final article from the Dispatch, including a quote from yours truly. Even if they did leave out some of my best points.

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Yakety Yak

I'm yakking. Rambling. I prefer to call it stream of consciousness, although it could also be called flight of ideas. The latter connotes mental illness, though, and no matter how comfortably that shoe might fit, I'm not gonna wear it.

Anyway. I'm stealing this quote about abortion from the comments section at Bible Belt Blogger:

I'm all for contraception, prevention is certainly better than termination.
Did you know you can get an implant that is safe, 99.9% effective, and lasts for three years? Just think girls not even a show for three years, wouldn't that be great?

I'm not about to get into the abortion debate. My opinion for the record is that it's wrong; I cannot understand how, in my job, I am called upon to help save the lives of babies who, had a different decision been made, could legally be killed at the same gestational age.

If you want to debate whether or not it should be legal, though, there are a blue million other blogs out there representing every possible opinion. Head on over to one of those, albeit with this warning: a lot of those people are wearing the aforementioned crazy shoes.

No, my thoughts center on that particular comment, and how far we are willing to alter our natural bodily functions from what was intended.

Let's take a woman of, say, my age, which is 42. I've been married for 21 years, so technically, not considering any premarital sex-- which, in case my kids are reading this, I absolutely DID NOT have!! Really!!--I could have borne like 15 or so children.

And in this ideal natural scenario, I would have breastfed all of them in between pregnancies.

I didn't do that, of course, and neither do most women these days. I chose to artificially alter my body in order to conceive only when I planned to do so. (Theoretically, anyway. I wasn't all that good at the planning part of it.) And I did breastfeed, but I wasn't picky; I used formula if it was convenient.

This is pretty much the way of it for women today, and now, as the commenter mentioned, we can also choose not to have a "show" for three years. (What the hell is a show? I'm assuming he means menstruation, and as we're big kids here, I'll go ahead and say it.)

Does anyone else see any possible correlation between how far we've come from what nature intended, and, say, the proliferation of breast and other female sorts of cancer?

What about the tremendous increase in autism among children? Yes, part of that can be explained by better diagnostics, but not all of it. I didn't know anyone autistic when I was growing up; did you? The Autism Society says it now accounts for 1 in 166 births.

This ain't no scientific study here; I'm just musing. We think we're so advanced and intelligent and that we can manipulate our bodies away from what was intended for the sake of, well, a whole lot of things. Maybe it's catching up to us.

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Goofing Off

(This is my daughter's favorite post.)






I will now demonstrate how wasting hours and hours of my life online has, in fact, been productive by demonstrating my acquired knowledge of HTML.

This, of course, depends on your definition of productive.

One of the things I have learned is how to format a list:

Breakfasts eaten in this household this morning:

1. Pop-tarts (2)
2. Pop-tart (1)
3. Breakfast sandwich of toast, sausage, egg and cheese (homemade, by request.)
4. Pop-tart (1)
5. Cookie and coffee (mine)
6. Kibbles and Bits

All served with, of course, milk, except for:

1. Kibbles and Bits

Things I say, every morning, after preparing breakfast for a child, based on gender:

1. "Here you go, babe."
2. "Here you go, princess."

If that didn't impress you, well, check this out:

Items on a Wal*Mart receipt I recently found, dated July 18, 2002:

1. CHARMIN 12RL 3.68
2. COMBO 13.44
3. DISNEY ADVEN 3.15
4. DETERGENT 2.97
5. BARSOAP 1.78
6. S/S CREW NECK 6.98
7. TOOTHPASTE 1.47
8. TOOTHBRUSH 1.94
9. MT DEW .98
10. PEPSI .98
11. 2LT VANILLA .98
12. 2LTR DIET KO .98
13. TRASHBAG 30G 1.50
14. JR MINTS .97
15. LIQ HANDSOAP 1.47
16. HAND SOAP .97
17. HAND SOAP .97
18. HAND SOAP .97
19. MINNOWS 10 P .96
20. MATTHEWS DA 9.84 WAS 13.88 YOU SAVED 4.04

What I bet you didn't know:

1. That you can get live bait at Wal-Mart
2. But then you'll need a lot of handsoap

What I'd like to know:

1. What a $13.44 COMBO consists of

What this list says about my household:

1. We drink too much soda
2. But at least we brush our teeth


Songs playing in my head right now:

1.

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