Cold Spaghetti

Will had his second ear surgery on Friday.  It was a blow to miss his Halloween festivities at school — and with that, the opportunity to wear Luke Skywalker clothes — so Paul and I tried to make the morning as special as we could.  He watched a Transformers cartoon Movie, one that Paul and I kept remembering and forgetting (Wait, what? Optimus Prime dies? A machine that eats planets?)  We were very supportive and did not make fun of him on the Goofy Juice.  Even when he turned to me and said, “Mommy, I have to say something.  You have two heads.”

He did great.  Both ears were full of fluid.  Instantly after surgery his hearing improved.  Our instructions are to use Cipro drops, which are like liquid gold, to keep his ears clear.  Since it took 3 weeks for one of his last tubes to fall out and 5 months for the other to completely clog, we are looking at daily drops for a long, long time.  Have we put in the drops today? Is the new household mantra.  Please feel free to ask us, because we are likely to forget by tomorrow.

When he left the hospital at 2pm with a sleepy, sleepy kid, we were sure he wasn’t going to make a 6pm party.

HA.

Cookie making with friends trumps ear surgery.

Thank goodness.  We needed the night out, too.

I know it’s six months away, but who can resist the hat?

Welcome to the lastest Just Posts roundtable, the monthly list of blogger writing on topics of social justice and activism compiled and hosted by Alejna and me.

It’s taken me 5 days to get this post up.  Does that say enough about life in Cold Spaghetti land?

Some of the delay in posting is due to a conference presentation I gave over the weekend about health and infrastructure in New Orleans.  Using a lot of maps, charts, and pictures, I gave the context for Louisiana, one of the poorest, least developed, States in our United States.  (Enter joke.  Our State motto: “Thank goodness for Mississippi,” lest we be last on ALL measures.)  The level of vulnerability among those in the Gret Stet is extreme by any measure and when further defined by race, becomes unthinkable.  But as far as we are down the hierarchy of outcomes, we are not so different than the rest of the country and indeed, not so different than the rest of the world.  The images of inequality and despair burned into our minds after Katrina are not indicative of New Orleans.  Those memories do not define or create a distinction for the rest of the country to use to separate themselves from our reality.  Every place is just waiting for that moment when it all falls apart, when our inequalities, vulnerabilities, and differences can no longer be invisible.

And now, the all important list: The September Just Posts.

• BipolarLawyerCook with My best friend’s wedding…
• dmariemart of Argot with Minds of Our Own
• Emily of Wheels on the Bus with No More Hall Passes
• Erika at Be gay about it. with and Iowa: a proposal. and Iowa: mawwiage, that dweam within a dweam.
• flying tomato of Flying Tomato Farms with Quit the Bullsh*t–Public Option Now!
• girlgriot of if you want kin… with Street walking and Danger, Will Robinson! Don’t Go “Down There”!
• jen at one plus two with bob marley has definitely left the building
• Jenn at breed ’em and weep with Hi, I’m somebody
• laloca of baggage carousel 4 with the politics of counting and thinking about miscarriage
• Magpie of Magpie Musing with From the Rain Comes Hope
• Neil of Citizen of the Month with Tales of Health Insurance
• Painted of Painted Maypole with Why isn’t this a non-issue?
• Tami of What Tami Said with I’m saving my cheers over new, “authentic” black Barbie line
• wreke of wrekehavoc with guilty pleasure monday: millworker (james taylor)
• Zach Ford at Zach Ford blogs with Coming Out Might Be Easier, But It’s Still Hard

The posts of this month’s roundtable were submitted by:

Slouchy
girlgriot
Holly
alejna

Thanks so much for reading! We really appreciate your support. And not just appreciate it. We need your support to keep the Just Posts going. Please drop by Alejna’s to see what she has to say this month. If you have a post in the list above, or would just like to support the Just Posts, we invite you to display a button on your blog with a link back here, or to the Just Posts at Collecting Tokens. If you are unfamiliar with the Just Posts, please visit the information page.

Once you open a loaf of bread in New Orleans, you have approximately 15 minutes to devour it completely before the humidity sucks out all the soft goodness and turns it into a wheat rock.  What a loss of good bread.  Our solution?  Throw it into the freezer at minute 14 — just in the nick of time — and save it for the animals in the park.

Like this guy, who I think just heard us tell Kate not to eat the moldy bread because it was for the squirrels.

Today’s high was 81.  In September, a high of 81 means it was an absolutely perfect fall day.

Way too beautiful to spend the afternoon inside.  So we picked the kids up from school and brought them straight to the park for a picnic.

Is this squirrel sticking is tongue out at us?

If you’ve spent time in Audubon Park, you recognize these three.  They are the park social committee.  We like to think of them as Agnes, Edna, and Beatrice.  They squawk with British accents.

The wood ducks are back (my favorites).  Will referred to the swan that followed him around as “big guy,” as in, “I need more bread to feed the Big Guy.”

Will also played around with the Photovoice camera and asked if I could set it on a timed release “so that we can get some family pictures.”  Okay, Will.  He set the camera on the cooler and got to work.

He was very serious.  So serious that we had to capture the intensity.  For the record, Kate totally and completely listened to every darn word the kid said.

Paul and I are barely holding it together, just seconds away from exploding into hysterics.  The Kid is directing us to put our heads together.

See?  I wasn’t listening.  I was suppose to move closer.  Okay, Will.

What unfortunately isn’t easily seen in this picture is the underside of Will’s cast.  He took a marker and wrote “DAD MOM KATE” in a line on the inside of the cast.  Underneath he wrote WILL, except that he made the W upside-down.  So really, he wrote “MILL”.  When he realized the mistake (“Will, who’s ‘Mill?'”  “What?”  “Mill.  M-I-L-L.  On your arm.”) he laughed like a loon and then simply wrote his name (complete with W) underneath.  DAD MOM KATE MILL WILL.

If that doesn’t sum up the age of 5, I just can’t think of much more that can.  Awesomeness.

I humbly requested a photo of Kate and Will.  This is the only one where one of them isn’t lifting the other, picking a nose, or bent upside.  It also showed that I am the only photographer no one listens to.  Not that this was ever in doubt.

Happy fall day, New Orleans! So good to be home.

A long, long, time ago we took the kids to Baton Rouge to visit the State Museum and Planetarium.

Okay, it was only last month.  But it feels like a long time ago.

The State Capital was across the street.  Very interesting fence.

The planetarium itself was very cool, with a good sky show. The kids loved it, which was fun for Paul I because we loved it (it was about the size and composition of the universe). Kate participated in a “building the city” event where kids got hard hats and “building permits” for different things. She built an animal shelter and we placed it in a spot in the city grid, where parents were busy building the biggest, tallest things they could “with” their kids. There was a special exhibit on handbags, which was surprisingly interesting and engaging. The Mummy was interesting as well, though the kids weren’t as willing to spend a long time in the tomb-like presentation space. Best part: no accidents from Kate, who is proving to be completely successful in potty training outside of the home, but not so much within the home.

For about two years, I’ve had a video clip of an ABC Nightline News broadcast on youtube.  It’s a segment from a show discussing violence in NOLA, and heavily features stories related to the murders of Helen Hill and Dinneral Shavers.  It’s personal, this event, and for New Orleans, it symbolized a larger political movement that continues now.  (I’ve written about these things here, here, here, here, and here.)

Every once in awhile a comment appears on the video and I get email notification of it.  The most usual comments have been from some guy who repeatedly wrote posts incriminating Paul in Helen’s murder — I have responded by deleting the comments and blocking the user.  After a few goes under two names, he stopped.  More recently, though, it’s turned into standard anti-NOLA crap.  The sort of comments you get from folks whose profile names are “LuvFOXNews”.  I’ve treated it like the others — like a nasty fly to swat away and forget.  But then another one showed up today.  And I guess I’ve started to have enough of the bullshit.  Maybe the ridiculousness around the responses to the President’s attempts at making our world better is pushing me over some edge or something, I don’t know.  But for whatever reason, I actually went to this person’s youtube page before deleting and blocking the comment, which was:

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chevyls1camaro has made a comment on ABC Nightline Jan 24th (New Orleans Violence):

You can reply to this comment by visiting the comments page.

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Typical New Orleans hate.  Here’s chevylscamaro‘s youtube page.

I visited the page and found that NOLA hate, black hate, and just about any other kind of hate one can think of seems to be this person’s reason for joining youtube.  I dunno, hating others maybe this person’s reason for living.  I couldn’t think of anything to do with the information, except for sending it here, and writing about it.  I thought you all may have some constructive thoughts or suggestions.

Cold Spaghetti is now five years old. My first post was written August 26th, 2004 — then on another site — and would move twice before ending up here in its own special domain.  I’m blushing as I admit this, but there is a lot of unfinished business on this site. One of my post-dissertation project-dreams is to re-vamp it, clean up old posts, set tags and labels, and properly archive everything in a cool kind of way (after all, it’s the closest I’m going get to cool).  That is how I’m getting through, you know… making all sorts of PLANS for what I’m allowed to do AFTER the dissertation.  Those AFTER plans?  They are BIG PLANS, let me tell you!  Life changing, earth-shaking plans!  In fact, I love to talk about the PLANS so much, that all the other stuff, like getting to AFTER, can fall to the wayside.  Oof.  If I’m going to make November, it may be time to raise the bar.  What do people do to finish a book, I wonder?  What drastic measure or extra-cool incentive helps others?  Should I deny myself chocolate or wear a chastity belt or something?   (Suggestions welcome.)

This week also marks the date of my inaugural post (granted, a cross-post, but a post nonetheless!) to NOLAFemmes — a website written by New Orleans women about New Orleans issues important to women. It’s a great site for information about local artists, events, and politics — and a good way to get an idea how the women of our city are healing our collective wounds, raising our future citizens, and carrying on life in this difficult, but beautiful place.

Most importantly, this week holds another anniversary in these parts. That of Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Flood. I don’t want to wax on about those pivotal events, only to say that we’re still here. The real work of recovery, of looking at our past and future and determining how to heal our inequalities, is just beginning. There is so much opportunity and hope; it is a really exciting time to be in New Orleans.

In honor of both events, I want to share the NOLA love. I’m hoping for comments from folks that read but haven’t commented before… just a lil’ shout out. I confess that since moving to coldspaghetti.org (two!) years ago, I haven’t been tracking traffic and I have no idea who is visiting or from where. (See, I wasn’t kidding about not being on top of the website.)

Make a comment here between now and September 1st — particularly if you’re new to coldspaghetti or never commented before — and I’ll send a NOLA-themed gift from a NOLA-based artist to one repeat commenter and one new commenter.  Selections will be made via random number and I’ll announce names on September 2nd.

Glasses raised to joie de vivre — no matter where you are!

I’m so glad Harry Shearer gets it.

He spoke compelling at today’s Rising Tide, poignantly describing the how New Orleans lost the media battle regarding the city’s story of Katrina, the Flood, and recovery.  He’s absolutely right, of course.  Read any article about New Orleans’ recovery and go to the comments; they are ripe with misinformation, sweeping falsehoods, and complete hatred towards this city and the people within it.  The reason it’s important for the people of New Orleans to continue to tell the story is because, somehow, the facts are still not understood: that this city was destroyed in a man-made disaster, a Flood that occurred when a Federally-funded agency failed to perform as it had been designed to perform because it was never built correctly.  And I can’t believe we still have to say this, again, but FOR THE LOVE, this city is NOT below sea level!  Can we move on now, please?

(See some video of Shearer’s speech here.)

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A last minute cancellation resulted in my being a member of the Health in New Orleans panel (versus its moderator) — along with two well-known, established mental health professionals.  One is consistently named a Top Female Achiever in the City for her well-respected work with the police mental health crisis unit; the other, a psychiatrist and medical director for a large local non-profit.  I was an out-of-left-field addition to this group… I don’t have one primary affiliation with one organization, my scientific perspective is a bit different (public health), and I’ve spent nearly 4 years volunteering and researching how clients and health promoters navigate the waters of New Orleans social systems.

I wasn’t intimidated by the other panelists, but I definitely wanted to take the conversation to other places that I didn’t feel it was going (or maybe could not go).  Instead of sticking to questions and topics that had been pre-arranged, the my fellow panelists opened the talk to the floor to do a large Q&A.   What followed were a lot of discussions about local services, which I don’t find particularly useful in this type of venue: the panel wasn’t envisioned as a laundry list of mental health services for a reason, because people tend to not remember those sorts of specifics.  (If you want to list services or achievements or whatever, bring a resource guide and pass out copies.)  Panels, I feel, should build on that sort of available information.  A more productive conversation may be one that discusses how we can supplement existing programs.  As an example: what can be done to better support families to care for their loved ones transferred to facilities an hour or more away with the closure of NOAH?   Or maybe a discussion of the sorts of a strategies we all can use to handle our own stress and mental illness outside of seeking professional providers?   In my thought, the power of a group like RT is when you excite the room — after all, these are folks who write and read and write some more — so I think it’s important to try and throw out big issues.  Let people get charged up and see what types of good actions come out.

I did try to throw in a few cents — pointing out that health is so much more than access, more than doctors and medicines.  We are resource-poor in New Orleans, without a doubt, but focusing on access and getting more providers and opening more clinics and getting more people health insurance is ultimately a disservice to the people of New Orleans.  I’m not saying these things aren’t important.  I’m saying that in the end, these are not the factors that create healthy lives.  What does create healthy people are the more difficult, more sensitive, more POLITICAL realities of our lives.  Our physical living environments (FEMA trailers, polluted properties, abandoned structures, proximity to blighted areas), our work environments (are we respected? do we have benefits and fair pay? do we feel useful?), our school environments (are our children eating healthy lunches? are they learning? do they have pride in who they are?), our streets (can we exercise without fearing for our safety? are children safe walking home?), and our neighborhoods (can we buy affordable healthy foods close to our home? is there a clinic nearby to see a doctor for non-emergencies? can we get a medicine when we need it?)  All of these factors contribute to our health: they create stress, they weigh on our hearts and minds, and when not addressed in comprehensive ways, they make us sick.

And, since the feeling of having no control over your life is a key part of mental illness, (as mentioned by a panelist) perhaps involvement in some of the issues above on a community level would help individuals find more purpose and agency in their lives.  Just a thought.

But that’s not all.

And here is where I am embarrassed.  My one note, the one thing I most wanted to discuss, maybe even the most important thing to discuss within the context of health and New Orleans, did not get mentioned.  I didn’t know where to put it in without sounding like the crazy loon in the armchair throwing off the conversation… so I waited for a question from the audience that would let me bring it up.  Unfortunately, it didn’t come.  So I didn’t say anything about the issue of race and class… and neither did anybody else.

Which is a shame because we cannot consider the scope of health challenges of any kind within our city — access, stress, mental health, behavioral concerns, nutrition, whatever health issue one can think of — without discussing race and class.  Race and class shape any health experience regardless of the location.  But in New Orleans, it is a paramount issue.  For one, before 2005, New Orleans was the only city in the country that had a defined two-tier system with separate and (un)equal medical facilities for the haves and have-nots.  What has not returned post-Flood are those services for the have-nots.  So what isn’t being said is that the reason these services aren’t here, or are being taken away, is because they are for a population that many do not want here in the first place.  The rest of us work away at putting money and resources into community clinics (whose funding is not indefinite) and outreach and signing individuals up for public services — but how effective can we be in the long run if we never take a step back and look at the big picture?

In the panel that preceded ours, John Slade mentioned that the movement to re-open Charity Hospital was gaining support because Uptown whites were having to wait longer in medical facilities for treatment and were unhappy with the current desegregation of the system.  Although flip, I think his comment speaks to an important truth… at the heart of our health concerns about access, treatment, and who gets care are long-held ideas about race and class.  Until we address those base realities and histories with honesty, I’m not sure we can build a solidly healthy community — no matter how many top-of-the-line medical facilities we open.

My silence on the issue is not because of lack of interest, thought, or evidence.  Either I’ve become so apathetic that I’ve lost the ability to hold faith in anything (a distinct possibility) or I’ve smartened up — after awhile, you just have to face the fact that the dining room table is never going to respond.

Then, this past week, we were faced with situations that necessitated medical attention. The first occurred while in Pensacola, where we visited a walk-in clinic that was part of the medical center Kate was unexpectedly born in 3 years ago; the second took us to an urgent care center favored by many in our area as one of the best around.

The differences were distinct and pronounced in every respect.

At Pensacola’s Baptist Medical Center, both Kate and I were seen by a friendly, good-natured, respectful, and competent provider who gave both of us very thorough exams with no ounce of hurry.  Kate had a chest x-ray to check out some wheezing heard in her lungs.  We had several pharmacy prescriptions filled.  The kids played in a children’s area.  And, all of the above happened within a 2-hour time frame.

Then, over the weekend, one of the kids who was staying with us at the beach tested positive for Type A influenza (aka: H1N1 flu).  The testing occurred on Sunday, with Will’s first day of school Monday, the next day.  We couldn’t send him to school until we knew that he was without flu — and in the interest of due diligence, needed to show that the rest of our family were not harboring flu as well.  Both Kate and Will had some fever on Sunday afternoon, and on Monday morning, all four of us were showing fever.

Despite pre-arrival calls to the one clinic that would see all four of us, and despite filling out all paperwork before our arrival, we waited for over an hour and a half in the open waiting area.  It was not particularly busy.  When we did see a nurse, she was secretive in her assessments (if you take a measure, you share it with the client, and you most certainly do not hesitate in reporting it), and was incomplete in her evaluation.  I had good reason to believe that some of the equipment was showing measurement error and one of the machines even broke during use.  We heard the doctor insulting us from the other side of the door.  When we finally did get seen, they did not provide the service we requested, I had to correct an inaccuracy the physician made regarding influenza, and in the end, they prescribed medicines the CDC specifically advises against for H1N1 flu treatment and prevention.  From start to finish, the whole thing took about 4 hours.  Note: we did not take the extra 2 hours it would have taken to fill the prescription.  (Buying a house is faster and involves less paperwork than filling a prescription in New Orleans.)

In short, we tried to do the right thing so that Will could be cleared to attend school.  In the process, we paid a gross amount of money, lost precious work hours, were insulted, and came away with poor treatment advice.  Such is the nature of health care in New Orleans.

Yes, without question, the health care system in the United States is incredibly broken and dysfunctional.  Our country is among the worst in the developed world in virtually every indicator of health.  Without question, it’s bad.

And in New Orleans?  Whether from lack of providers, lack of resources, lack of compassion, or apathetic frustration (all of which are factors) — it’s even worse.

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A few months ago, I was asked to help on a survey that a local agency wanted to do regarding experience with the health system.  It was being put together last minute, by well-intended people who were driven by a need to show the dysfunctions within our medical services.  Surveys in New Orleans are incredibly difficult post-Katrina (if not impossible) because we simply do not know how many people are here, particularly within marginalized, minority populations.  Still, this organization had a group of health students coming from a respected northeastern University during their spring break, and these students wanted to “help” by doing whatever “survey” this group could concoct.  Upon investigation, I discovered that the students were under no supervision from their institution, had no IRB approvals despite the sensitive nature of the questions they were wanting to ask within high-risk groups, and (most alarming) felt no ethical conflict about any of the above.  These things would be in-excusable for work done in their own city, but in New Orleans, a place known to be low on resources, it was seen as perfectly acceptable by both these students (who, frankly, should have been trained to know better) and the local organization.  In short, the idea was that it was fine for New Orleans to accommodate lower standards of research and be accepting of unethical inquiry simply because we are resource-poor.

I withdrew from the survey and advised the organization to put the students to work finding information that was needed for an area benchmarking of services.  The students protested that it wasn’t a good enough use of their time and proceeded with the survey… which grew into a monster so unethical and alarming that I pondered reporting it to their home institution.

All people deserve ethical treatment in research, no matter how resource-poor they or their communities may be.  I do not feel that this is negotiable on any level.  What does that say about us when we decide which kind of people get respect and value in a health inquiry and which do not?

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How we can talk about health without talking about ethics?  About what it means to be human and the ways in which our society should reflect how we define humanity?  Isn’t that the point?

I do not know how ethics have left the conversation of health care.  How, in our debate of it, we have forgotten to discuss what is right, what is the most human response.  But it isn’t there.  And in New Orleans, ethics is not only ignored but deliberately surpassed as an annoying step one can causally eliminate.  As if the people here are so desperate and pathetic that we should be thankful for any “help” we can get.

It is beneath us to compromise ourselves, no matter where our community stands in recovery, no matter where our society stands in development.

This Saturday!

The many talents of Harry Shearer are gracing this year’s event.  Panel topics include… the future of New Orleans food, music and parading culture; the state of New Orleans health care (moderated by yours truly), and politics in the Last Year of the Reign of Nagin.

Registration can be found here… and includes lunch from Cafe Reconcile!

Kate’s first caregiver, Ms. Gladys, (blog mentions of her are here) retired last week.  I used to hang out with Gladys when Kate was a baby. Usually it was to nurse (since Kate was adverse to the bottle and I am adverse to the pump) but sometimes when I’d go in for that afternoon feeding, it was hard to leave. I’d help out around the room, giving a bottle, changing a diaper, or rocking someone to sleep. The perk was that it meant I got to talk to Gladys. Gladys can tell it straight, but has a way of gently leading you to the answer so that you come to it in your own time. She is such a wonderful listener that it is easy to get carried away and babble on and on to her soft affirmations. Eventually, it got easier to ask her questions. This was how I learned about her daughter, Ardis, who died shortly before the Flood came and engulfed their home, taking with it most of their physical memories.

Abeona threw a big surprise retirement party for her last Saturday, with people there representing her 27 years of service.  We helped a friend put together a book, scanning pictures and sending photographs from Abeona’s first three years.  She did a fantastic job on the book, which included photos, stories from families, scanned art projects, and memories reflecting many years of work. But I wanted to do something else and asked for help from staff to make it happen.

As I understand, it took some serious work to get this photograph scanned — the last one taken of Ardis. 

As usual, I forgot about taking photographs of the process until I was well into the piece.

This was my toughest portrait to date, mostly because I was so very nervous to do it.  It felt very personal and, in a way, invasive to be doing this as a surprise.  She hadn’t asked me to do this because she felt I could do the job correctly — it was something I was just doing.  What if there was something I missed?

This is the only finished photograph I have — I didn’t take any of it in it’s frame.

Even now, I’m at a loss of what to say about it.

This is Ardis.  She was a beautiful, smart young woman born to an amazing, compassionate woman.  It was a pleasure to draw her.