Losing Our Optimistic Outlook in an Age of Change
Read Cockeyed Optimists in a Crybaby Culture, a post by Robert Stein on his blog, Connecting the Dots. Using the wonderful old Rogers and Hammerstein South Pacific song, I’m a Cockeyed Optimist as a metaphor, Stein looks at the way our American culture has changed and lost its focus on fairness while chosing the most helpless as our victims.
Sunflowers keep me optimistic.
Most thought-provoking comment:
Political megatrends aside, this is a significant shift in American values from ideals of fairness and justice for all to rage over being victimized by efforts to care for the poor, the aged and helpless.
Let’s hope we can find a way to once again place these values — justice, kindness, respect, fairness — at the center of American life. I am a great fan of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. In fact, I never tire of watching them, again and again, because these stories portray universal values and principles that never age.
Interesting to me, as an outgrowth of this post and my own thinking, is the way people leave tasteless, rude, and even vulgar comments on blogs, newspapers, and other Internet websites. What about commenting at in the digital world makes people want to leave these permanent digital footprints for others in the world to see?
Here’s a post, Conversations about Commenting, that I wrote for my other blog, MediaTechParenting.
On YouTube watch Mitzi Gaynor sing Cockeyed Optminist – from one of the original movie productions of the musical.
Reading Glasses and More Reading Glasses
I’ve just finished reading You Can See Mortality Better Through a Pair of Reading Glasses, an essay in today’s Washington Post. The opinion piece, by Janice Lynch Schuster, looks at reading glasses — and how nearly all of us eventually require them — as a metaphor for viewing and accepting our mortality.
Writing with irony and just a touch of humor, Schuster describes how her perspective on reading glasses has evolved, from earliest childhood through the present, from her grandmother to her mother. Of course, now it’s her turn to wear glasses, much as she wishes she could avoid them.
Perhaps five or six years ago I bought my first pair or reading glasses to wear over my contact lenses. My wonderful eye doctors, bless them, suggested going to the drug store to buy cheap pairs. So after regularly misplacing my single pair, and conducting stressful searches to find them, I bought a several more — one for upstairs, another for downstairs, one for the car, one for my purse, and another for my desk at work. Today I have eight or nine pairs, and with a few exceptions they rarely cost more than six or seven dollars each.
Caring About the Patient While Caring for the Patient – UChicago
Click here to visit the U of Chicago announcement site and watch a video.
The Bucksbaum Foundation has donated $42 million to the University of Chicago to create an institute that concentrates on clinical excellence with a focus on partnering with patients. What a common-sense, and timely idea. Disclosure: I have a graduate degree from U of C.
As university president, Robert J. Zimmer comments in the press release:
This generous gift offers the opportunity to bring a new level of rigor to the study of the doctor-patient relationship and clinical judgment. The Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence provides an important complement to the biological research and clinical strengths of this institution.
The main focus? Developing the environment for better communication thereby ensuring better patient care (and better outcomes when it comes to recovery). Adult children who are helping older senior parents through medical care often find that communication gaps occur frequently and are complicated by information overload and reticence of older patients to ask questions.
According to the announcement on the website: Read more »
Eleanor Clift Writes About Hospice
Orchids were a favorite of Mother's.
Journalist Eleanor Clift has written a superb article in the August 2011 publication Health Affairs about the hospice experience of her husband, journalist Tony Brazaitis, in the months before he died of cancer. It’s freely available and filled with astute observations and information — a good read for anyone, but especially for families who may have to consider hospice in the near future.
In Hospice and the ‘End Game,‘ Clift describes what she calls “the different philosophy of care” of hospice programs and how they focus on quality at the end of life. She writes:
They say hospice is the best medical care that no one wants because it signals the end of life, and American culture is all about fighting until your last breath. But hospice is far more than a waiting room for death; it’s a different philosophy of care for both the patient and the family.
In our family that different philosophy ensured that we spent four high quality months with my husband’s 90-year-old mother at the end of her life.
Apropos of Distracted Driving, Children, and Cell Phones
In light of my previous post about the apparent extra protective layer that grandparents have when they drive their grandchildren around, I decided to post this BMW distracted driving advertisement. I believe that telephones and texting play a big role in parents’ accidents these days.
I wrote a longer post about the this BMW video on my other blog, MediaTechParenting.
Are Kids Safer When Grandparents Drive?
I’ve just read an thought-provoking research article from the journal, Pediatrics, Grandparents Driving Grandchildren: An Evaluation of Child Passenger Safety and Injuries (freely available, PDF full text or abstract. As a part of this study, the researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School collected insurance data on 11,850 children who were in car accidents, some of them driving with parents and others driving with grandparents.
And guess what the researchers observed?
Something about the way grandparents drive, the data indicate, keeps their grandchildren safer when an accident occurs, than when the children are driving with parents. Researchers hope to investigate further to find out more about this phenomenon, especially given that 70 million boomers are moving into the grandparent phase of life.
According to the article: Read more »
Great KevinMD Post on Medicare Reform
Stop by the KevinMD blog and read Government Austerity with Medicare Reform as a Top Priority. The blog post, by medical student Nathanael Heckman, addresses the issue of medicare reform and life expectancy.
Raising the age for eligibility is inequitable, because the rich live longer and the poorer Americans need the care that Medicare provides. Heckman provides a nifty and attention-grabbing graph that depicts the differences in life expectancy for men, age 65 who are at the top half and the bottom half of wage earners .
Click on the above link of the thumbnail of the graph to visit the KevinMD blog and read the entire post.
Who Are These People? Health Overhaul Musings
The decision begins on page 16 of the document.
Three cheers for the U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit, that has dismissed cases brought by Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli and Liberty University in my home state, oops commonwealth, of Virginia. Read and listen to the NPR story at the Shots Blog. Read related articles in the New York Times and Washington Post.
Who are these people who make all sorts of claims about the evils of the health overhaul? Do none of these people have a relative who is going without health insurance? Do any of them go to a church that helps the poor or resettles refugees? Has none of them ever lost a job? Doesn’t anyone know someone who got cancer and lost health benefits?
Four recent experiences made me wonder - more intensely – about what prism people are looking through when they consider the world of health care.
Becoming A Grown-up Child
One day in April 2007 my husband and I were the adult kids in our families — we are the only adult children
— and the next day we became what we laughingly call “real grown-ups,” helping first one, then two, and increasingly all three of our parents. It’s time to give back, and we do so willingly and happily. However the process is not easy, and it is not free from anxiety and tension. Check out the As Our Parents Age About page to learn more about the mission of this blog.
AsOurParentsAge Tweets
Connect with Marti on LinkedIn
Copyright and Attribution Info
As Our Parents Age by Marti Weston is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on work at AsOurParentsAge.wordpress.com and AsOurParentsAge.net
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing As Our Parents Age. To learn more about this blog go to the AsYourParentsAge About page.
What I’m Currently Reading
Check Out the New Medline Plus Website
Life With Father
