More New Years Gifts

This is the second installment of my New Years gifts to you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share with you. I hope this New Year brings us all joy and health in a world that knows more peace.

1. Dancing cockatoo
   
2. Flow
3. Paintjam
4. The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook
5. Chris Bliss - Amazing Juggler

Medical Blog Awards 2007

Much to my surprise and delight, this blog has been nominated for a Medical Blog Awards 2007 -- Best Patient Blog award - a competition sponsored by Medgaget.

While I have no delusions of winning this award, especially given the wonderful blogs nominated in this category, I am flabbergasted by the inclusion.

Here is the timetable of events. If your are so inclined, please feel free to vote for this blog when that phase of activity is open.:

-- Nominations will be accepted until Monday, December 31, 2007.

-- We will announce the finalists on Monday, January 7th, 2008

-- Polls will be open from Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 and will close at midnight on Sunday, January 20, 2008 (PST).

-- Winners will be announced on Wednesday, January 23, 2008.

Keep your eye on Medgaget for status updates. And thank you for your support and for reading In Sickness & In Health

New Years Gifts for You

This is the first installment of my New Years gifts to you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share with you. I hope this New Year brings us all joy and health in a world that knows more peace.

1. Herding Cats
   
2. Free Rice
3. Richard III & Peter Sellers
   
4. Ashes and Snow
5. Opera Guy

American Cancer Society Report: People with Inadequate Health Insurance are More Likely to Die

An article on WebMD tells a not unexpected, but still deplorable, story:

Cancer patients without adequate health insurance tend to face grimmer odds than those with good health insurance, says an American Cancer Society report. The American Cancer Society based its report on information from the CDC and from the National Cancer Data Base.

The report shows that people with no health insurance or inadequate health insurance face four main challenges when it comes to cancer:

• They're less likely to get screened for cancer.
• They're less likely to get counseled about cancer prevention.
• They're more likely to get diagnosed late, when their cancer is harder to treat.
• They're more likely to die from cancer than people with adequate health insurance.

Health insurance isn't the only gap in cancer care. Racial and ethnic disparities also affect cancer outcomes.

Ever since I developed a chronic pain condition, and like too many other pain patients, wandered from specialist to specialist, from one health care system to another, from western to alternative treatments, I have been aware that my white, English speaking, educated, middle class, married, insured status served me well.

I was always taken seriously. No one ever intimated that my pain was not real, even though no cause was ever ascertained. With medium effort, I got referrals to specialists outside my provider network. My phone calls to my care team were returned.

My status ticket got me a seat on most every train I wanted to ride. Even though I knew the system was slanted in my favor and that others were disadvantaged, I took my advantage. I was sick, I was in wretched pain every day, and I was willing to do anything to make it stop. Even during my worst periods, I was aware of this unfairness -- and felt guilty and lucky.

Richard, my husband, also played the privilege card, many times - always for my benefit. And I counted on him to play it well, especially when I wanted insurance approval for seeing a pain specialist at Johns Hopkins or when our mail-order drug vendor was taking too long in delivering my medications.

We talked about everything else, but we never talked about this. I think we were both focused on survival and couldn't afford to let ethics dampen our efforts and our access to resources we both knew others weren't getting. Shame would come later - when I began to climb out of the pain pit.

Now I work with hospital systems that are trying to make a difference, trying to bring health care to all members of their community. Are my efforts helping to make things more equitable? Barely - one mini-micro drop of water on a parched landscape. I still feel guilty and lucky - but I have to do something.

Grand Rounds are up at Trick-cycling for Beginners

Grand Rounds are up at Trick-Cycling for Beginners, a truly wonderful blog written with humor and truth by a psychiatrist in the U.K. She introduces her Ground Round choices with a haiku -- how inventive is that! I am honored to be among her picks.

Popped but not Forgotten

The ultimate stress reliever - you must check this out.

I learned about this through the How to Cope with Pain blog.

I've been tagged

Rosalind at Keep Working, Girlfriend tagged me for the meme challenge. This is the second time within a two week period that I've been tagged. While I am very appreciative, I have to confess, it was really hard to come up with seven more interesting facts about myself without stepping onto some psychological land mines or outright lying.

For readers new to the meme challenge, here are the rules:

1-Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog
2-Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird
3-Tag 6 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs
4- Let them know they are TAGGED by leaving a comment on their blog

7 Facts About Me:

1. I have never gotten a parking ticket.
2. I am genetically incapable of being late for anything. I usually arrive at least 15 minutes early. For me arriving on time feels like I’m five minutes late.
3. I speak five languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hebrew, English) – two of them badly.
4. I used to ace my college classes by writing class notes in tiny script on index cards and then memorizing each card so that I could recall the visual image of the sentences on the cards during an exam.
5. I play one musical instrument, the guitar, badly.
6. I have been in a women’s group that has met monthly for over fifteen years. I don’t know where or who I would be without these amazing women.
7. One of my best teenage memories is being alone in the house during a power outage in the winter. I made a fire in the fireplace and lay down on the floor next to my dog and read Alice in Wonderland out loud to her until we both fell asleep.

I'm tagging:

I'd Like to Buy a Bowel
Living With Fibromyalgia
Wachter's World
The Daily Headache
Well Soul
Own Your Health