Twenty Gallons and Counting

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I started donating blood in 1979 as a student at George Mason University. I was walking by the student union building and saw a Red Cross bloodmobile. I had a few hours before my next class so I decided to roll up my sleeve and do some good for someone I’ll never meet. I wasn’t afraid of needles, found that giving a pint of blood didn’t make me overly dizzy or tired, and I liked the karma bump.

In the 31 years since I’ve donated blood, or plasma, or platelets, pretty consistently. I’ve had some good experiences and met some fun people.

  • In about 1982 I was at Dulles Airport and my flight was delayed. I saw that there was a bloodmobile at the fire station next door and I decided to fill the time by giving a pint. It went well with one small exception. It was a cold day with the temperature in the low 20s. They had moved the fire trucks out of the station and moved the gurneys in; unfortunately when the fire alarm goes off, it automatically raises the garage doors. We were there, lying on the gurneys, needles in our arms, when the doors opened and the cold air blasted in. Amazing how fast blood stops flowing when it’s that cold; also amazing that nobody there knew how to close the garage doors. It was a frigid 5 minutes or so.
  • When I lived in Boston there was a bloodmobile at the Boston Children’s Museum. In an interesting twist, they had a unique giveaway. If you gave a pint of blood you got a free pass to visit the museum, but you also got a coupon for a free pint of ice cream at any Brigham’s Ice Cream Store. It was called “Give a pint, get a pint.” I did.
  • As a seminarian I gave blood at a bloodmobile at the Washington Theological Union. The Red Cross folk knew we were all studying to be Catholic priests, and the questions they had to ask about our sexual histories were hilarious for us and deeply embarrassing for them the ask. I loved every minute of it.
  • In my brief time at St. Patrick’s Church in Memphis, Tennessee in 1994 I connected with St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. When they found out I would be a regular donor they suggested that I switch from donating whole blood to donating platelets. It was more invasive in that (at the time) they needed to put needles in both arms. The blood was drawn out of one arm, the platelets were spun out, and the blood was replaced in the other. It took two hours and they would set me up with a movie in the VCR. The technology is much improved now; they can draw and return the blood with the same needle and it takes less than an hour. I donated platelets until 2006 when my veins made it harder for the return cycle. I’m now back to donating whole blood. I guess all the donations have built up so much scar tissue on my veins that they aren’t as sturdy as they used to be.

From 1979 to 1995 I donated blood in several different locations for several different organizations. I have no idea how much blood I gave during that time. In 1995 I moved to San Diego and connected with the San Diego Blood Bank. As of this past Tuesday, I have now given them 20 gallons of blood. That’s almost an entire gas tank for a large SUV. Pretty amazing.

As I look back, I feel very, very blessed. I know many people who would be happy to give, but can’t (Nancy included). I’m grateful that I can. I’ve never known where my blood has gone and that has been a gift in itself. It’s given me the opportunity to imagine that I’ve saved lives.

The medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonmides (1120-1190) wrote about what he calls the “ladder of tzedakah.” Tzedakah is often translated as “charity” but is probably better understood as “justice.” The lowest form of tzedakah is to give unwillingly (e.g. being guilted into it). The 2nd highest form is to give anonymously to an unknown recepient and the highest form is to give to someone before he is in need of it. I like to think of blood donations as the 2nd highest form. Over the years I’ve given to people I’ll never meet who will never be able to repay me. I like that.

There are many who can give blood who don’t. If you are one of those, give some thought to sharing in the joy I have experienced in the last 31 years and (more than) 20 gallons.

Is Air Travel Ever Going To Not Suck?

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They tell me that there was a golden age of air travel. There was a time when air passengers were treated like kings and queens and the idea of flying somewhere came with a sense of elegance. It’s hard to imagine what those days were like.

I flew for the first time in the early 1970s, going to visit my grandparents; it was a quick flight from Washington DC to Boston and I remember that people dressed up to fly. It was almost like going to church. The good news back then was that we were treated well; the bad news is that flying was so expensive that it was beyond the reach of most people. That changed in 1978 when the airlines were deregulated. It made air travel cheap, but much more complicated as there were more airlines, more routes, more choices, and more variables.

It all changed for the worse on September 11, 2001. Virtually everything we believed about air travel changed. There was a flurry of hijackings in the early 1970s and we learned to get used to screenings before we boarded a plane. But we also learned that the hijackers expected to survive the incident and we were better off cooperating with the hijackers and allowing the negotiators on the ground to fix the problem. Finding out that hijackers were now suicide bombers told us that we needed to be aware of the people we sit next to.

This new awareness benefited us; in 2002 the shoe bomber was unable to blow up the plane because of the quick thinking of those around him.

It also benefited us on Christmas Day, 2009, when a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit landed safely despite the efforts of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He boarded the plane with the intent to destroy the plane and kill everyone on it. He had, hidden in his underwear, a chemical called PETN; it’s related to TNT and he intended to detonate it by lighting it on fire. It’s a compound that’s easy to get past security but hard to detonate. Passengers around him noticed that he was attempting to light something and stopped him. There’s been no end to the gnashing of teeth about how he was allowed to get this far, and the Obama administration conceded that their security failed.

I disagree. If we’ve learned anything from September 11th, it’s that the last line of defense are the seatmates of the suicide bomber. I agree that it’s scary to think that the bomber got that close to success, but the fact that the plane landed safely and nobody died indicates that the system worked.

Unfortunately this has led to the “we have to do something” syndrome and it’s started in spades. Camera crews in seeming every major city were dispatched to seemingly every airport to see what changes the airlines made and to ask random travelers if they felt safer. This was not the best way to cover the story and it certainly wasn’t the best way to figure out how to make air travel safer.

One suggested (kneejerk) change was that passengers not be allowed to have anything in their laps for the last hour of the flight. This came out of the fact that the bomber waited until the flight was nearly over before attempting the detonation. This appears foolish because a bomber who knows this will simply detonate the bomb before the last hour. This is my best example of a change that makes us feel better but doesn’t make us safer.

There is also a hue and cry to use body scans before passengers are allowed on planes. The only real concern I’ve heard is about privacy. That argument normally appeals to me, but I have different concerns about these scans. My primary concern is the radiation used; from what I can read they use T-Rays instead of X-Rays which are not as dangerous, but I’m not convinced. We already know of a link between overuse of X-Rays and cancer, and we know that there are lots of people who fly lots of miles. Do we know there is not a cumulative, bad outcome to being scanned? I hope I’m wrong.

The other problem is that while it will detect a weapon that is wedged between skin and clothing, it will not detect anything hidden in folds of skin (either body cavities or skin folds in overweight people). Simply put, it’s easy to circumvent.

Clearly we need to do a better job screening people before they get on a plane but that story does not report well. This most recent bomber paid cash for a one way ticket from Lagos, Nigeria to Amsterdam to Detroit. His father warned us that he might be trouble. We need to improve screening so someone like him doesn’t get on the plane to begin with.

The hysteria over this reached a crescendo on Sunday, January 3rd. A man at Newark (N.J.) Airport walked past the TSA screening and made it into a secure area without being screened. The terminal was essentially shut down and no flights were allowed to take off; flights that landed were left on the tarmac and not allowed to get to the gates. This went on for the better part of six hours. The man who breached security apparently left the airport 20 minutes later and has not been identified. We’re approaching the point where a trip to the airport (or connecting flights) needs to include the contingency of finding a place to stay if the airport gets shut down. That’s right: if you’re elderly, if you have health troubles, if you’re an unaccompanied minor, or you’re too poor to afford a hotel room near the airport, you may well spend the night sleeping on the floor with your suitcase as a pillow. I don’t want to travel like that.

We need to be honest about the steps that really will make air travel safer. We need to be better at screening people before they get on the plane. We need to be willing to say that my 78 year old father with an artificial hip is not the same security risk as someone from Yemen who pays cash for a one way ticket to the U.S. the day before the flight. And we need to continue to be as vigilant as the passengers on the flight to Detroit were on Christmas Day.

Uncle Joe: Couldn't You Spend Christmas With Us?

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This past year has been a tough one for my father’s side of the family. We lost two of my aunts, Aunt Freda and Aunt Lempi in the winter and spring. The day before Christmas Eve we leaned that my Uncle Joe died. He had congestive heart failure and squeezed a great deal of life out his body; as a matter of fact he died after climbing a flight of stairs. The good news is that his nephew John was with him and told us that Uncle Joe didn’t suffer.

Even though he had a long life it’s still tough to lose someone right around the holidays. His death gave this Christmas a tinge of sadness. It’s also hard when it’s winter in Massachusetts. Uncle Joe’s wake is starting as I write this (from sunny and warm San Diego) and the current temperature in Gardner, MA is 11° F. I doubt that most of his family will even be able to attend.

My father is the youngest of seven, and one of four surviving. As a group they’ve been blessed with length of years, if not always good health. Uncle Joe was a case in point. He’s had heart failure for a number of years and needed to be on oxygen for a long time. Had he lived a hundred years ago it’s pretty clear that he wouldn’t have lived this long, and I sometimes wonder if his extra years were a blessing to him. It was certainly good to see him on my infrequent visits to Gardner and I’ll certainly miss him when I’m there next but I think it’s a fair question whether our current state of health care has served him well.

This is probably grist for another post, but our health care system is good at keeping our hearts beating, and moderately good at pain relief. We are also good at providing equipment to keep us mobile (e.g. oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, etc.). But we’re not as good at helping people stay healthy and avoid getting sick. Well, more later.

I've Elected to Have No Opinion

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OK this goes against the very grain of writing a blog, but here goes: I have decided on some issues to have absolutely, completely, entirely no opinion. I hope this doesn’t put my American citizenship in peril.

There are certainly many issues where I will continue to have strong opinions and this is far from a decision to stop blogging. But I’ve noticed that I’m oftentimes asked to weigh in on an issue and I have a hard time either deciding on the issue or caring about it. I’m now electing to vocally have no opinion.

I’ve often used the 24 hour news channels as a scapegoat and will do so here. My problem with networks like CNN, Fox, and MSNBC is that every 24 hours they need to find 24 hours of content. One of the ways they fill this content is to pit pundits against each other and argue; they also bring viewers in to participate through real time emails and phone calls. This results in all of us feeling not that we have a right to an opinion, but that we have a duty to an opinion. I’ve decided to just say no to this duty. Here are some of the areas where I have chosen to have no opinion:

  • The Mt. Soledad Cross: There is a war memorial cross on a hill in La Jolla. For the last several years there have been lawsuits going back and forth regarding the appropriateness of having a religious symbol on public land. I’ve decided to have no opinion.
  • Every year at Christmas the level of moral outrage appears to spike up. Public displays of manger scenes (Christian) menorahs (Jewish) and the like provoke heat seemingly every year. Some complain that wishing a non-Christian “Merry Christmas” is offensive while others are offended with “Happy Holidays” and feel they are not allowed to say “Merry Christmas.” I’ve elected to have no opinion.
  • Last week I was listening to National Public Radio and they ran a story on chocolate milk in schools. It seems that some groups (like the dairy industry) like having chocolate milk in schools because more children will drink milk. They’ve outlined their arguments at a web page called Raise Your Hand For Milk. The other side argues that the added sugar in the chocolate makes it no better than sugared soda. They are led by Chef Ann Cooper who calls herself the “renegade lunch lady.” I’ve elected to have no opinion.

There will no doubt be other issues and I’ll keep the blog posted.

End of a Month of Celebration

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Almost everyone knows that I love Thanksgiving. I like the fact that while it’s a civil holiday, most people think of it in at least partly religious terms. I like that it doesn’t cause the problems of specifically religious holidays (e.g. Christmas). I also like the idea of taking a time to specifically look at those people and things we are grateful for.

Thanksgiving was fun, but the real celebration was the wedding of my nephew Nathan to Makayla Nadeau. I can safely say that if it weren’t for their wedding there would be no way we’d go to Newport, Rhode Island in November. It goes without saying but it was a magical weekend. I’m Nathan’s godfather and as a priest I gave him his 1st Communion; I was also touched to be asked to participate in part of the wedding ceremony. Rev. Dan Hopkins presided and did all the legal stuff, but I treasure my part in it.

Nancy and I flew into New York City and we were able to spend time with our niece Katie and her boyfriend David. I’ll confess that I like NYC better and Nancy does, but it was great.

We took the train from Penn Station to Providence, RI. It came a month after peak foliage but it was a beautiful ride nonetheless. I love San Diego and will never move but I do miss the East Coast from time to time and it was nice to experience it from sea level.

Nathan and Makayla, Nancy and I wish you as happy a marriage as ours.

Another Health Care Post

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The current Health Care Debate answers one of the critical needs in this country: how to provide protection to everyone (or nearly everyone). But there is another need: how to contain costs and make health care more efficient. We’re hearing more about how to provide health care to some of the 47 million people in this country without health insurance, but very little about how to make the system more efficient. Let me tackle these two separate issues one at a time.

The figure of 47 million without insurance comes from the census department and is from 2008. That translates to 20% of the US population under 65. There is nearly universal coverage for the population over 65 because of Medicare. Most Americans get health insurance from their work, or the work of someone in their household. Unfortunately that excludes people who are under 65 and not working, people who own their own business, and people who are not eligible to receive health insurance from their employers. These people daily live with the awareness that an accident or serious illness can have catastrophic effects. It’s true that if you are uninsured and are injured, the emergency room of any hospital is required to treat you regardless of ability to pay, but that’s a long way away from being cured. According to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) the hospital is required to treat a life threatening emergency until you are stable or can be transported somewhere else you can be treated. They are not required to treat a serious, but not life threatening, emergency and can “release” you once you are stable even if you life was in danger when you came in.

Now, whenever we liberals talk about expanding health coverage conservatives scream that government run health care would be a disaster. But the funny thing is that since 1966 we’ve had virtually universal, government run health care for those 65 or older. It’s called Medicare. I work with the elderly and to a person they like how Medicare is run. When you turn 65 you are eligible to enroll in Medicare, but not required. You are free to not enroll and find health insurance on your own. Funny that I don’t know anybody who has done that. It’s also funny that we have universal health care for the elderly (who vote in high numbers) but not children (who can’t vote).

But this misses my main point. We are not dealing with is the outrageous cost of health care and how poorly we ration it. Do not be fooled: we currently ration health care but we do it by coverage. If two 40 year old men are diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes (formally called “Adult Onset Diabetes”) and only one of them has health insurance, their lives will become dramatically different. The one with health insurance almost certainly has access to medication (either oral or injectable), counseling to change your lifestyle, and methods to monitor your blood sugar level. The one without has none of this. The one without health insurance is looking at a dramatically shorter lifespan with the added benefits of possible blindness and gangrene in your feet.

The hard, cold reality is this: no matter what we do, we won’t ever be able to have everything we want as we want it as soon as we want it. We as a nation have to decide who will not receive all they want. Currently we ration by ability to pay (either privately or through insurance). I don’t believe this is the best way.

The further hard, cold reality is that no matter what we do, the death rate is still the same: one per person. We are all going to die one day and all the health care in the world isn’t going to stop that. The purpose of health care is not to allow us to live forever, but to allow us to live a good quality of life for as long as is practical. That said, there really does come a point where additional health care dollars are not doing that. For example, if a 95 year old man with terminal prostate cancer wishes to have aggressive chemotherapy treatment it probably doesn’t make sense. The chemo is likely to be unsuccessful, and even if it does stop the cancer, he is likely to be much sicker from the chemo. Even if the chemo is successful and doesn’t lead to additional bad side effects, he is still a 95 year old man who will likely die of something else within the next few years.

Under the current system, if he (or his family) demands aggressive treatment he will likely get it. His primary doctor can refuse to allow the chemotherapy but most doctors will go along with the patient or family if they are insistent enough. Also, if his heart stops beating (for any reason) the local paramedics will try through CPR to get it going again. Essentially there is little in the current system that will tell him it’s time to go. These are resources that are not being used to help people who will. The chemotherapy the 95 year old man receives takes away from the ability to provide preventative medicine for children and the poor. Unfortunately at this time there is nobody who is able to say no to the 95 year old man.

This isn’t about death panels. It is about recognizing that limited health care resources need to be allocated where they will do the most good for the most people. My father in law is 90 years old and is in good health. Recently I overhead a conversation he was having with a few friends. He was explaining that if there was a procedure that he needed and a 30 year old man needed the same procedure, the younger man should get it even if the younger man cannot pay for it. His friends were astonished and basically said that the 90 year old is entitled to whatever he can afford, and if the younger man can’t afford it, well that’s life. Frankly, I hope when I’m 90 I’ll have the same insight as my father in law.

At some point this discussion has to be part of our health care debate.

Family Update

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OK, I don’t do this often, but I wanted to post a quick note about happenings in my family. I decided to do this after I read a nice article about my nephew Chris in his local newspaper in Virginia. He turns 18 next month and has begun his senior year at my old high school, Woodbridge Senior High School. I hear rumor of a tattoo, but haven’t seen it yet.

In other exciting news, his older brother Nathan is marrying his longtime love, Makayla Nadeau. We’re all gathering in Rhode Island in November for the wedding (a short 55 days from today). Nathan is currently studying for a Ph.D. at Boston University (a short ride on the T from my old stomping grounds, Boston College).

These are exciting days.

The Health Care Debate is Making Me Sick

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This is no surprise but when Barack Obama was elected President I was one of the people who was heartened. I believed (and still believe) that our country can once again be one that cares about all of its people, not just the ones with oil wells. His decision to tackle health care makes me feel that this may be the time we have real reform.

It’s cliché but true to say that our current health care system is broken. Most of us have health insurance and if we’re under 65 years old we get it from our employer (or the employer of the head of our household). Employer provided health insurance started as just another perk to attract good employees, but it’s become a huge problem. It’s a problem for a couple of reasons:

  • This is the easiest problem to understand, but if you lose your job, you lose your health insurance. At the time when you’re awash in worries about how to pay your bills, you now have to worry about getting sick or injured. It’s true that many people can take advantage of COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) but that means you need to pay the entire cost of the policy (where before your employer paid most of it) and it expires 1 1/2 years (18 months) after it starts.
  • If you work for someone who doesn’t offer health insurance, it can be difficult to get it. Your employer is not required to offer it, though most large employers do for full time employees. But if you’re part time, if you work for a small company, or if your boss is a cheap bastard, you’re out of luck. You need to find insurance on your own.

I’ll admit to this, but I don’t have much sympathy for the insurance companies. They have to negotiate with large companies for big volume, but if you’re looking for individual coverage you have no way to negotiate. Not only do you pay big bucks for limited coverage, they can drop you for just about anything. And they can do it retroactively (this is called “recision”). Don’t believe me? Ask Robin Beaton. She is a retired nurse who was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2008 and needed a double mastectomy. Her insurer, Blue Cross approved the surgery, but days before the surgery they informed her that they weren’t going to pay for the surgery because she had a preexisting condition that she hadn’t disclosed. Turns out she had seen a dermatologist for acne and Blue Cross interpreted this as precancerous (teens all over the world may panic now). Since she “already had cancer” they weren’t going to pay for the mastectomy. Through the intervention of her congressman she was able to have the surgery 4 months later when the size of the tumor increased 2 to 3 centimeters. You can read more about this at Salon.com and CNN.

I knew when President Obama started talking about health care there would be some pushback from the Republicans but I can’t believe what I’m hearing. To quote Lily Tomlin, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up.” Here are some highlights:

  • Sarah Palin: Seniors and the disabled “will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”
  • The Club for Growth: The health care reform plan would set limits similar to the “socialized” system in Britain, where people are allowed to die if their treatment would cost more than $22,000.
  • Rush Limbaugh (7 August 2009): It’s right out of Adolph Hitler’s playbook.

There’s more but this gives you a flavor. The reality is that President Obama, and many of us, simply wish to provide adequate health care to all Americans. We don’t wish to devalue or decrease the health care of people who already benefit, but expand it to those who don’t. In the 1960s these same forces opposed Medicare calling it “socialized medicine,” but today it would be hard to find someone on Medicare who thinks he’d be better off without it.

Stop believing the lies of those who want to nothing else but to scare you.

Goodbye Michael

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So earlier today there was a funeral in Los Angeles; maybe you heard something about it. Michael Jackson, who died on June 25th, was laid to rest today in Forest Lawn Cemetery after a memorial service at the Staples Center.

It was a landmark event that marked the end of a brilliant but tragic life. Even people who didn’t like Michael have to admit he was a boy and man with incredible talent and genius for what would entertain people. I have to confess that my iPod has a few of his songs and I still enjoy listening to them. He was one of a kind.

Unfortunately he was also tortured by the very talent that made him famous. Much like his former father in law, Elvis Presley he appeared to use great quantities of pain killers to try to cure his emotional and spiritual pain. Elvis died at 42 and Michael at 50, and fans of both try to pass their deaths off as heart attacks.

I believe that the tragedy in Michael’s life is that he didn’t love himself as much as his fans loved him. It all seemed to work as long as he was the talented, youngest member of the Jackson 5. He was young, black, and very talented. But as he grew up he somehow became uncomfortable with the idea of being a black man. In the 1990s his skin began to turn white; he claimed he suffered from a condition called Vitiligo, a condition where patches of skin have no melanin and appear lighter than the rest. Most people of African descent either live with it or find ways to make the patches appear darker. Michael claimed that he lightened the rest of his skin to match the patches. Many health professionals doubt he ever had Vitiligo, and even those who believe him think he made a poor choice in how to treat it. It is generally assumed that he wanted to be white and “bleached” his skin to make him look white.

He also didn’t want to grow up. I personally don’t get this (and am much happier as an adult) but he embraced the innocence of being an eternal child. This ended up being the most controversial part of his life as he built a life around his own imagined childhood: a ranch he called Neverland from Peter Pan. He surrounded himself with children who he saw as playmates. Unfortunately the rest of the world saw these children as victims and him as a pedophile. His claims that they shared his bed as “innocent fun” sickened most of us and gave him a label he never fully understood.

I pray that in death he finally achieve the peace that eluded him in this life.

Goodbye Michael.

Habamas Cattus

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OK, my Latin is really rusty and I have no idea if I have the right declension but it’s supposed to say “We have a cat” and it’s a takeoff from the “Habamas Papam” that is declared when a new pope is selected.

Yes, the long wait is over, and we have a cat. Pictures will follow, but for now she’s a short hair tabby that we got from the San Diego Humane Society and SPCA. Once we finished all the house stuff it was time to look at getting a new cat. As you remember, our last cat, Kirby, died in March and we’ve been without a cat since. Yesterday there was a Humane Society Adoption Center at the Ocean Beach Dogwash and they had 9 kittens. They were given names, grouped by litter. Ours was named (no kidding) Mint Chocolate Chip and one of her siblings was named Neopolitan. There was another group of three called Morticia, Uncle Fester, and Lurch.

One of our first jobs is finding a new name for her: Mint Chocolate Chip was just a placeholder name. We’ve decided to move past the vacuum cleaner names (ie, Hoover and Kirby) and we are thinking of naming her Missy. Suggestions are always welcome and we’ll keep everyone posted.

We had a good night with her last night but I still have this fantasy of inventing a time machine and going back to ancient Egypt. There I can find the person who first decided to domesticate a nocturnal animal.