Category: Health

Swine Flu vaccine – better safe than sorry

Posted on by Suki

I noticed that Parmalee put in her ideas about the flu vaccine in last week’s newsletter, so I thought I’d write up some of my thoughts here.

Unlike a lot of parents I know in Santa Cruz, I am not anti-vaccine. Having read a fair amount about the devastating effects of many of the illnesses that we routinely vaccinate for, I was all for making sure my children didn’t get those. Frankly, there’s just no reason for polio to exist anymore. The WHO has been chasing it around India and Africa to try to suppress it once and for all, and until they do, I personally think that all children should be vaccinated against it.

I am, however, anti-vaccine-just-because-it’s-there. What I mean by that is that I know that the medical establishment has to make decisions more in terms of public health goals than in terms of individual health concerns. Public health decisions can be weird things: On the one hand, they are made for the general good. If a disease will kill tens of thousands, and the vaccine might sicken a hundred, the vaccine looks to be the better choice overall. If they crunch the numbers and find out that more people will be likely to get a particular vaccine in one form than in another, or at one time of life than another, they make public health policy decisions that don’t always make sense on an individual basis.

Case in point was the development of a hepatitis B vaccine. This was a great medical advance. I don’t know anyone personally (as far as I know) suffering from hepatitis B, but I do know someone who has hepatitis C, and it has been awful. It’s a slow, ugly disease. But it is one of those diseases that people largely don’t think about, the way they might worry about cancer or heart disease.

Hepatitis B is also a “lifestyle” disease. You can’t catch it walking down the street. You get it by exchanging bodily fluids with another human being, which generally happens either by sharing needles or sex.

Reasonably speaking, no child is likely to get hepatitis B. And speaking on the personal level, my own children’s personal risk of getting hepatitis B anytime soon is functionally zero. As is most kids’.

So why do they recommend hepatitis B vaccines for babies? Simply because when they crunched those public health numbers, they found that the only time in an average American’s life that s/he goes to the doctor in the right sequence of months to get the vaccine is, you guessed it, when they’re a baby. And from a public health point of view, that justifies giving babies a vaccine against something they have a functionally zero chance of getting.

This is why I’m not anti-vaccine, but I’m not vaccine-happy, either. I give my kids vaccines when I think there is a good reason to do it. Because of that, I held off on the hepatitis B till they were older, because I knew that as a responsible parent, I could handle bringing my kids in for multiple shots, and because I didn’t see any reason to stress out their little baby immune systems with another vaccine.

Every year we also get them flu shots. My son has asthma, and the flu is a major problem for asthma sufferers. Most people don’t realize that in a “good” flu year, 36,000 people die on average. The public health perspective is clear: a flu shot usually has no side effects; sometimes it causes pain, low fever. If a person has an undetected allergy to eggs, there can be severe symptoms. But for all others, the side effects are negligible. The side effects to getting influenza, however, are not negligible. People die from this disease.

Personally, I’ve never had influenza (note that “stomach flu” has no relationship to influenza, which does not cause vomiting). But when our son was small, our doctor recommended that I get the vaccine so that I couldn’t unwittingly bring the virus into his environment, even if I didn’t suffer symptoms. So I did. But lately, I have to admit that I’ve been more lax about it.

The H1N1 “swine” flu is causing a lot of us to think about our stance on vaccines, because it’s apparently much more virulent in children. (Flu is usually more deadly for the elderly.) So on the one hand, this virus is an unknown. It could just peter out and pose little threat to public health.

But I have to say that I agree with the government’s stance on this one. They are figuring that it’s worth the risk to vaccinate just in case this virus gets lethal. Just think if our government had a vaccine back in 1918, when fifty MILLION people died worldwide of a single flu virus. Consider how you would have felt burying members of your family, knowing that the government had chosen not to advise flu shots. Of course, this is all hypothetical because they had no such thing in 1918.

But here we are in 2009. We have such a thing. Our vaccines aren’t perfect, but they are a whole lot better than sitting back and watching fifty million, or even one million, people die. I know that a lot of people in Santa Cruz will choose not to vaccinate their children against this new flu. But the way I see it is this: the vaccine will not hurt the child. The flu might kill them.

That makes a pretty easy decision for me. I’m opting for a few aches and pains, and a lot of bellyaching on the part of my shot-hating daughter. I’ll go for the vaccine, and if this flu turns out to be nothing, well, as they say, “better safe than sorry.”

Those early years

Posted on by Suki

I was speaking with a mom on the phone. It was a business call of sorts, but since we know each other and she knows I’m sympathetic, she called while her kids were in the tub.

As you can imagine, our call was punctuated with instructions to her kids, the sounds of splashing, and kids asking for things.

“Oh, Suki,” she sighed. “It’s so much.”

I know exactly what she was talking about. One spring, either my daughter’s first spring when she was a baby or the next when she was a toddler, I went to do a search on the Internet. I had to figure out what was wrong with me.

Every evening when my husband got home from work, he’d find me collapsed on the couch, staring into space. I felt exhausted to the point that when I sat down, I could feel every nerve in my body throbbing. My muscles felt spent, like I was hiking a mountain every day.

I decided I had leukemia.

I made an appointment with my doctor, which is not an easy thing to do when you have two little kids. I told her how I had been feeling and said I wanted to get a blood test.

“I can get some blood work done,” she answered, “But I can already tell you what’s wrong: You have two children.”

As you may have noticed, I’m a pretty energetic person. I need a lot of what I call downtime, but in my case that means time to think and write, not time to veg. I actually hate sitting still for no reason. I’m impatient with any entertainment that doesn’t grip me, and always keep a book or my computer handy when I’m watching a movie. I never go to a concert without my notebook.

But when I had two small kids in the house, I pretty much achieved nothing. It was all I could do to get through a day. The only activity I scheduled every week for the kids was Music Together. My son went to preschool three mornings a week, and during that time I got household stuff done or went grocery shopping.

I remember realizing one day that my mother had gone through this with five kids: for fifteen years she had a child under five in her life, usually two! How did she do it?

I asked her and she said she didn’t really remember much. She said the main thing was that she had “no ambition except to get through the day.”

I remember it differently: I remember my mother as a whirlwind of activity. She was a piano teacher, she ran a cheese co-op with her friends, she played music at church.

I also remember that she let go of a lot: We didn’t have the world’s neatest house. (I remember a friend of mine saying, “I like going to your house — it’s messy and fun!”) She didn’t try to have anything like a “real” career. If she needed to go out, she would just send any remaining kids to go play with friends. Most of the time there was no need to pay a formal babysitter or make “playdates.”

In modern times, we expect a lot more from moms. Not only are they supposed to have a career of their own, but we expect them to set their kids up with a full schedule of activities and friends. And since everyone else has these scheduled lives, we aren’t around for each other as much as my mom’s friends were around for her.

And it’s exhausting. Researchers say that modern life is literally exhausting: Americans got on average ten hours sleep a night in the nineteenth century. Now we’re down below 7! Cars and highways have created so many more possibilities for us yet those possibilities end up making us miserable. If we can get our children Brazilian jujitsu classes with a master and we DON’T do it, aren’t we scarring them for life?

It’s all terribly exhausting. We moms sit around thinking that everyone else is thinking we’re layabouts. We sit around thinking that our husbands (or wives) think that we’re layabouts. We can’t remember simple things, like what we just went into the bathroom to get. We spend the same amount of time putting together our children’s fall schedules as the CEOs of major corporations spend making decisions on what the company should be doing this quarter.

Yet it seems so trivial, so not worth being exhausted over. We remember before we had kids, and the things that really deeply exhausted us. I’ll put my partial list here: climbing the cone of a volcano, writing a novel in six weeks, studying for excellerated Latin tests at Stanford, running Bay to Breakers. That all seems so real, so important.

Yet what we’re doing with our kids is real, and it is important. The under-five stuff is largely stuff they’re going to forget in a conscious sense. How many of us can remember our moms giving us a specific bath on a specific day when we were four? We might remember it if it’s the day that mom was giving us a bath and she burst into tears. Or if it was the day that mom was giving us a bath and there was an earthquake.

It’s real and important in a different sense. In a physical memory sense. Your under-fives are learning from you in a physical way right now. They are learning from your caresses. They are learning from how you dry them off with a soft towel. And yes, they’re learning when you get mad and yell at them, even though you knew that it wasn’t the Positive Discipline thing to do.

All of this is registering, and it’s forming how they face the world. We’re all making mistakes, but we’re also all being loving, caring moms as best we can. And that’s all we need our kids to know. Our under-fives are experiencing the world in a way that we can’t remember. But it’s very real.

And you are very important.

PIWA for a six-year-old

Posted on by Suki

In Growing Up in Santa Cruz this month I wrote an article about Positive Impact Wrestling Academy (PIWA). [Read the article here.] This organization is the brainchild of Reggie Roberts, the wrestling coach at Aptos High. When after years of working in substandard facilities he finally got to move his wrestlers into a well-equipped facility, he didn’t just sit back and relax. He decided to start a new academy that would welcome all students in the county – age 7 and up – to learn the positive messages of wrestling.

If you’re like me, wrestling doesn’t stir much “positive impact” in your memories. I don’t even know if my high school had a wrestling team. My main association with wrestling is the story that my mother tells: as a diminutive sorority girl at Cornell University in the fifties, she was often “set up” with wrestlers, because they were short and looking for shorter girls.

She married a six-footer.

But that was the fifties and this is now. I can’t tell you how tall Reggie is (I realize now that I think about it that I don’t often notice people’s heights, possibly because, like my mother, I look up to most people!), but I can tell you about his moral stature. Very high. The man is doing great things for teens.

And a six-year-old.

So here’s the story: I got an e-mail forwarded by the editor of GUISC asking if I’d like to write an article about PIWA. I’m pretty much game to write an article about anything, even if it’s something I know as much about as I know about wrestling. Why the heck not? I answered. I love to learn new things.

Reggie was eager for me to see the PIWA set-up in action. He was thrilled that they had such a great new space, and that alumni, parents, and students had come together to fundraise to buy the necessary equipment that the building bond didn’t fund. And he wanted me to see the teenagers at work, learning wrestling but also learning life skills.

I had both of my kids for the summer, so I dragged them along. They’ve gone to a few interviews this summer, always with good results. (See my interview with Gwynne of local band Zunzun — my kids got to go to a performance for that interview — bonus!)

My son was a bit bored with all the wrestling talk, but my daughter was definitely interested. Reggie invited her out on the mat to learn some moves, but she said no.

I think a few days ago I wrote about not listening to your children….

Within a few days, she was asking about going to the wrestling academy. Life happened, and then today we finally got the chance to drop in. Reggie had said that during the summer some younger kids had been attending, but today there were a group of high school students and… my six-year-old.

Right now they’re doing Judo, so my daughter put on the gi that we’d bought our son when he was six and taking tae kwon do. (That didn’t last. He was constantly getting freaked out by the big room and breaking out in tears!) We went over to Aptos High and without any hesitation, she jumped right in. The instructor, JT from Aptos Martial Arts, and Reggie did stretches. She did stretches. They did somersaults. She did somersaults. They did handstands and rolls. She did something like handstands and nutty six-year-old rolls.

Halfway through the class, I texted my husband: “Our daughter is amazing.”

It just blew me away: Remember, this is a child who can’t follow instructions in a classroom for more than five minutes till she’s had it with instructions and she starts to dance on the table. This is a child who gets annoyed any time someone tells her she’s doing something wrong. A child who gets angry and frustrated if she doesn’t do something exactly right.

Yet there she was, clearly not doing anything much exactly right, having the time of her life…for two solid hours! Since no other small kids were there, when they went into partner exercises, one of the teenagers got on her knees and practiced throws with my daughter. It was adorable to see a six-year-old trying to lift a hefty sixteen-year-old over her shoulder. She didn’t just pretend, though: She was really trying.

The paragraph two before this one is actually not completely fair to her: She doesn’t always respond in those ways to being in classes. She only does that stuff when she isn’t engaged, when the teacher hasn’t figured out how to draw her in and give the exercise meaning. For Reggie, that part of coaching is what it’s all about. I’m sure he coaches wrestling moves in a proper way, but really, what difference does it make to me? What he’s really doing out there is right there in the name:

Positive Impact.

She came home and told her daddy; “And at the end, they all applauded for me.” I think that’s all I have to say.

Learning to live with our biology

Posted on by Suki

Someone forwarded a New York Times article about successful dyslexics to an e-mail list I’m on. The article is about the high proportion of successful entrepreneurs who are dyslexic.

According to the article, it’s likely that these people are successful because of and/or in spite of their disability. One of the people featured, Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko’s, says, “I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence as a kid. And that is for the good. If you have a healthy dose of rejection in your life, you are going to have to figure out how to do it your way.”

That’s an example of succeeding in spite of your disability. You get so energized by people saying “you can’t do it” that you know that you have to do it.

Another comment he made is telling in another way: “I get bored easily, and that is a great motivator,” he said. “I think everybody should have dyslexia and A.D.D.”

That’s an example of embracing what others see as a disability and figuring out how to use it to your advantage. Again from the article: “One reason that dyslexics are drawn to entrepreneurship… is that strategies they have used since childhood to offset their weaknesses in written communication and organizational ability — identifying trustworthy people and handing over major responsibilities to them — can be applied to businesses.”

This way of looking at a disability goes hand in hand with what I think is a good parenting strategy. Instead of working on “fixing” children, I think parents and other caregivers would be much better off thinking of their job as a sort of helper or guide. We can watch our children and see where they will need to compensate. Even children without disorders have strengths and weaknesses, and as parents we can guide them to places where their strengths shine and also help them find ways to take advantage of their weaknesses.

This approach becomes all the more important if your child has an actual disability holding them back. I once met a woman who’d been born with spina bifida. She was born into a hard-working, no-nonsense farm family, so instead of pitying her or coddling her, she told me, they figured out how to help her do what she could do. Her father constructed a cart that she’d strap her bottom half into, and she’d pull herself around the farm on her hands.

Disabilities of the body are one thing, but people seem to have a different point of view on disabilities of the mind. Parents faced with a child who behaves unusually — is unusually energetic, unusually moody, or whatever — seem to react differently than if they had a child who couldn’t walk or a child who had a hereditary disease with purely physical symptoms. Our society seems to have a general sense of shame about disabilities of the mind, and need to normalize the children rather than let them see if they can adapt their biology to the world they were born into.

I think articles like this are a good reminder that before we had drugs to alter the way our brains work, we had strategies. And these strategies are something we shouldn’t throw out the window just because we have chemicals that make the job easier.

Each of us is born with our particular biology, the way our physical self works. Our brains are part of this. I remember the triumph I felt the day I was reading a book about misdiagnosis of brain differences as disorders, and I got to the part about “reactive hypoglycemia.” I had never heard those terms put together, but I knew exactly what it was. One of our children, if not fed a constant stream of calories at least every two hours, has complete emotional and mental breakdowns. A child who can do logic and reason on a full belly becomes a completely illogical beast when he’s hungry. It’s not crankiness — it’s such an incredible personality change that we were worried that he had something serious going on.

Turns out all we had to do was stuff him with tofu.

More difficult is the child whose general physiological make-up makes him harder to deal with: more volatile, more energetic, more creative, more difficult. That’s the situation we were presented with when we got our second child. I’d be lying if I said that we never talked about drugs, but I think that in a way the “she needs drugs” conversation is our way of relieving the stress of raising an intense child. The fact is, at some point in her life she needs to be able to live in her body. If it gets to the point that she really can’t function, that’s where modern drug therapy comes in. But if she’s too energetic to deal with going to a school where they sit still much of the day and fill in bubbles with number two pencils? Somehow I don’t think that drugs are the answer.

The answer right now is for her to learn to live in her body and interact with the world as it allows her to. If we drugged her now, at what point would she go off the drugs and learn to deal with who she is? From my point of view, it was best for Paul Orfalea that he had to deal with it early. He learned that he would never be a college English professor, an electrician, or a mid-level manager. He found entrepreneurship as a way to use his skills, and to use his disabilities as abilities.

There are children who are truly suffering and for whom drug therapy is the most humane and effective way to help them. But most difficult kids are just that: they’re difficult and they’ve got to learn to deal with it. Twenty years from now when my daughter’s boy(or girl)friend says, Sometimes she is just infuriating!, I’ll answer, I know exactly what you mean. Then we’ll sit back and watch that infuriating, energetic, creative person spin her magic.

And we’ll applaud.

Don't listen to your kids

Posted on by Suki

This morning our daughter came in “to cuddle” sometime long before seven a.m. In our household, this is against the rules. On weekends, she needs to wait till 7 a.m. before she can interrupt her parents’ beauty sleep.

Groggily, her daddy said, It’s not seven o’clock yet. Go back to bed.

She went away. It was like a miracle, but we were too tired to care.

Later she came back. It was after seven and I invited her in to cuddle. As is our custom, I started to talk about our day. I covered the farmer’s market, then got to the part I knew she’d be really excited about.

“Then you and Daddy are going to have some special time together.”

“I don’t want to go with Daddy. I don’t like Daddy. I want to stay with you.”

Before I had children, I probably would have considered that a statement of truth, something I should listen to and consider. After I had my rather more easygoing son, I might have thought, well, I should consider that it might just be his mood. But now that I’ve had my daughter, I’ve realized that there is one statement that just doesn’t make any sense: Listen to the children!

Kids are mercurial. They have motives that make no sense to adults. They see a goal and get there in what we would consider the most obviously ridiculous way. Sometimes they say things with great emphasis that they will deny saying later. Sometimes they say things that actually mean something quite different than you might expect.

Now I’m talking to those of you who think you should always take what your child says as a true expression of their feelings: You may make a habit of believing that everything your child says has some sort of meaning that you can get from it. You may be thinking: Perhaps my daughter has deeply buried feelings of antipathy to her father. Perhaps she really needs her mother on this day. Perhaps it will hurt her deeply that I don’t take her feelings seriously.

But here’s the reality. She said, “I don’t like Daddy,” and I said, “OK, honey” in a non-committal way. By the time it was time for her and her father to leave, she had forgotten all about it. What she said probably had meaning at the time, but it really didn’t mean something the way an adult would mean something. It meant something like, “Right now I hate you but in five minutes you will be my very best friend,” the way that kids have been doing with each other for eons.

I’m guessing that there is some deep, genetic meaning to this behavior. I bet someone smarter than me could figure it out. But all I know is this: if I just say, “OK, honey” in a non-committal way, that opens up the rest of the day to happen as it will.

If I try to convince her to change her opinion, or if I act on that firmly expressed opinion, that’s when the trouble starts.

I’m not saying that I don’t listen to my children, really. I do listen to them, and I do consider whether what they’re saying has any greater meaning in their lives. But frankly, so much of what they say just happens to be a fleeting thought. Some months ago, my son thought it was the most important thing in life to be able to buy a computer from One Laptop Per Child. He was obsessed with it! It was so fabulously important that he be part of this great connecting of humanity!

He never did get that laptop, and he has long since forgotten it. Other things have become the Most Important Thing, and perhaps by the time he wakes up tomorrow, something else will take its place.

I remember a time when I was a child that The Most Important Thing was that I would get a horse. Never mind that I was terrified of horses, that the only times I’d been on them they’d never done what I asked. That I had no place to keep a horse, and that I had no interest in hauling myself to a stable every day to take care of a horse. I Had To Have A Horse.

I remember this clearly. I don’t remember what came before or after that thought, just that one day the thought was gone, and I had other absolutely important goals that had to be taken care of Right Then. No negotiation, no reasoning. There was a time in my life when fleeting feelings were paramount.

So I do honor my children’s feelings… sometimes. I try to take care not to hurt them by openly rejecting their feelings. I have developed (probably modeled on my mother) a sort of casual, disinterested tone. “Oh, really?” I might say. “That’s an interesting idea.”

If it’s something they’re truly passionate about, it will last for more than a minute.

FYI: My daughter did go with her father to have special time. She returned happy, full of stories, and not at all interested in cuddling with me. Right Then And There there were some sowbugs that had to be caught. It was The Most Important Thing.

Don’t you understand anything, Mommy?

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