So I thought it was all due to me packing on weight, and not exercising much. But still, something was weird with my breathing, and I felt like somebody was sitting on my chest a lot. But then I really was out of shape. My mother suggested that I had high blood pressure. Nope, not the problem.

Then I found that I became breathless immediately when walking around in the cold. So obviously cold air doesn’t agree with me. And there was this feeling of somebody sitting on my chest that was certainly not usual but not really alarming as well. And I thought that I was short of breath because I was so out of shape. And I often cough when I smell something irritating like cigarette smoke, or perfume, or chilies. Nothing unusual there.

And over time I just got used to it. When walking outside for errands in the winter I just walk very, very slowly. I feel like a fool, mind you, overweight with all my bags, walking at a snail’s pace but at least then I didn’t have to be afraid to keel over from lack of breath. And when somebody is smoking on the street I change to the other side. And when somebody is smoking on the train platform (it’s not allowed but people do it anyway), I go to the other end. I got really used to this until finally I watched myself and realized that my life is really defined by these things. Changing sides three times on a five minute walk because there is somebody smoking in front of you is not normal behavior. Walking at a snail’s pace wheezing when you’re only 43 is not normal either.

Then I started jogging. It was almost exactly a year ago. Since I felt so ridiculous about it, and since I knew I can’t stand to exercise in the cold air I started jogging up and down the annex corridor. Yes, it does feel a bit weird, and yes, that corridor has only ten meters but still. You know those overweight people that you see huffing and puffing while being all red in the face? The ones where you can tell that they just decided to take up jogging after spending years on the couch eating potato chips? I knew I would be one of them so I started to run in the safety of my own home. That has the added bonus that I can stop at any time if I don’t feel up to it. That hasn’t happened often but still.

So after a few months of running I was still short of breath when walking up the hill to the grocery store, and I thought, “This is odd. I’m in better shape now than ever, so why is it so hard to breathe?” It isn’t always hard to breathe, mind you, when I’m sitting on the couch in front of the TV everything is peachy. But it was odd.

Then I taught this knitting class, and after one class I had to dash to the train station. There was a student whom I knew to be going in the same direction, and I thought we could walk together. And then she said that she had to walk very slowly because it was cold, and she has exercise induced asthma. I had never heard of something like that before but there are actually people who mostly get their asthma attacks when exercising, or walking uphill, especially in the cold. That was really interesting. Did you know there was a thing like that?

So I went to the library and got some books on asthma. And there it was: an asthma attack can of course be wheezing, and gasping for air but it can be as mild as having a coughing fit (throw a chili pepper in the frying pan and watch me), or the feeling that somebody is sitting on your chest. Duh.

So I went back to my doctor. He did the whole routine again: blood check, cardiogram, ultrasound, spirometry to check whether the lungs work properly, and everything came back normal. Since he is a cardiologist he looked at my heart twice, and everything was fine. I was slowly getting frustrated, there was obviously something wrong but all my tests showed that I’m perfectly healthy.

Then he did a spirometry while doing a stress ECG, and wham. I knew I’d feel lousy but I went for it. A stress ECG is not a pleasant experience. You’re taken to your physical limit so you always feel like you’re going to die even when you’re in good shape. So I sat on that ergometer pedaling away until I had the feeling I couldn’t breathe any longer. One of the weirdest things was that sensation that my muscles, and my heart were perfectly fine. I could have pedaled much harder, and my heart was far from beat. I only started wheezing, and gasping for air. The nurse asked me how I felt, if there was any pressure on my chest, and all I could do was nod vigorously. Then she fetched a doctor to watch over me while I finished the test. It’s an interesting feeling, working out like a maniac, topless, while hooked up to two machines with two people watching you intently because they’re afraid that you’ll have a heart attack or something.

So. Now I officially have asthma. When I told a friend she said, “Only you can manage to be happy about having asthma.” But that’s not the point. I’m not happy about having asthma, I’m happy that I have an official diagnosis with the possibility of treatment instead of the constant feeling that something is wrong. And I never could be entirely sure if I were a hypochondriac or maybe dropping dead the next minute.

After the first elation about the diagnosis and the shiny new inhaler, though, I started realizing that, yes, I now have a chronic illness. And while using the inhaler is great because for the first time in years I could just run without feeling like breathing through a tiny little straw; it doesn’t make the asthma go away. There is no pill to cure it, there is only better days, and worse days.

Still, at least now I know what I’m dealing with. And you know, I told you so the whole time. What I learned from this is this: when you know there is something wrong go to the doctor, and then go again, and then tell him, “I know you didn’t find anything last time but every time I walk uphill I feel like somebody’s sitting on my chest.” and then get some books, and talk to people, and go back to the doctor again. Because if I hadn’t thought that he wouldn’t find anything anyway I could have gotten that diagnosis far earlier.

But this year I thought I’d give it a try again. My one (not only but most important) goal for this year is:

Lose 10 kilos of weight or more.

I know. Pathetic, boring, and unexciting goal.

I thought I’d do it properly this time, think about my goal in advance, make it public, hold myself accountable, and such. Well, I did state it in December, I told my husband that this time I was adamant about losing weight, and that I would start January 1st. And I did. I made a few rules for myself because this time I am actually going on a kind of “diet”, and I did pretty well for about, um, two weeks. I will keep on trying, though, because defeat is not an option.

Now you might think why is my weight such a big deal? Well, for one I am heavier than I have ever been in my life. That would be quite okay if I hadn’t gained weight steadily for the past three years. While I might resign myself to be a somewhat overweight person, I can’t resign myself to be a really fat person in the near future.

I did lose weight between 2005 and 2007. My lowest weight in the past years has been about 70 kilos in the summer of 2007. this year on January first I weighed 89.9 kilos. And there were days when my weight was even higher. I could just see myself go over 100 in a few years. (And just for comparison that means that I went from a BMI of 23.1 to one of 29.7 which is quite overweight.)

Of course I had thought that if I just lived a bit better – getting enough sleep, exercise, and eat real food – that my weight might just drop by itself but it didn’t. Even adding running to the mix didn’t do it.

So after a year where I focused on becoming a happier person, I know want to focus mainly on becoming a slimmer person. My rules are:

1. No alcohol but on special occasions. (Like my husband’s birthday and such. I found throughout this month that there were quite a few special occasions which meant an average of 1 1/1 beers per week.)
2. No sweets but an occasional piece of dark chocolate.
3. No crackers.
4. No potato chips.
5. No grazing all afternoon or evening.

At the moment I just don’t buy any foods that I tend to binge on. After almost a month of this I did buy some gummy bears for my son again but I don’t get to eat any of them. I used to store some snack foods in my studio for afternoon snacks but I cleared them all out. Now I have to go to the kitchen, get myself an afternoon snack, and that’s it.

And yes, I feel a bit defeated because I need to do this, and when I succeed I want to do it for yet another year so that in the end I might just feel like myself again. Also I want to be able to wear dresses in the summer without my thighs rubbing against each other, and I want to be able to run without my knees hurting. I’m fine so far but of course all this extra weight strains my joints.

I’ll be using this blog to hold myself accountable but I won’t turn this into a diet blog. Just know that as of today I’m weighing 88.9 kilos, on kilo down. When I started this I had told myself that if I didn’t lose at least a kilo by mid-February I would have to join Weight Watchers.

While I’m happy to have lost any weight at all, I also found myself getting lax with my rules after about three weeks. One reason was that in the beginning my husband also didn’t drink any alcohol. But then he went back to his glass of wine in the evening. One reason is that I am obviously not able to stick to any rules for any amount of time. Well, that means I have to forgive myself and do better today. And tomorrow. And the day after that. For the next few years.

I just have to be all “only today” about it, otherwise I’ll be driving myself crazy.

I still long to be a person who just eats, and that’s it but so far it hasn’t worked.

As I told you last month I made a bunch of resolutions. Those were:

1. Go to bed on time.
2. Pick up after myself.
3. Write 500 words of fiction at least six times a week.
4. Think about the things I love about my family, students, and friends.

1. And again, I didn’t manage to go to bed on time very often but still I have slept more than the months, or years, before. I find that I have to cancel watching DVDs most evenings. In order to get enough sleep it’s a very good idea for me to go to bed very, very early, and just read a bit. That’s seriously cutting into my knitting time but still, every single day I manage to sleep enough or nearly enough I feel happier the next day.
2. I’ve been doing very well on the “picking up after myself front, and that makes me happier as well. There are still heaps and piles in some areas but I’m getting there. And I manage to do a bit more housework which my husband appreciates very much.
3. I did write 500 words of fiction (or sometimes more) about five times a week. It seems that there’s always something coming up, and that six times a week is very hard to accomplish. But still I have several thousands of words more of my story than I had before January. It’s great.
4. I didn’t do that well on the “thinking about the things I love about my family, students, and friends”-front. Especially with my son I got decidedly cranky. But I can say that his sleeping is getting better. It did take a bit of a threat, though, I have told him that he is not to come to me at all until morning. Since he wants me to leave both his and my bedroom door open all night so I can hear him I told him if he so much as calls me throughout the night I will not only close the door but lock it. Apparently that was just the thing it took. You might want to wish me luck, we’re currently working on the “debate everything your mother says”-issue.

The other thing that makes me happy is that I’m starting to lose weight. Well, to be honest I’m down by 100 grams over the last month but still that’s something because over the last two years my weight has been climbing up every single month. Losing weight is something I hope to achieve through becoming a happier person but I’d say the goal of happiness is much better than the one of getting slim.

The thing that makes me even happier than losing a hundred grams is that I might be starting to exercise again. I did some yoga on Sunday (very slow, very easy yoga that made me realize how much out of shape I am), and yesterday I did my very first ever “Couch to 5k”-workout. See, I’m decidedly not a runner. I’m not built for it, not even when I’m a normal weight and fit, and I have never been able to run for any length of time. But when I was thinking about what kind of person I want to be I found that I’m really envious of people like my husband who just put on their running shoes and then go off jogging through the fields for an hour or so. And then I thought about what Mel had started some time ago, and then I read Kris’ post about how she managed to run a marathon, and that got me motivated.

I didn’t know whether I should talk about it here because all I’ve done so far is alternately walk and jog for a total of thirty minutes once, and I did it at home just staying in one spot (and I know that’s not quite the same as moving forward while doing it, but trust me I did work out and I can feel every single muscle in my lower body right now). I’m not about to go out on the street with this anytime soon, and I’ll never run a marathon for sure, ever. But still. I feel pretty amazing having tried out something new. I plan to do the next session of walking and running tomorrow in the morning.

So this will be the fifth resolution in my “happiness project”, exercise three times a week or more.

My first reaction? Hahaha! Me? And then I thought, well, I’m not exactly stupid, but then I thought of all the really intelligent people I know like a friend’s husband who is a genius working in AI research, and people I met in university with a mind so sharp they seemed to cut themselves, and everybody else. But then this nice knitter told me a bit more of it (and with every trait she described I thought “That’s my husband!” and “That’s my husband too!” and “But that’s me!”), and she recommended some books to me which I immediately bought and read. One of the books was full of the life stories of gifted people, most of them hadn’t known for ages. And while I certainly have never learned a language in three months, or done anything that remarkable until reading those books I had operated under the common prejudices that gifted people are people who wear glasses, are a bit awkward in social settings and get high grade in math and science.

Well, I do wear glasses but my grades were never really good, all of my teachers were seriously disappointed of me because “she could have done so well if only she had applied herself”. She, on the other hand, felt that she had applied herself as well as she could, but never got it quite right. For all my life I have been suffering from having this great potential. I know that this is a luxury problem but it does not feel good, the knowledge that you could have if only you had done things different or maybe if you could have turned yourself into a different person.

So, after a couple of weeks where I felt that the things that are wrong with me, the things that make me stand out, and never fit in anywhere, and that make me say the wrong things, and forget to smile at people, and that make me jump to conclusion, and talk in a way that people go “Huh?” all the time, that these things might be due to my IQ. Sounds weird, doesn’t it?

I went here and took an IQ-test. I felt very nervous that day, my son had woken me up early, I was seriously sleep-deprived, and also had hormones that made me feel like I was thinking my way through pea-soup-like fog. I went to the test and there were only five other test-subjects, all of them male and looking as if they were studying math or engineering. The guy guiding us through the test was wearing a suit, and I immediately disliked him.

Then came the test. There were only four parts to it, some language, some math, some where you had to rotate cubes in your head, you know that kind of test. I found the language tasks quite easy, I had the feeling that I should have taken the spatial orientation test a bit more serious (typical for me all I could think about was that I wanted to get out and drink something at that point), and the math tasks made me realize that my daily life doesn’t include any math whatsoever. I was too slow to finish that one in time.

When the test was over I was certain that my score would be too low but I knew that I can solve this kind of problems if only I can think straight. After the test a couple of us went out to have a beer, and there we met a few Mensa members. And that was really interesting. All of those people were testified gifted. That was about the only thing they had in common because they were very, very different, but: You know how annoying it is when you go to eat something in a restaurant as a group? How people always take ages to order and can’t decide? Not with these people. I have never seen a group of people that big order that fast. And not one of them did the, “What are you getting? Do you think I should get the duck? Does anybody know if the duck is good here? Really? You’re getting the pork? I don’t know, maybe I only eat a salad.”-thing. None.

There was a scene with the waiter at the restaurant – and I won’t bore you with the details – that was quite funny, and usually this would have been one of these moments when I burst out laughing, and then everybody looks at me with that “what’s funny there?”-look, and then I try to explain, and then nobody gets it but with these people the waiter went away, and every single person at the table burst out laughing. They were all very much awake, had a spark in their eyes, and don’t like small talk.

I know that a lot of people consider standardized IQ-tests to be irrelevant, and I know that the only thing they can tell you something about is the exact same kind of cognitive intelligence that they measure but still this meeting together with the information from the books I have read point me towards the conclusion that having a very high cognitive intelligence might make one different enough from most people that you don’t fit in.

It doesn’t make you smart in every situation. It might make you perform very badly on tasks that are too easy, for example. You might have problems with people, you might abhor small talk, or you might do well, and have no problems whatsoever. It usually makes you quite stubborn, quite independent, relatively exhausting, and in some cases so perfectionist that you never finish anything.

Not to leave you hanging, I got my test-results, my IQ (when sleep-deprived and feeling dumb as a brick) is in the top 1% range of the population. Usually I don’t tell that to people because when I do I feel like boasting, which Im not. I don’t feel particularly smart. I’m pretty confused most of the time, I often don’t get things, and the knowledge of it makes my unfulfilled potential weigh even heavier on me. And while I’ve always known that my mind often works really fast that doesn’t keep it from drawing the wrong conclusions very fast too. I either get things right away or they never really stick. Also I’m still the same person I was before the test.

First I thought I shouldn’t tell anyone. Then I thought, wait a minute, I talk about things here like thinking I might be bipolar or having ADD, and now that I find out that I’m gifted I don’t tell? Now that I have found out that the thing that makes me feel different and not fitting in is not something that’s wrong with me at all, now I won’t tell anyone? What kind of a reaction is this?

Well, it’s understandable especially when you’re living in Germany. You get the “So, you’re good at math, that doesn’t make you special.”-response quite often. Not that I’m good at math. Or that look that now you have told someone they think that you feel superior. It does get worse when you tell somebody that you think your child might be gifted too. I told it before, my son is bored in school. I remember starting school, excited to learn something after all, and then I waited for it to become really interesting and challenging. And waited. (It did become interesting when I did my dissertation but then I never got my PhD. Failure again.)

People here in Germany mostly don’t get what the problem is. They think you’re just a bit smarter (and in their heads they think “Well, if you’re so smart why aren’t you doing better in life then?”). For me the problem has shrunk since I know the reason for all this feeling weird. It also helped me because now I know that I’m not alone, there are others like me out there, and there are ways to find them. One of those ways has been the internet, I have this feeling that there are quite a few really smart people out there writing blogs.

When I finally took the courage to tell my parents my mother said (slightly bored), “Of course, we always knew. That’s why we had you start school early.” Of course? So why did nobody ever tell me? All I ever got was the “We are so disappointed that you’re not doing better.”-look. Together with the “It’s so easy for you, don’t think you’re something special.”-talk. And then my mother said, “Well, since you’re not in academic research it doesn’t make a difference anyway.”

To all those parents out there who might have a gifted child, and who don’t want their child to know so that it doesn’t feel different from the others I say: Please tell them. Your child doesn’t need you to tell them they’re different. They can’t hide it anyway. It’s just good to know the reason why one is different. It’s not a deficit, it’s an asset. One can have a lot of fun with a brain that works well and fast. Really. And trying not to set yourself apart won’t work. Trust me, I have tried all my life.

My husband has been fighting the flu with a vengeance, and successfully, until last night. Now he’s the one spending the day in bed, which I did yesterday. While I feel much, much better today, I still would like to spend a bit of time in bed today for recovery purposes. Which I will, just after I have cleaned up the kitchen, done the monthly taxes, and have written this post.

My son is the one who feels worst right now. After a week of flu, fever, coughing, not being able to sleep because of coughing, and then finally feeling just a tiny bit better on Thursday; he has been feeling worse again. Starting Friday afternoon, of course, when all doctors are closed.

After a bit of debate my husband and I diagnosed him with a secondary bacterial infection and gave him a bit of penicillin that we have had around. So far it’s not working. It will be big fun when, on Monday, I take him to the doctor again and tell that I thought it was a good idea at the time. (Don’t worry, we’re not foolish, it’s a completely new and unopened bottle of children’s penicillin, still fresh, and there’s enough to give it to him for five days. Chances are that the doctor would have given some to him anyway, only I think it should be working faster.)

Also, my father comes to stay overnight tonight. I’m still contemplating how to make him comfortable while avoiding actual contact. I don’t want him to get sick too. My mother-in-law offered to have him sleep in her guest room. Maybe that’s the best solution.

And? Thank God my mother-in-law is still feeling well because she has to babysit again next week.

I didn’t want to sound all whiny, this is just to tell you why I have been almost incommunicado for the past days. I hope to be well again tomorrow or the day after, and will send both my son and husband to the doctor tomorrow morning.

And then I found out that yesterday was also Love Your Body Day. On the one hand I think that we may have just a few too many blogger holidays (Talk Like a Pirate Day, anyone? Towel Day?) on the other hand, of course, every day is a good day to love your body. In fact since this body might be the only one we have we’d better treat it with respect and love. One of the commenters to my last post called her body a “heap of cells” and I felt quite uneasy about this.

I know it took me quite some time to learn to love my body but it was really worth it. Yes, I am overweight (that’s a fact) but I don’t really feel that there is something to hide. From the inside my body feels good, it’s strong, it’s curvy, my husband likes to look at me, and while I see that it’s aging and far from perfect I can tell you that I felt fatter, less fit, and less lovable at the age of twenty than I feel now.

Then all I could see when I looked in the mirror was a heap of “problems”: butt too big, shoulders too narrow, thighs too big, arms too skinny, waist too narrow. When I dressed I thought about things to hide all the time.

I did learn this from my mother. When she speaks of her body she only speaks about the things she doesn’t love about it. She taught me to wear clothes like tents so that people wouldn’t realized that my bottom part is bigger than the rest. Only later did I find out that the tents actually covered everything so that I looked equally big all over. Only later have I learned that there are indeed people who like women to be on the curvy side. And I learned that I prefer real women over coat hangers every time.

I went to the sauna and the pool and looked at other women’s bodies. Look at them in a friendly way, not the “Look at her, if I were looking like that I wouldn’t wear a …”-mindset. Study other women and find something beautiful about each and every one of them. And look at myself in the mirror every day and learn to love me as I am.

I can tell you that your butt doesn’t get smaller if you hate it. And that there is no magic number on the scale that makes you feel beautiful. I have felt fat at every weight between 57 and 84 kilos. And I have felt more beautiful when I was heavier and older than when I was thinner and younger.

I did write about feeling fat back in June so I won’t do it here again, (instead I’m shamelessly pointing you there). So, let’s all step in front of the mirror, take a look at ourselves, smile (genuine smile, please, no faking) and say, “I love my body. I look fabulous!” Repeat until you really mean it.

There are two things that I want to write about today. First I want to remind you that next week on October 15 there is Blog Action Day. On that day more than 7,000 bloggers will all write about the same topic to raise consciousness. Last year it was about the environment, and this year it will be about poverty. (I want to thank Lia for bringing Blog Action Day to my attention again.)
Unlike most parent bloggers this month I won’t be writing about elections. Not that I’m not interested in them, there’s just that I’m only watching this whole circus show from afar. I do hope though that every single one of you who can vote has been doing so in the US, and will be doing so in Canada. As for my German readers I’m sorry to say that in the last county election where I live only 60% of those who could have voted actually did. Shame on those who didn’t!
I guess that means I’m writing about three things after all. Well, the main thing I had wanted to bring to your attention this month is Alzheimer and Dementia research. As most people I hadn’t thought about these things at all until Terry Pratchett, one of my very favorite authors of all times got diagnosed with an early form of Alzheimer’s and decided to tell the world about it. Having a disease like that still can stigmatize you. Not much is known about the disease, and how to treat it, mostly it’s just assumed that some people get a bit weird in the head when they’re old, and all you can do is hope that you’re not one of them.
As most of us, though, I know people with Alzheimer’s or dementia, people in my family, people who because of their disease turned into mere shadows of their former selves. As most of us, I know people who tried to take care for these people at home, caretakers who had to lock their parents in and treat them like little children to get them through the day. And who often in the end had to make the decision to have them move into a nursing home because they couldn’t do it any more on their own.
There is a lengthy interview with Terry Pratchett on-line if you’re interested in more information. One thing that Mr. Pratchett said moved me the most:

It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer’s you are an old fart. That’s how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.

I don’t know how to make people with Alzheimer’s feel less alone but talking about it might be a good start.
And because talking about matters of social justice is at least a better starting point than doing nothing, here is the list of posts we collected in the parenting part of the blogging community. (And this might be as good a place as any to remind everybody that every person can send in a link at any time pointing towards a post he or she has read or written. You can find my e-mail address on my “About”-page.)
Ladies and gentlemen, the list:

Alejna with September 12, 2001
Border Explorer with Everything for Wall Street; Nothing for Main Street
Chani with Financial Smackdown, My Last Sarah Post, and Steal This Meme: Politics
Daily Kos with Amazing: Obama helped a stranded stranger
Denguy with Fear
Emily with Saving the planet for Starbucks customers of the future
Ewe Are Here with Busy Would Be and Understatement
Girlgriot with Speechless and Supermoms and super colliders
Holly with I couldn’t hold it any longer and Pennies for peace
JCK with IMC project: Saving the lives of malnourished children
Jen at A2EATWRITE with How to vote/how to buy a car
Jen with Good morning America, how are you?
Jennifer at Faking It with To Support of not to support, that is not the question, as I see it
Julie with How you can help recent hurricane and tropical storm victims
Lia with Age And Ageism and Give Some Thought
Leslie with The most problemmatic of times
Los Angelista’s Guide to the Pursuit of Happiness with Shiny and Bright Sarah Palin
Mad with Losing at the waiting game
Magpie with Ways to Make a Difference
Mary Murtz with Unfriended? Defaced? What?
Mir Kamin on Blogher with Men and Women: Becoming more alike makes ‘em more different. What?
Mother Woman with Manning the Phones
Rebecca with That creepy obsession with virginity and In defense of a silver tongue
Red Stapler with Why I am voting for Barack Obama
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee with Dear Mr. Harper
The Ascent of Humanity with Construction and the Glass Factory
The American Prospect with Everybody Calm Down, Obama is hitting back
The Buddha Diaries with A Fistful of Bills
Under the Overpasses with The Sky is Falling–really! and The View from Down Here

The considerate people who read and sent links:
Alejna
Thailand Chani
Painted Maypole

And as always you should check out what Mad and Jen have to say this month, too. Without them there wouldn’t be such a thing as a Just Post Roundtable.

I had the child, and, as a lot of you know already, there still were hormones. breast-feeding hormones that make you not only a bit dumb, and forgetful, no, you also start to burst into tears for no apparent reason. (On the other hand I was like that when pregnant too.) Top that with serious sleep deprivation, and you end up with a woman quite different from the one I was before.

Still, a year later, breast-feeding was over, I was sleeping a bit more – not enough of course – and so I waited for myself to turn normal again. You know, with a functioning brain. One that didn’t forget everything. I felt foggy and mushy, as if I had to make do with a blunt mind. Since it clearly couldn’t be the hormones anymore, I blamed it on lack of sleep.

I already told you that I went to my doctor because I started to have my period about every three weeks which is a bit too often, and that I started to take medicine for it. Agnus castus to be precise with a helping of Vitamin B for additional help with PMS. Well, imagine my surprise when, after a while, my brain went out of its foggy, mushy state. For the first time since April 2002 I almost feel like myself again.

So it seems that indeed hormones had been making me dull, and forgetful, and put me in a low mood for six years.

It’s a bit embarrassing to be so driven by hormones. I feel that my body shouldn’t work like that. It should just function properly without me paying much attention. Please?

Notice, too, that I said “almost myself again”. I fear I will never regain all of my mind power back. And I’m a bit scared of menopause. The time when hormones will go wonky again. I feel that almost 30 years of PMS is enough.

I thought, I’d share though because there might be others out there blaming their foggy brains to lack of sleep when there might be other things responsible too.

My husband and I were going to mindfulness day again, and we were a bit late for the train. So we started running towards the station. Down the steps, up the steps, and along the platform. It was seven in the morning and winterly cold. So, I started running down the stairs, and halfway down I get winded and think, “That’s weird. I didn’t know I’m that unfit.” Halfway up the other stairs I started wheezing. And my legs felt heavy. And I thought I’d better stop running because I couldn’t anyway and somehow I didn’t feel that well. And then I walked as fast as I could seeing my husband running away from me towards the train, and then I started running again, and then my body did this weird thing where after each exhale it just went on exhaling spasmodically with a sound like a coughing.

I made it to the train (which then sat there right at the station for the next two minutes or so), plunged down on a seat, and went on to breathe like that for the next few minutes while thinking, “Well, that is odd. what is that? Oh, maybe I’m having an asthma attack.”

Somehow I wasn’t especially mindful for the rest of the day. I didn’t quite know what to do, or where to go but then I thought I’d better see a doctor. So, today in the morning I rang the office of one of my husband’s students who happens to be an internist, and when I told them, “I think I had an asthma attack.” they told me to come in immediately. The doctor first asked me a lot about heart conditions in my family (there are none), and I was thoroughly checked. So now I can say that as far as x-rays, ultrasound, blood tests, cardiograms, and that test where they see if your lungs work properly go, I’m perfectly healthy. While I’m happy that I didn’t have a heart attack, and that all the tests for asthma showed up negative, there still is an odd feeling to my breathing. And it feels like somebody is sitting on my chest.

So, I’m either a hypochondriac, or it’s like it often is, I go to the doctor and say that there’s something wrong, and they don’t find anything, and then I go back the next year, and they don’t find anything, and then I go back the next year, and after a few years of this finally they see that there might be something off after all. Or it might be like with my thyroid problem where I had my thyroid checked once a year for about twenty years before finding out that the only thing wrong with my thyroid is it’s unusual shape that leads doctors to think that I have a thyroid problem.

I think I won’t be running in cold weather again soon. And I think that I want to know more about allergic asthma. The doctor sent me home with, “Maybe it was an asthma attack but I didn’t find anything. If you don’t feel better in two days, come back. If you feel like you’re having an attack, come in immediately.”

At least he didn’t tell me I’m imagining it all. But then he has to take me seriously. I have been his singing teacher after all.

How was your weekend?

Time for the Just Post Roundtable. As every month for almost two years now Mad, Jen, and I gather posts about social justice. Our readers contribute by sending us links to what they wrote or read. Thank you for that again.

This month I’d like to use my introduction to remind you of something that I briefly mentioned back in February: the Goods 4 Girls project. Deanna Duke, the woman behind that project, describes it like this (and I’m quoting this in its entirety, sorry for the length):

You may have seen the commercials… the ones describing how girls in South Africa miss school when they have their period and how buying Tampax tampons will help them. There’s also a commercial for Always pads, with a similar message. Imagine having to use rags or newspaper, which is what many of these girls use for their periods.

Procter and Gamble (P&G) has started a program in Africa, where they are donating Always sanitary pads to girls who otherwise would miss several days of school each month due to inadequate menstrual supplies.

But what are the potential problems with donating disposable feminine hygiene products? Well, for starters, there is the environmental impact. In most of these areas, they have no solid waste programs or landfills. In other words, they burn their waste.

As such, products that have synthetic components (like sanitary pads and tampons) would be incinerated. For some schools, P&G is building incinerators near the bathrooms. But what about the pollutants emitted from burning these products? They may potentially get inhaled by the students and teachers. Any additional packaging, plastic or otherwise, would need to be disposed of in the same manner.

What would be a good alternative to help out these girls but without the environmental impact? Since most of these girls are using rags now, having a pad that is a more sophisticated (with a waterproof barrier) may be enough to allow them to participate in school and regular activities. They would still wash the pads as they normally do with the rags, but they would benefit from the extra protection.

I started Goods 4 Girls to provide the link for women wanting to donate hand-sewn menstrual pads to agencies who could provide the means to identify areas of need as well as provide the distribution to the women and girls needing the pads.

So, what can we do to help? We can

1. donate cash
2. for those who like to sew we can sew pads and donate those
3. donate pads

You can find out all about donating here.

The easiest way of helping is to promote the project with the button you’re seeing in my left sidebar. You can find that, and tons of information including links to further reading (scroll down to the bottom), and tales about the distribution of the first shipments of products on the Goods 4 Girls homepage.

I won’t tell you all about it because the Just Post roundtables aren’t just about making a pretty list, they are about information. And here are the posts to read:

Anne with Yolanta
Cecileaux with Tomorrow, 40 years ago and Why neoconservatism deserved to fail
Emily with Saving the Planet for Starbucks Customers of Tomorrow
Flutter with Life is good, even when it’s crap
Girlgriot with It’s not easy being green
HerBadMother on blogher with Toss the Tylenol, Nursing Moms: This is Terrifying, Lost boy and Hide Your Hooters, The Haters Are Coming
Holly with Games for the haves and have nots
Jen with God in the house
Kittenpie with Down and Out in Riverdale
Lara with My little girl is the issue
Lisa with How a graduate marketing class saved my life
Mad with Flotsam and Take back the night
Megan with Realities
Mir Kamin on blogher with School supplies socialism makes for an angry village
Neil with The Orthodox Jewish guy outside of the supermarket
Pundit Mom with DNC on the homefront: Ellen Malcom of Emily’s list and Homeless children, don’t count on John McCain
Wrekehavoc with Stop using sex as a weapon
YTSL with Life in West Kowloon

And here are those who read:
Janet
Yolanda
Mary
Alejna

Welcome again to the Just Posts roundtable.

When last month I wrote about child poverty in the introduction to the Just Posts there were a lot of marvelous comments. I’m especially thankful to Hel for pointing out that not everyone of us is living in a “rich country”. I forget that, sometimes, in the same way that I’m not really comprehending the fact that it’s winter now, where she lives, while I’m in the middle of summer.

I knew instantly what to write about for this month’s introduction when I heard about the Expo 2008 on the radio. It’s all about water and sustainable development.

When I wrote about my guilty conscience when staying in the shower for too long, one of readers mocked me. And she is right, water is not that much of a problem where I live. It’s raining as I type this, and the water we drink comes from nearby. In past years we were advised not to give it to infants, and the town I live in helped families with newborns so that they could buy bottled water for them, but for the past years, and ever since my son has been born the water has been of good quality.

The situation in the nearby Bavarian capital is a bit different. While they have water that is pure and marvelous, and they have plenty of that, it seems a bit weird to me that that water comes from somewhere in the Alps. There are big pipelines fueling it to the city. But there isn’t a problem with the water as such. It’s good, it’s pure, and there’s plenty.

Of course, that’s not true for everyone in the world. Good water for drinking is a scarce resource and is becoming increasingly rare. Imagine living in a place where you had to chose between drinking something that makes you and your children sick, or not drinking at all. Imagine living somewhere where most of your day is spent fetching water from a place that’s hours away.

It’s sad that it always seem to come back to this these days, that there are people who have pools, and washing machines, and who take showers and baths every day, and who don’t even drink water because it’s so common, and there are people who barely have enough to survive, or even less.

I don’t know what to do about it, I know that I can’t send my unused shower water to the desert but it would be great if I could.

And now to something different, here is the list of posts that were gathered by you:
Andrea at Punk Rock Mommy with Planting the seeds of my own garden
Andrea with The burden of perfection
Averagebean with Freedom of speech?
Blog Antagonist with Speak English Me
Chani with Wellness Wednesday: take back your time
Christine Kane with Making Friends with Songs and Food
Defiant Muse with The mommy myth
Flutter with I am an omnivore
Girlgriot with Gotta do more than holla and We can, I mean WE can
Hel with Afternoon in an urban footgarden
Her Bad Mother with Joy, And Pain
Identity Theory with The weapon of rape
Indigenous people’s issues today with Five key indigenous people’s issues
Jen with Where the streets have no name and the shattered ceiling and what it means for our children
Julie with Kids and sex?
Kaliroz with indifference to me, is the epitome of evil
KC with Wheels
Mayberry Mom with 20 lousy pairs of scissors
MOMocrats with Moms need help in California family court system
Moosh in Indy with the healthcare of stereotypes
No Caption Needed with High Noon in Sadr City
The Expatriate’s Kitchen with World Refugee Day
Toddlywinks with The powerlessness of three
Tossing Pebbles in the Stream with To laugh or be outraged
Susanne with Corsets, coolness, caps, and cosmetic surgery
Suzanne Reisman on blogher with Banning the Pill Kills Women. Period. and “Third Genders” in Societies with Rigid Gender Roles
WhyMommy with Thank you, AmVets

The ones who read:
Janet
Moosh!
Alejna

And, as always, there are Mad, and Jen the ones who started this. Please, check out what they have to say this month. And Jen will be going to BlogHer and talk about this here roundtable, how marvelous.

Still, he couldn’t get over the fact that women would wear something as uncomfortable as that, something that makes you almost unable to breathe. My next thought was, “Today’s women would never do that!” But then I thought of high heels. Shoes that make your feet hurt, and your back, and your knees, and your hips, and you can’t even walk in them. And then – I thought of cosmetic surgery. And made the mistake of talking about that as well. Have you ever tried to explain to your kindergardener why some women want to put plastic bags into their body? Because they think it looks pretty?

Of course, I couldn’t really explain it to him because I don’t understand it myself. I do understand not feeling pretty, I understand not being content with the way I look (though I wish I couldn’t). But pay a fortune to have surgery that isn’t really necessary? And where do you stop, then? When you look like a Barbie doll? When you have grown so old that your heart doesn’t take it anymore?

Cosmetic surgery is on the rise, and I sense a paradigm shift that makes it more “normal”. Younger and younger women are thinking about it, and having it, even at an age where their bodies aren’t yet finished.

I’m really worried about a lifestyle where we are defined by our looks. Where we try to look like the ideal 18-year-old until we die.

I’m also very worried that something like cosmetic surgery seems to be much more available these days. Until not that long ago, in Germany, cosmetic surgery was only for people who really needed it. People with horrible scars and such. Nowadays it’s something that you just pay for. Don’t like your nose? Snip.

I’d love to be able to tell my son that people have evolved since the days of the corset but it seems they haven’t.

(And, please, don’t forget to send your links for the Just Post roundtable. My e-mail address is creativemother AT web DOT de.)

As for the question of the bathing suit I have to confess that I exaggerated for dramatic reasons, I actually own a bathing suit that fits me, and has done so through weight loss and gain for years. When I bought it in 1998 or so I weighed about 67 kilos and it fit me even in the first stages of pregnancy until I reached a weight of about 85 kilos. Right now, of course, I hope to be able to fit into my new bikini again though it will certainly be a bit tight this summer.

I have, as probably most women in the first world, a long history of weight gain and loss. I also am still suffering from an eating disorder, namely compulsive overeating, though I’m much better now and still haven’t given up on healing. In fact, that’s my word of the year for this year: healing.

I still believe that it is possible to just eat, and maintain a nice and healthy weight. I don’t believe in diets. They don’t work. I also don’t believe in any diet foods, in avoiding anything; now it’s carbs again, some years ago it was fat, and I’m just now too lazy to figure out which diet craze will have a comeback after the return of the Atkins diet (I know, it’s totally different nowadays, and it’s called low carb. Whatever.)

What I aspire is a life where food, and my looks, and the question of whether I still fit into my jeans aren’t that important. And I know that it can be done. My great role-model in this is Geneen Roth who spent deacdes on the diet-carousel, was anorexic at one point, and nowdays just eats and stays the same size.

Sadly, I’m not one of those people who read a book, get the idea, and then are changed forever. For me, everything I change has to be a practice. I stumble, I fall, I start over, I stumble, I do great, I fall,…

So, without making this into a mega-post, I just give you a list of the things I changed in the past, a list of things that worked.

1. I learned to love exercise and to do it regularly. I don’t do much, about 15 to 30 minutes every other day. And I do something I like doing. Something that’s easy to fit into my life. Going for walks, doing yoga with a DVD, things like that.
2. I slept more. In fact that was the change that gave me the most benefit of all. By only changing my bedtime so I got enough sleep, I lost weight. I swear. So now I only have to do that again, ahem.
3. I ate more real food. I found that there were three main reasons for my binges: a) I was tired, b) I really was hungry but didn’t allow myself to eat something real, and so I ate snacks upon snacks, c) I craved nutrition that I wasn’t getting, like when I’m eating only cookies they will never make me feel satisfied.
4. I sometimes stayed hungry for a bit. I was eating something like five meals a day before but then I decided that if I get hungry at 11 am, and I’m having lunch at 12, I maybe don’t need a midmorning snack.
5. I don’t graze. Either I eat or I don’t. No shoving of tiny little things into my mouth.
6. No food after dinner. Apart from that one piece of chocolate (it’s a big piece of chocolate, don’t worry). I might, occaasionally eat crackers in front of TV but only very occasionally, and not the whole carton.
7. In the evening I can have either a beer or a piece of chocolate, not both. I altered this rule later so that I’m not allowed alcohol during the week because I became worried about alcoholism in my family, and also about my son seeing me drink beer or wine with every meal, every day. And yes, it does count if you do it after they sleep. I try to model the behaviors I want my son to develop. Not only becausee it’s good for him, it’s good for me too.
8. I think about my mid-afternoon snack in advance, and buy groceries accordingly. It’s no use to think I’ll skip it, especially on teaching days. I need it, and so there has to be something for me to eat. Mostly I go with a handful or two of nuts and raisins.
9. Drink enough water. Apart from a cup of black tea in the morning, and those weekend beers, I drink water and unsweetened herbal tea. Somebody asked me about switching to alcohol-free beer. While I occasionally drink that it a) doesn’t taste that good, b) still has much more calories than water or tea, and c) is a very un-natural thing and I try to avoid these as much as possible in food.
10. I also stopped eating sugar last year, well, mostly and when I do I prefer brown sugar over white. But that had nothing to do with losing weight, I did it because I felt addicted to it. It messes with my feeling of whether I’m hungry or not, it makes me hyper, and I feel better when I don’t eat it. (I feel like a hypocrite typing this since I just had a lovely piece of cake, I’m sitting in a café right now. So, I have cake about once or twice a month. I do better without absolutes. I also savour every bite when I eat something like that. Last year we went out and had ice cream for my birthday. It was a very pleasant experience made more special by being the only ice cream I had all summer.)

To show you how much of a difference these tiny things make, and also the fact that I’m using my bike more often instead of the car and such, I have lost two kilos since the beginning of June. Without suffering, without battle, just like that. I know that you can’t do that always, I’m living proof for that, I’m the one who gained and gained over months despite knowing what to do.

What also helps me is realizing that ultimately it isn’t that important. I could just stay this size forever, and there’d be no harm in this. But also, my life doesn’t end because I don’t eat potato chips every day. There are more important things in life, much more important things, and that’s something I want my son to know not only because I say so but because he sees me living it.

So, my main reason for spending just a little bit more on groceries was mostly taste, and also the fact that I like my food better when I know that there is only food in it. I tend to forget about additives when I’m at home because I always buy the same things, and don’t have to check the labels anymore. I was reminded about all the stuff that gets added to regular food though when shopping in an unfamiliar grocery store two weeks ago. I was looking for ham and salami and such and had to put back most of what had looked appealing at first glance.

Last week I went and bought a little booklet about “E numbers”. E numbers are codes for food additives in the European Union. (And I just found out that these numbers are used all over the world these days, without the E.) So when I check a food’s label there might be “E 216″ listed there. Since I never know what those numbers mean I tend to stay away from all of them. In fact there are some additives that are not that bad, or downright harmless, but most of them in my little booklet are deemed unhealthy in some way.

What does that have to do with organic food? Well, currently there are 316 additives food manufacturers are allowed to use in the EU. In 1993 there were “only” 265 allowed in Germany. Their number is getting bigger and bigger. In organic food there are only 47 food additives allowed. Interestingly, when I check labels in the health food store there is never something like “E 412″ listed on the label. If it’s in there it’s called guar flour.

I’m really happy that nowadays additives have to be listed on the label. I remember a time when you just didn’t know what was in there. Still, with everything labeled it is hard to shop for people with food allergies. I have a friend who can’t have anything coming from an animal, no nuts, no sulfur, and no preservatives. She has to avoid everything that’s canned or comes in a glass.

All this is doable when you’re at home and preparing your own food, even if you end up just cooking plain vegetables most of the time but you run into trouble the minute you want something more complex than a banana, when you buy bread or buns, and none of the salespersons knows if the products contain milk, eggs, or butter, and eating out can become quite the adventure.

So, in buying and eating more organically produced food I try to minimize my intake of weird chemical stuff. Like many people I started thinking about this in a more detailed way when my son started eating real food. But then, having thought about it, I couldn’t just go on eating the regular junk anymore. And, as I mentioned before, most of it doesn’t taste good anyway.

What about you? Do you know what’s in your food?

It’s surprising the number of women who are unacquainted with their bodies from the neck down. Our mirrors are strategically placed for only blow-drying hair and applying makeup, then we quickly dress without a glance at our reflection. We know our faces intimately, but most of us wouldn’t recognize our bodies in a lineup. When a group of women were asked to identify themselves from a series of headless bodies wearing nothing but their birthday suits, only 20 per cent correctly chose their naked selves. The rest guessed wrong, choosing bodies that were bigger in size than their own! (Debra Waterhouse: “From Tired to Inspired: 8 Energizing Ways to Overcome Female Fatigue”, p 175)

It’s weird that people who are often obsessed with the way they look don’t even really know how they look. That about every single one of us secretly believes she is fat, regardless of actual size. That every single one of us has the feeling she should lose about ten pounds. It always seems to be ten pounds at least, I don’t know why. I know that in my case the number keeps getting adjusted down every time I lose weight so that I never am where I want to be. But today I’m not writing about weight loss (even if I’m thinking about it) but about our body images.

Debra Waterhouse goes on:

Whether we are familiar with our anatomy or not, what’s not surprising, unfortunately, are the negative comments we make about our bodies. It has been estimated that the average American woman makes eighteen critical comments each day about herself and spends one third of her waking hours ridiculing her physical self in some way – getting on the scale and obsessing about the number, getting dressed and grimacing at the way our clothes fit, taking inventory of our wrinkles, catching our reflection unexpectedly in a window and frowning, comparing ourselves to fashion models, measuring ourselves against other women, depriving our bodies from food and nourishment, agonizing over what we will and will not eat – the list goes on and on.

How much time did you spend criticizing your body today?

Just think about it. How much time and energy wasted.

I think that I would recognize my body. Every day I make a point of really looking at myself. From all sides. I have been working on making friends with my body for years now. It’s better to have your body for a friend, and to treat it nicely since you want him to do a lot of things for you. We are not mind alone, even if it might feel like that when we’re sitting in front of the computer communicating with invisible people through a friendly shining monitor screen.

Learning to like what I see in the mirror was hard at first. My body, of course, isn’t flawless. Nobody’s body is, by the way, and you all know it. After a while though I liked myself better. I found that I actually like big butts. Hourglass figures, strong legs. That’s not to say that I’m not working on changing the things about my body that I don’t like but I find that in the long run being free from back pain is more important than having thin ankles. And that, like in any stable relationship, I have to accept what’s possible and what not.

When I actually started thinking about something important to me every time I caught myself thinking about my appearance or weight or food that set free huge amounts of energy. It was about 2 1/2 years ago that I did that, and only a couple of weeks later I had written two songs.

Energy follows attention. Being heavier than one wants to is not a full-time occupation. No, really, not even very heavy people eat all the time.

So, I’m giving you homework this time:

1. Step in front of the mirror, naked would be best, and say something nice about your body. Say it out loud. Repeat. (This is an exercise from one of Geneen Roth‘s books.)
2. Think about what’s really important to you. Maybe something creative. Every time you find yourself thinking about how fat you are or how you should lose weight think about that important thing instead. Bonus points if it is something creative.

I never know whether my mood changes because of the things I’m doing or because of some weird brain chemistry shift. Though I’d say that the way I live my life also influences my brain chemistry. It’s not as if my brain weren’t connected to the rest of me. While I do know what to do to make me feel better I have been strangely reluctant to change my behavior in any way. It was as if I threw myself wholeheartedly into the vortex. There’s this cycle of not caring for myself, not sleeping enough, eating more junk, not making music, spending too much time mindlessly surfing the internet, not doing housework… I have become even more stupid, forgetful, unreliable, and overweight than before.

It would be nice if there was a magic pill. I could go to a doctor, take it and feel happy and healthy again. But I doubt that it works that way. I’m not really clinically depressed. In fact I am a cheerful person despite the fact that life looks a bit grey all the time, and everything I do feels like pushing a big boulder uphill. Even things like doing the dishes, getting out of bed, or taking a shower.

The reason I’m writing this now is that I actually do feel a bit better. I have been getting enough sleep for almost a week now, and I have started to tackle things that have been lying around and weighing on my conscience for months now. Like reading a friend’s manuscript (I told her in September that it would take me a couple of weeks, ahem.), like starting to sew a bag that I originally planned to make in August, starting to knit something that I bought the yarn for in October. Since it has been such a long time since I cared for such a lot of things I couldn’t finish everything that I started or wanted to do since August in the past week but I made a start.

It seem that I really need structure and routines to feel good, even if that structure and routines don’t feel good when I’m in the midst of them. Like exercise. I only feel good after I have done it. Somehow I have to remember that dreading and procrastinating something often takes more of my energy than actually doing it. Maybe I should make a banner of that and post it over my piano.

So, to celebrate feeling better I’d thought I’d post a list of things that make me happy. in fact, I encourage you to do the same, whether you feel good or not, because it lifts your mood anyway.

1. The first flowers peeking out under the snow.
2. My son starting to spell words.
3. My son starting to play the very first chords on the guitar.
4. Hearing my husband play his guitar through the wall.
5. Taking out the guitar not with the notion of, “I have to practice for work.” but just for fun, and playing around with it for a whole afternoon. (In fact I found out that I think of my two guitars as “work guitars”. When I use them I have to be efficient, and to the point. Get the most out of limited time. So I took one of my husband’s for play.)
6. Writing blog posts again.
7. Baking bread.
8. Eating the bread I made.
9. Pulling out an exercise DVD that I used to work out to three times a week, and finding that I’m not totally out of shape.
10. Seeing my son dragging around his new bunny and playing with it.
11. Waiting for my hibiscus to blossom.
12. Watching my son singing along with “Sky Children“.
13. Having no unread posts in my feed reader.
14. Being almost able to sing again after weeks of throat problems.
15. Not having to teach until next week.
16. Knitting the Scheherazade-stole with exquisite Wollmeise-yarn, something I have been looking forward to since at least four months.
17. Giving up on being perfect all at once, and instead just changing one thing at a time again.

What have you been happy about lately?

The thing that stuck in my head this month (apart from many fluffy things) was something Ewe wrote about Health Care in the US. And that mixed with numerous pleas for financial help on various blogs.

So: It’s a shame. Being sick shouldn’t make you bankrupt. Especially if you’re paying for health insurance. And then, when you actually need it – boom – you’re not “covered” and on top of serious illness comes financial debt. It seems to be better in Canada, and it certainly is better in Germany. Even in England, or so Ewe tells us. She writes:

I’ve never been without excellent, dependable health care, health care that never required more than a reasonable co-pay, and I’ve certainly needed it over the years for my multiple knee surgeries, shattered elbow, emergency appendectomy, pregnancies, etc.

I have been thinking about that phrase “reasonable co-pay” since then. I don’t quite know what reasonable means here. When I was pregnant and had a baby there was only one thing I had to pay for, and that was some kind of test that wasn’t deemed necessary but that my doctor recommended. It cost me about 40 €. Otherwise, dozens of ultrasounds, checking in with the doctor once or twice a month, a big ultrasound made by someone specialized in pre-natal diagnostics, giving birth in a hospital, the cesarean, staying in said hospital for ten days, all this cost me – nothing.

Health care in Germany is not heavenly, not by far, but I have never heard of somebody having to pay for years because he got seriously ill. People are required by law to have health insurance and employers are required to pay half of the monthly fees.

The US system leaves me with my mouth open in utter astonishment. I have a friend who moved to the US when she was pregnant with her first child. Her husband had a job at a university in Colorado. She told me that she had to enroll in classes she didn’t want to take (and pay for the courses of course) in order to have a reasonable health insurance. In Germany she would have had insurance through her husband. Like my son can have health insurance through me or my husband (it doesn’t really matter) without extra pay. When my friend had her second child in Germany she was surprised by all the test and check-ups that were done. Obviously, she didn’t have those when she was overseas.

Families like this have enough to deal with, they shouldn’t have to go fundraising so that there son can have necessary surgery. To me this appears inhumane. While people in the US are fortunate to have this medical care available, the next thing they have is to worry about the cost. In Germany all of the surgery, and most of the therapy would be paid for, just like that.

Nobody should be without “excellent, dependable health care”. My heart weeps for the people who live in countries where there is no medical care to speak of but I find it exceptionally cruel that there are people living in one of the richest countries in the world – and one that is very proud of having the best of everything – who can’t afford medical care. Or people who just have lost a loved one and then in addition to have to deal with that loss have to face bankruptcy on top of it.