4-wheelers, healthcare, danger and broken arms

9:45, 12:45, 1:15, 2:40.
These were the Dr. appointment times that Jude and I had to look forward to yesterday. And y’all know how much I love the Dr.! Although I must say it was convenient that we don’t live in southern California where it would take at least, say 45 minutes, to get there.

Needless to say, as I left the hospital campus as 4:00 I had done a lot of thinking about what had required us to spend so much of the day there in the first place – and secondly, how this monstrously expensive day was being funded. Here are the conclusions in brief.

We go to the Dr. too much and Dr.’s don’t seem all that educated to solve problems just to prescribe medicine and avoid lawsuits – thus the first 3 appointments were to check Jude’s ongoing issues with RAD (basically Asthma - maybe, they aren’t sure, but want him on steroids for life, which we refused and now he seems to be getting better), and 2 things for the pregnancy that involved 45 minute waits and were less in depth than,
“Hi, how are you?”
“Pregnant.”
“Let me know if anything changes.”

What would I ever do without them?

Now, the final appointment was a follow up to Jude’s emergency room visit on Friday after he crashed his 50 cc 4-wheeler. So yeah – pretty much can blame the parents for this one. He was with my parents for the day when mom called and said, “Jude’s fine but I think his arm is broken.” As a mom my first thought was, “Is that a coherent sentence? Doesn’t “fine” mean, not broken?” But apparently it doesn’t because he is fine and his right arm is broken. Or as I like to point out “cracked” and he will be out of the splint thing in 10 more days… and he is really remarkable with one arm even though we are starting to think he is right handed.

So now, 4-wheelers – will he be riding them still? The answer is – if he wants… only from now on someone will run with the rope instead of tie it to their recumbent bike… but hey we seem to have to try ever stupid idea once around here… (the clip should explain, although Jude is disappointed that the crash wasn’t caught on video.)



To all of you tax payers – thank you. Since we are on state health care (that is poorly done) you are paying an astronomical amount for these emergency room visits, x-rays, and appointments -my guess is $2,000 for this week and another $8,000 for our pregnancy.

Which brings me to health care. Now I am entirely way too nihilistic about politics but a good look at our health care system is needed and an interesting way for me to do that was look at how some other countries deal with this problem – and you all could watch a bit on this at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/ (thanks Alison for the head’s up). I had many thoughts on this program but the two that stuck out the most were - “wow $45 dollars for an MRI in Japan.” And whatever the new American system is, I want to pay something for our health care and we should probably have to pay more than some others – like maybe the questioner for universal healthcare could ask, “Will your 3 year old be operating heavy machinery?” And if the answer is “yes” you automatically pay $10 bucks more a month.

But we should get points for Jude’s faithfulness to the helmet.