Emotional Monday

I really ought to go get my hormone levels checked or something. It doesn't take much to get me weepy on a Monday morning! I read a story that popped up on my Comcast news page about how diabetics (and of course it didn't differentiate between type 1 and type 2) are cutting back on medicine to survive loss of or cutbacks on health insurance because of this economy. Those who are insulin dependent are switching to less expensive kinds of insulin that don't give as tight control as the more expensive brands. One woman went into DKA because, the article said, "she stopped taking most of her drugs and cut her insulin doses in half to stretch her budget."

I got very emotional, sitting here at my computer on a Monday morning, preparing for my classes, preparing to greet the kids with a smile. Deep breath time.

I guess Daniel must be using one of the cheaper insulins. Is Novolog one of the cheaper ones? When I went to pick up his prescription on Friday, I took out my wallet, ready to pay $35 as I have done since switching to this insurance, and the pharmacist said there was no charge. Something switched this month.

Shouldn't I have been informed that something changed? I'll have to check through my emails, and junk emails, to see if there was a notice.

Anyhow, I hope that this country makes strong progress towards a better health care system. It is past time, and people are dying every day because they can't get the care that they need. I know I'm focusing on diabetes, but of course there are so many other chronic conditions, so many patients in desperate need.

*sigh* Monday.

I've Looked at Clouds

When I was young I found a photo album of pictures that my dad had taken when he was aboard a ship. There were pages and pages of cloud pictures.

I flipped past these pages pretty quickly, because after the 20th or so cloud picture, I thought they pretty much all looked the same. BTW, they were B&W.

Today we had a wild change of weather, from heavy rain & fog to warm & sunny to wildly windy with ominous clouds in exotic swirls & feather shapes.

I took a few pictures. Certainly a few more than I will post here. These pictures are okay, but they don't portray the majesty of the sky today, and can't possibly reproduce the epic sound effects of the wind. But I thought about Dad's photo album, rectangle after rectangle of cloud shapes. How did the sun feel on his face that day? Was there salt in the wind from the ocean around him? Why does he press that day, those clouds, into a book after all these years?
The temperature rises and falls with the movement of the air; these are certainly winds of change. No wonder we look to nature for portents -- when we hear the cannon rush of a weather front passing through as we try to sleep on a warm night, we may wake to snow on the ground in the morning. Even without a lightning storm the air seems to be filled with an electricity, an energy, a promise, a foreboding.

Tonight I spent one-on-one time with Dominic. Matt had the other two out at a video game extravaganza. Dominic was getting a kick of watching the live-action version of the Scooby Doo movie on a Spanish-language channel. He lounged on the couch pillows & wiggled his loose tooth. I asked him to open his mouth so I could see how loose it was, and to check the progress of the new front teeth that have been quickly increasing in size these past few days.

I thought I saw something stuck on those two front teeth, and asked Dominic to hold still while I scraped at them a little with a finger nail. Nothing came off. They have bright white spots on the enamel, whiter than the surrounding teeth.

Daniel had that on his teeth when his permanent teeth came in. I asked his long ago dentist about them, and she said that sometimes the antibiotics that kids take when they are babies can cause these marks on the enamel of the permanent teeth. Okay... I didn't think anything about it at the time. But in this past year I have learned that a high percentage of kids with undiagnosed celiac disease can have dental enamel defects.

*sigh* I'm pretty resigned to this, you know. But I can still complain about it for a while. The new health insurance we have doesn't cover the complete cost of testing for celiac like the old insurance did. Nora's test cost us $400... Ouch. Yes, we will get Dominic tested. But I look at those teeth and think that it is hardly necessary. I can see the future of our household, and it contains no gluten. I listen to the wind blow outside, and know the change is coming.