Lift Up Your Hearts!

Pressure is increasing on schools to remove that nutritional disaster called soda from their vending machines and replace it with healthy fare like water, juice, and milk. In response, the soft drink manufacturers, not to be caught with their profits down, have succeeded in spinning milk into soda. Take a delicious bottle of milk, add sugar, artificial flavor, and sometimes even carbonation, give it a name like Milky Way, Starburst, or Bubble Blast, and voila! — a drink no calf would recognize.

Schools are happy; they can continue to expect income from their highly profitable vending machines. Soft drink companies are happy; they've found a way around the threat to evict them from campus. Apparently even mothers are happy, as they are finding this an easier way to get some of the benefits of milk to children who whine for breakfast soda. So why am I such a grumpy old lady about this new trend? After all, I do love hot cocoa, an early form of sugared, flavored milk, and I'll admit a cup of steaming Milky Way flavored milk on a cold night sounds delightful. Two things, I suppose: There's a difference between an occasional cup of cocoa and having fat-laden, artificially flavored sugared drinks several times a day; moreover, I am saddened at the realization that so many of the next generation are growing up with no knowledge of the delights in drinking plain, cold, smooth, perfect-with-a-plate-of-Grandma's-cookies milk.

Bottom line, though no one is admitting it: The United Kingdom's socialized health care system is financially strained, and it costs too much to keep Charlotte alive.

Unquestionable reality: Some types of medical care are expensive, and resources are not limitless.

Critical Question: Who should make medical decisions for you and your loved ones? Some would say the ultimate authority should rest with some form of government, whether legislative, judicial, or a medical review board, because otherwise the limited resources will end up going to those with the most money rather than those who are most deserving. I would argue that someone who doesn't have enough money for medical care has room for appeal: insurance, friends and family, charities, other governmental programs, fundraisers, pleas to the general public. It may not be easy, but there is room for hope. Where can you turn when an institution, under the influence of philosophies that may differ vastly from your own, decides that you—or your child, or your parent, or your spouse—no longer deserve to live?

Focusing on Charlotte's quality of life, or on what decisions you would make were she your own child, only distracts from the vitally important issue: Who has the authority to make life and death decisions for you and your family?

We can still access the Internet, except for getting our phone messages; we can't access the CallVantage site, which also tells me this is a major problem, and that it is AT&T's, not ours.

I've noted before some of the problems with epidural pain relief during childbirth, and my latest reading, Lise Eliot's What's Going on in There: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life confirms my worries. Here are a few of her concerns:

• Every drug used for epidural anesthesia can diffuse out of the epidural space and enter the baby’s circulation. The good news…is that the total amount of drug reaching the baby is considerably lower than in systemic administration. Nonetheless, whatever dose does enter the mother’s bloodstream crosses quite efficiently to the baby’s circulation.


• Although many studies report no effect…on Apgar scores or cursory neurological exams, few of them have used wholly unmedicated mothers as a control group. Using more sensitive indices of infant behavior, some studies have found that newborns…are less alert, less able to orient toward stimuli, and less mature in their motor abilities than babies of unmedicated mothers. Greater exposure…makes babies jumpy and more irritable. The effects are most pronounced on the first day after birth, but some have been found to persist up to six weeks of life.


• The most common side effect of epidural administration is…a reduction in the mother’s blood pressure. Maternal hypotension is at least partially responsible for the fact that the baby’s heart rate often slows down for a while shortly after an epidural anesthetic is injected. If the mother’s blood pressure falls too low for too long, it can seriously compromise blood flow to the placenta, reducing the fetus’s supply of oxygen. These serious side effects are prevented by giving the woman fluids through an IV….If this countermeasure doesn’t work, another drug may be needed to prevent her blood pressure from falling too low and compromising the baby.


• Many studies have now shown that women who receive epidurals have longer labors, on average, than women receiving systemic analgesia. This is especially the case during the pushing phase…. Women receiving epidurals are more frequently diagnosed with dystocia, the failure of labor to progress, four times likelier to require forceps, and two or three times likelier to end up having a C-section, than women receiving systemic analgesia or no pain relief.


• Although most babies are not significantly affected, epidural anesthesia may compromise the health of the small subset of babies already at risk due to illness, prematurity, or a difficult delivery. Encouraging more women to have unmedicated deliveries would be better for babies, and for the women themselves, who would be exposed to fewer side effects, have shorter labors, and might be in better shape to begin breast-feeding and bonding with their babies right after delivery.

None of these concerns surprised me. What I did find astonishing was her report of the difficulty in getting reliable data on the adverse effects of epidural anesthesia relative to no anesthesia at all, instead of relative to other forms of pain relief: “There are simply too few ‘natural’ deliveries to enroll in a clinical study!” Upon reflection, I believe there are more mothers who chose unmedicated delivery than she implies, though I’m also certain the numbers are far lower than they would be if the public were better educated about the joys of natural childbirth and the dangers of anesthesia. Two additional reasons come to mind for the lower numbers available for study: Those who chose natural childbirth often do so for reasons that would also make them reluctant to have their newborns’ lives disrupted by clinical study. And, sadly, the hostile atmosphere frequently encountered by those seeking to avoid unnecessary medical interventions in the births of their babies often drives them underground, where they avoid observation for good as well as ill.

I can't say as I recommend Nobody's Fool, since it's the kind of book that makes me want to wash my brain out with soap afterwards. However, I will admit that his characters are somehow so human (if not humane) that the sleaziness seems essential to their characters and not gratuitous.

The incentive for reading a book that would not otherwise have attracted me was learning that its fictional town of North Bath is based on Ballston Spa, New York, which is not far from where I grew up. It was easy to recognize Schuyler Springs as the real-life Saratoga Springs, and other places that I know (Albany, the Northway, the Adirondacks) are not disguised. Unfortunately, all I know about Ballston Spa itself comprises one family, one home, and one church, none of which is evident in this story, for which they all should be deeply grateful.

Our local Target store has a two-layered system of checkout stations, which makes finding the best line a little more complicated than usual. After checking out several in the first tier that turned out to be longer than they looked, I found an almost-empty line in the second tier and headed for it. When I was almost there, a man popped up from another direction, striding determinedly toward my goal. Not wanting to fight him for it, I swerved and settled on the nearest available station.

While I was standing in line, a fellow customer looked at my purchases and asked, "Is that clear contact paper?" It was. "Where did you find it? I've been looking all over for it." She had come up empty at Wal-Mart and found nothing at Target. I was not surprised, as the first time I tried to purchase contact paper at Target I couldn't find it and neither could the clerks I'd asked for help. But I'm a seasoned clear contact paper buyer now, and upon entering the store had headed immediately for the sign that says "Small Electronics" and picked up the last three rolls. At the checkout line I was therefore able to hand one of the three to the very grateful woman and her more grateful daughter, who I'm guessing needed it for a school project.

My nephew is going into seventh grade, and this was part of his required summer reading. He didn't have much to say about it, not surprising since it's hardly a title, nor a story, I would expect to appeal to most middle school boys. Or girls, for that matter. At that age, I would have picked up the book, assuming it was a science fiction story, then put it down in disgust when I discovered what it really was.

I'm not sure who the target audience is for this book, since the setting is high school and the themes adolescent, yet the intellectual level seems more geared towards elementary school.

I also picked up a few more, similar, books (some by the same author, some not) for comparison. Back when our children were home, I read hundreds of children's books from the library, and was generally dismayed by the genre of modern adolescent school-based stories. Things haven't changed much. As the genre goes, this is among the better, so I almost hesitate to say I found it oftentimes insipid and vulgar. Compared to most of what is out there, Stargirl has much to recommend it.

Back to the homeschooling idea. I don't know if the author actually knows something about homeschooling and is distorting the idea to make his point, or if he is just using the idea as a device to explain why Stargirl is so different. How else to explain someone who is immune to peer pressure, works hard at being kind to everyone, and is unafraid to sing aloud in the school cafeteria? Certainly he gets one thing right: homeschooling allows ordinary parents to raise extraordinary children.

What I really can't understand is why Stargirl would be required reading at the middle school level, unless some teacher wanted an easy way to begin a discussion on peer pressure. For literature, we must stop feeding our students pap! We can no longer hide behind the fiction that they cannot handle more complicated reading. The Harry Potter books are longer and more complex, deal with difficult subjects, and are replete with literary allusions—and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was on the personal summer reading list of countless children much younger than seventh grade.

In my nephew's case, he fit Stargirl in between Harry Potter and Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. Stargirl is okay. It was an interesting diversion. But something is wrong when the books a child reads for school are so much below the books he reads of his own accord. Wrong with the modern American educational system, that is—something is obviously very right with the child!

Janet is currently in Japan, preparing to teach English. Perusing an old diary today, I discovered an inclination toward that profession appearing much earlier in her life than I had supposed. The incident took place in the fall of her third grade year.