HealthyConcerns.com

In case you were wondering about the health care lingo...

...Maria Niles over at BlogHer breaks it all down in this post: Health Care: Understanding The Policy Discussion And What Women Want.

I know some of my readers here get frustrated that people confuse "health care" with "health insurance or coverage". I know some readers here probably wonder what the difference, if any, between "Single payer" and "universal" health care.

Maria does a great job of giving good working definitions of these and other terms commonly tossed around in the health system debate.

Read all the way to the end of her post, because she includes a ton of great reference links for even more edification.

Seriously, where would I be without smart bloggers helping me out?

What impacts both your stomach and gives you a cough?

Because whatever does that? I have it.

Started last Monday now. Thought it was food poisoning. Nausea, light-headed, hot flashes. And then some chills too. Strangest thing was that even as Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday went by without me eating very much if anything, I wasn't feeling bad. Usually I need to eat every few hours or risk getting a bit shaky, unfocused irritable. For days though I had no interest in food, and wasn't feeling particularly unhappy about it. When I do eat...my body's not particularly pleased about it, if you know what I mean. varying levels of gastric disturbances ensue.

Not normal for me. I can usually eat like a truck driver no matter how sick I am.

Sometime around Wednesday I started getting this nagging little cough. Dry, but constant. Which over this long weekend has blown up into a big. miserable, hacking cough that keeps me from good sleep and is starting to give me very sore abs. Still dry, though. Not a lot of mucus roiling around in there.

Sore throat came and went over 48 hours. Right ear ached and felt like I'd just landed from a flight without clearing my ear, but that's clearing up.

What isn't clearing up too well is the cough. And the occasional swing between being hot and being cold. And the gastric rebellion if I dare to eat. And, for that matter, the lack of any appreciable appetite. I'm eating because I oughta, not because I wanna.

So, amateur (or, hey, professional) diagnosticians. What do you think?

An amazing post about being a survivor

Every now and then a BlogHer member writes a post that strikes a chord with everyone who reads it.

Pookielocks did it today with this post: Conquering Your Trauma Anniversary.

Practical and poetic advice about how to deal with memories and PTSD and everything else that comes with traumatic events of all kinds.

And the comments? Well, it's just like they say: If you knew everyone around you who had been raped or abused or assaulted, you wold be shocked. True of men. Frighteningly true of women.

Don't miss this post.

Update on the Kansas medical records case: Dee-nied!

Just a quick update about a post I made last week: The Kansas Supreme Court has temporarily blocked a grand jury from getting hold of partially redacted medical records from an abortion clinic. [Hat tip: Women's Bioethics Project]

Think what you will about abortion, but imagine mass release of medical records for all sorts of supposed reasons and see if you like it. How about release of records of AIDS patients? Those with certain kinds of cancers? STDs? Heart issues or high blood pressure. I can imagine in my own wee brain lots of reasons various groups could try to obtain such records for "reasonable" reasons. but it wouldn't make it any less creepy.

Score one for the right-to-privacy perspective. We'll see if it holds up.

Two interesting posts from the Women's Bioethics Project

I'm going to point you to two posts on a prolific blog that could suck up all the time in my day if I weren't careful: The Women's Bioethics Project.

The first discusses a ruling Kansas that is requiring a healthcare provider to turn over the medical records of all patients who not only received but inquired about late-term abortions.

The Women's Bioethics Project lays out the details pretty succinctly, so I recommend reading their post.

I'll just say that the details provided make it clear this isn't really about medicine, or even about law enforcement (which the folks who want those records are purporting the issue to be) but about politics plain and simple. Or perhaps more about the continued assault on a government that respects all religions and is ruled by none.

The second is about the Daily Mail's report that british scientists have discovered how to turn women's one marrow into sperm. Yes, you read that right. So, now, apparently, we really can self-reproduce.

I don't know why I'm pointing this out, except I find some of the comments on the Daily Mail story pretty funny in their paranoia, especially the ones about malevolent feminism. Hilarious.

'cause it's women who have cause all the world's problems, yeah.

So, there you go...some good weekend reading.