Love In The Asylum

So, let's start Monday off with a signal boost!

RubyFoxCreations is an awesome person and a RL family friend (I've mentioned her here as L at least a few times) who has had a really rough time of it this year, trying to get settled and get her life together after a divorce. She's been working really hard to make the best of a bad situation, but she's got a bit of a set-back - her car really needs repairs, but she doesn't have the money right now. So, since she is also creative and crafty in addition to being generally awesome, she is opening up her Etsy shop: RubyFoxCreations.

Right now she's got a hand-crocheted afghan up for sale, and is also offering commissions for special items by request. I'm hoping she'll put some of her jewelry up soon as well - my mom and I both have several pairs of earrings and necklaces she's made, and I have a couple of crocheted hair accessories, and she does some really neat work. I know a lot of people on my flist are not swimming in cash themselves at the moment, but if you have a chance (and since it's November, if you are maybe starting to think about holiday gifts for people), you should really check her shop out.

I haven't seen Keith Olbermann's Special Comment on health care yet, since my laptop is a powerless hunk of plastic right now. But other people's posts on it reminded me of an entry I've been meaning to write for some time, and now is as good as any (even if I'm writing in the computer cluster right now). So:

My mother is self-employed as a landscaper/gardener - her job description is fairly fluid, but she does a lot of weeding and pruning, removing stumps, planting trees and flowers, just generally heavy-duty yardwork (a lot of it for older people, especially women, who aren't comfortable having a strange man on their property for hours at a time). Her boyfriend G was, when she met him, a bouncer at a club, but that job ended some time ago and for the last year he's been doing landscaping with her. What this means is that a) they do not make very much money, and b) they do not have health insurance.

Early this summer, G developed a problem with one of his teeth. I was going back and forth between her apartment and my dad's house about once a week, and every time I saw it he was complaining about it - it hurts, his face is swollen, he can't eat, he can't sleep. But it wasn't bad enough to put him out of commission, and they didn't have the money for the dentist if it wasn't an emergency, so he popped pain pills and smoked weed and tried to wait until it went away.

In August, it was finally apparent that this wasn't something that was going to fix itself, and after a week straight of being unable to eat anything from the pain G dragged himself to the dentist. Where he was told that the swelling around the tooth was too bad for them to be able to remove it. He was given a course of antibiotics and told to come back in a week. A week later, when he went back, they told him to go straight to the emergency room.

At the emergency room they told him the infection from his tooth had moved into his jaw. The swelling in his throat and mouth was so severe that it was restricting his breathing, leaving his oxygen saturation in the low 70s (by contrast - my grandmother, who is on permanent oxygen therapy for a collapsed diaphram, almost never goes below 80). The surgery to extract the tooth and drain the infection took four hours. And he spent almost a week in the Intensive Care Unit, in a medically induced coma, with a breathing tube down his throat. More than a month later, he still doesn't have all his strength back. His doctor said if they had waited to go to the emergency room that night, instead of that afternoon, he would have died.

The medical bill for all of this emergency intensive care treatment for what should have been an easily fixed tooth infection: $60,000.

And you know the really frustrating thing? I can understand exactly what was going through his head, this entire ordeal, because I WOULD DO EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

This is something I'm not sure people who are used to having health insurance can understand. But if you grow up in, or you spend a long time in, a situation where you cannot afford medical care, you think about it differently. I can count on my hands the number of times I've been to the doctor in my life - not because I've never gotten sick, but because in my family, in my experience, doctors are for emergencies only. Doctors are the last ditch solution, if you've tried over-the-counter medications, and the antibiotics you didn't finish the last time you got sick, and just ignoring it and hoping it will just go away, and nothing's worked. No 'I just want to make sure this isn't anything serious.' No 'I was wondering if you could do anything about this rash.' No preventative care. Because that isn't what doctors are for.

Proper medical treatment should not be a luxury. Being healthy should not be a luxury. Being alive shouldn't be a luxury.

Dr. George Tiller, pro-choice advocate and one of only a handful of doctors in the country who perform late-term abortions, was shot and killed today while attending church.

I'm horrified, and I'm disgusted, but I can't say I'm surprised. Not when all the right-wing rhetoric I've been hearing for the last 4 months has been a call to violent rebellion. Not when the "pro-life" movement has made a decades long history of using these kinds of tactics - assualts, attacks, bombings, murder - to scare doctors, and scare women, away from even medically necessary abortion. People like this are terrorists, plain and simple.

Dr. Tiller provided a vitally necessary service to thousands of women. Most women don't get late-term abortions for kicks - you don't carry a fetus for 7 months and then decide 'oh hey, I'm sick of this, abortion time!' Women get late-term abortions because their babies are dead, or dying, or have such severe birth defects they won't live after they leave the womb. Women get late-term abortions because THEIR PREGNANCY WILL KILL THEM. And even if they did do it because they just don't want to be bothered anymore...well, that is their choice. No one should be forced to have a child they don't want, and no child should be unwanted. But now those women have one less option. And since Dr. Tiller's clinic was in Wichita, Kansas, there are few enough options to begin with. What will happen to all those women? Why doesn't the pro-life movement care?

Dr. Tiller was a hero. He did a difficult job, despite the fact that he was harrassed, that he was sued, that he had to work in a clinic shielded by bullet-proof glass and hire a bodyguard to accompany him when he left. Despite the fact that he has been shot before, in 1993, by the same kind of person who killed him today - someone who doesn't really care about life, but about sex and controlling women. RIP, Dr. Tiller.

Abortion is murder? MURDER is murder, you ignorant bigoted hypocritical fucktards.

ETA: Feministe has a list of pro-choice charities you can donate money to here. I usually give to Planned Parenthood, but given the nature of this murder I'm donating to Medical Students For Choice, which funds the training of med students and residents in abortion and other reproductive health service, so that we actually have doctors who can perform the medical services we have a legal right to receive.

So, I lurk on occasion on ontd_political , since it's nice once in a while to have one's political news filtered through a lens of wank and slash loving. Also it's a good way to find less mainstream stories. Just now, I was reading this article about NY's state assembly passing an anti-bullying bill (and yay for them!), and came across this in the comments:

"I agree with this bill except for the weight and religion part.

I think children should be bullied on things that are fixable, things that can be changed. I'm obviously against bullying based on gender, sexual orientation, nationality, physical disabilities, genetic disorders etc

but weight (and sometimes) religion can be changed. and such a change, for example losing weight will better the student's life. it'll give them more confidence and make them more healthy (that is if they lose the weight in a healthy manner)

...

If I could find the people who bullied me all those years I would tell them thanks.

also kids who kill themselves because they're bullied are weak. there's more to life than grade school/high school/college. You just have to stick it out and endure it for awhile, but it's not the end of the world."

FUCK YOU. JUST...FUCK. YOU. DIE IN A FUCKING FIRE.

I know I shouldn't let myself be so bothered by something some random person on Livejournal says. I should ignore it, I should brush it off. But it does really, really bother me. I am fucking seething right now. Because I know this kind of attitude is so widespread and so common and it is horrible. I hate people who think people are bullied are just weak, that if only they would just stand up for themselves they would be fine.

Bullies do not back down just because you ask them nicely. Most of the time they don't back down if you tell them to fuck off and die. They don't go away if you ignore them. That is a lie. And it's a pernicious lie - that attitude, and the attitude of the person who said those things that there are somehow people who desrve to be bullied, it makes it so hard to be taken seriously by adults when you are being bullied. And there is nothing more painful than being a victim, and finding that your attempts to be heard and helped are ignored or dismissed.

And yes, I was bullied. I'm a bookish, overweight, poor anime geek with no dress sense or interest in pop culture, what do you think happened? In middle school, my class had a competition centered on avoiding or insulting me. One girl stalked me and threatened to kill me - a teacher intervened after I started crying in the middle of the hall after she threatened me, but she didn't stop. I will never be able to trust a guy who comes onto me or tells me I'm attractive, because so many times in elementary, middle, and even high school I've had guys come up to me and tell me their friend thinks I'm cute and wants to talk to me, or wants my number, only to run away laughing because apparently it's really fucking funny to embarrass your friend by making the fat girl think he likes her.

I want people to take this seriously. Because it is serious, and the damage it does is serious, and it won't stop until we face that.