Entries from July 2007 ↓

By Tracee Sioux

I found Chapter 1 in Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destinyboth validating and empowering. For me it was great to have my feeling of bluffing as a professional validated in a historical sense. Orman brings home the point that women have not, historically, filled the role of workers or the role of people who have their own money. When speaking of a collective conscience as females 25 years is like 5 minutes and the result is that our “new money” is still something we don’t really know how to handle yet.

This could not be more true. It’s also incredibly relevant when trying to empower a daughter. Since I am learning this for the first time I think it will be most empowering to my daughter to work out the kinks out loud. (Rather than whispering about money as previous generations have.)

Our girls need to understand that the world is still full of “firsts” for women. First woman Speaker of the House, Thanks Nancy Pelosi, first woman running for President, Thanks Hillary Clinton, etc. I think it would be a mistake not to give our daughters the historical perspective that we don’t have very much experience at incorporating work into our family lives and it’s frankly, difficult and full of sacrifices and unforeseen pitfalls.

Unrealistic expectations of perfection can be enormous burdens for women. We need to be careful not to pass our judgment about each others’ work vs. stay-at-home choices to our daughters. The most empowering thing to pass on to girls today is the awareness that they will have choices. Ideally, we can send them off into the world empowered to make either choice, whichever they feel most comfortable with or with whatever combination they can make work.

Either way, we need to send them into the world expecting to be valued whether they make money or not. Orman beings out the point that women are undervaluing themselves if they stay-at-home and don’t make money AND they are undervaluing themselves if they go out and work.

In Chapter 1 she also says this is only to be expected considering how new access to money is for women. Why would they know what to do with it or how to handle it? It’s not as if these lessons were ingrained in our collective consciousness for millennium, as they were for men. It’s a great point.

Yet, for our daughters surely we can teach them better and give them sound words about money. I know the classic psychology of say Dr. Phil would have us believe that children shouldn’t be burdened with adult things like the family finances.

I would argue that such “protection” doesn’t empower our girls to go out into the world and make good financial choices. I think we should be working out the kinks “out loud” with our kids, daughters especially. How can we help them avoid financial pitfalls if we continue our bluff or never admit to mistakes?

On my mother’s side I’m the first generation career woman. On my father’s I’m the third. Either way, that’s not much experience. But, my daughter will have me telling her what to watch for, what to think about, what to avoid and what to do. Hopefully, she won’t feel so much like she’s faking it.

For more on Chapter 1 and how we can get on the same side as women, check out BlogFabulous. By the way, this is the first time I’ve ever led a virtual book club (or any book club for that matter) so I am still working out the kinks of how to have an online conversation between two websites (maybe I should’ve just picked one, but it’s an important issue). Please cut me some slack.

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By Tracee Sioux

Your ankle better be broken.

That’s the list of things that I tried NOT to say to my five-year-old daughter while waiting to see the doctor Monday. Such thoughts make me feel like a terrible mother, not to mention a lousy human being. No one should say such things to a hurt little girl, right?

Well, what if you highly suspect that the hysterical sobbing was just a demand for attention after she’d been practically slathered in attention while on vacation? What if you are being dragged away from work by pseudo-sobbing and almost pain? What if you keep remembering the dismissive way your own parents reacted whenever you felt pain and how devaluing it is to hear, “Oh, it doesn’t hurt that bad, you’re just faking it.”

As always I bring old issues to the table and it deeply effects the current situation. My husband was unsympathetic to my empathy for her pain and my unwillingness to simply ignore and dismiss it. He believes my reaction to her hysterical sobbing about her foot should have ended with, “it doesn’t hurt that bad.” Then refusing to discuss it further by ignoring all attempts at attention-getting. What he doesn’t understand is that was my first tactic.

However, after several hours of declared pain (actually 5 days) I started to think, “what if I’m wrong? What if it is broken? What if she remembers this forever and then brings it up for the rest of her life – the time her foot was broken and mom wouldn’t take her to the doctor?” In fact, my cousin remarked, (just minutes after my daughter jumped from the top of the stairs and missed the bean bag) “I’m two for two in telling them to suck it up and having it turn out to be broken.” She’s a pediatric nurse, so I asked her how I could tell. “You can’t, it has to be x-rayed.” Her son, wearing a toe brace, made it known this kind of thing isn’t easily forgotten.

So, there I sat in the waiting room, knowing I was being played for attention and utterly furious about it. The longer I sat there the more furious I became. Then I realized my anger wasn’t really about my daughter, who is, after all, only 5-years-old and can’t discern the difference between “suck it up” pain and “go to the doctor “ pain.

My real issue is with the relationship the insured middle-class has with at the whole medical racket in general.

This is one of the ways we stay stuck, I thought. The reason we never get ahead is because I’m constantly sitting in these offices waiting for more unplanned medical bills. It’s never the co-pay is it? Well, that’s only $25. That can be absorbed. It’s all the extra crap they throw on for a couple hundred extra dollars that ruin a budget quick as light.

The doctor came in and vaguely, in a around about way, said that it probably wasn’t broken. But, he would hesitate to send me home without x-rays. “And how much is that going to cost?” I wanted to know. I’m not being sarcastic. I really, actually, want to know what the price per x-ray is. I think I’m entitled to such information considering I’m going to be required to pay the bill. I think I should have a right to assess the necessity of medical services based, in part, on the price of such services counterbalanced by the likelihood of there being a break.

Am I the only person in America who thinks doctors, clinics and hospitals should be required to disclose their prices, like every other industry in America? It’s illegal for my mechanic not to disclose his prices or give me a reasonably accurate estimate. Hairdressers post their prices on the wall. Have you ever asked a medical professional for a copy of their price sheet? They will let hell freeze over before any such information is handed over. Evidently it’s impossible to tell what the actual price of medical procedures is until the procedure is over.

Of course the doctor said he “doesn’t know.” Which, I personally, think is absurd. It is his business isn’t it? He or she does make a living off ordering medical procedures like x-rays. Wouldn’t you think you would take the time to figure out the actual price or at least a general going rate of an x-ray? I have yet to meet a doctor who actually knows what they are charging for any procedure. And let me assure you, I ask every single time. Every single time, they don’t know and they always, every time respond the same way:

“Aren’t you insured?” Or some variation like this doctor who asked if I was “under-insured” or they say, “I would imagine that your insurance covers it.”

All of which infuriates me because as I said before, what my insurance covers is relative. Relative in the sense that my insurance may cover certain procedures 80/20, but 20% of $1,000 is still $200 that I didn’t budget. Is that going to make me go bankrupt? Of course not. But it will throw our family finances off for this month and the next. That’s a couple of months we don’t save for a house, those are months we “cut back” on something else.

Then there are always the “I had my buddy look at it” bills. When I go to my hairdresser and she asks her assistant or co-worker to check out a color shade do I get a bill from her co-worker? No, I do not. When my mechanic asks his buddy to help him pull the engine from my car so he can work on it do I get a bill from his buddy? No way. So why is it acceptable for everyone in the radiologists’ office to gather around my x-ray, in which there is nothing suspicious or questionable and then individually send me a bill? Why is that ethical? Why should I pay for opinions I’ve never authorized? (Oh, but I did sign the blanket permission to treat form in order to be seen at all.)

This happened when my baby was born, this happened when the doctor ordered an MRI on me for unexplained dizziness, extra doctors and nurses send me bills when I get lab work done to test my iron levels. It happens so regularly that I believe it’s just considered “industry standard.” Add an extra $60. And if it is brokent you can count on a charge not only for the foot brace or cast, but the extra bill for whoever showed you how to put it on. God only knows whether that will be under or over $200 more.

Are all medical professionals sleazy scammers just trying to make a greedy buck? No, of course not. The doctor is motivated to order the x-rays because he doesn’t want to get sued for sending my kid home with a broken foot. As evidenced by the fact that he made it a point to tell me he was noting, “Mother refused x-rays” on the chart. He said, “Usually, I think people come to see me because they want me to order the x-ray.”

Well, I came because I want you to tell me that her foot is bruised and will feel better in a few days. I’d like to skip the unknown and unplanned costs associated with any x-rays.

The radiologists aren’t evil or malicious either. Nor are the medical billing managers.

There is no price sheet for procedures in medical offices.

There are deals made with insurance companies for how much doctors are allowed to bill them and bill the patient. The actual cost of labor and materials it takes to x-ray my daughter’s foot doesn’t have any relation to how much I’ll be billed.

The price is different for me than it is for you. The price is relative to what kind of deal the insurance company can make with the clinic’s billing staff (evidently, no doctors are involved in these negotiations because none of them have any idea how much any service costs). But their rules and regulations are so convoluted that medical professionals are, I would imagine, as mystified and frustrated as anyone else.

This is not evidence of a healthy medical system. This is evidence of a system in which no one, except the insurance company, is being served. The American people do not exist to serve insurance companies. It should be the other way around, the medical system in America should serve the people of America.

It’s NEVER just the copay. If it were, then I’d just suck it up.

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by Tracee Sioux

I find myself in a mothering predicament concerning the body weight and body image of my 5-year-old daughter.

My goal as a parent has always been to give my daughter a healthy body image. Make her feel like her body is exactly right, just as God gave it to her. Something to be taken care of, but not something to be obsessed about. At the same time, I didn’t want to be burdened with a fickle eater. In other words, she eats what I make.

Last October the pediatrician told me Ainsley was in the “red zone” for her BMI. My goal, she said, was to keep her the same weight until the next October.

The “red zone” sounded dangerous and a lot like being overweight to me. While, she doesn’t seem chubby or fat to my eyes, I don’t like the sound of that at all. I just took her to the doctor for something unrelated and she has gained 3 pounds over the last 9 months, which alarms me.

I did some research and this is how the “red zone” is being explained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

“Based on the height and weight entered, the BMI is 18.6, placing the BMI-for-age at the 94th percentile for girls aged 5 years 9 months. This child is at risk of becoming overweight.

Although not overweight right now, this child has the potential for becoming overweight so prevention of excess weight gain is important. Children and teens should NOT be placed on a weight reduction diet without the consultation of a health care provider.”

It seems difficult for me, as a mother, to determine exactly what action I should take about this. I admit to having been judgmental about mothers who refuse to allow their children sugar or sodas at birthday parties. The sugar-Nazi mom always seemed to me over-controlling and over-anxious about every little thing their children put in their mouths. Of course, their children are probably not in the BMI “red zone.” Mine is. So, now I feel bad about being judgmental about snack zealousness. I’m sorry.

Surely no one would believe that a child who loves, and I do mean loves, vegetables and fruit over anything else would be in the “red zone.” I have the type of child who begs me for the giant bag of baby spinach and profusely thanks me for the frozen fruit and carrot sticks in the grocery cart. I’m not kidding. She knows what is healthy. She chooses healthy food for most snacks. We go through a buffet line and she fills her plate with veggies and fruits. I buy the “healthier” snacks like baked chips and nuts and fruit and say “no” at least half the time to her requests. I don’t even buy juice to encourage more water drinking.

She’s also not a huge television watcher. I admit that she’s probably more sedentary than she should be. She enjoys academic kinds of fun, reading and writing and doing math puzzles. Seriously.

There is also only so much exercise to be had as a kid in America these days. Only irresponsible parents allow their kids to run around the neighborhood anymore, now that the neighborhoods are full of child molesters. (At least my neighborhood is, I looked it up on the National Sex Offender Registry) She’s pretty much limited to the front yard and her only sibling is a baby who isn’t allowed out of the house at all. She has no one to play with. Kids’ sports and activities are expensive and time consuming. She’s in soccer, but it’s the off season. I try to take her to the pool and around the track at the gym (insurance won’t allow her on the actual equipment) but it’s very frustrating for me to waste my exercise time while she goofs off. I keep writing letters asking the gym to incorporate children’s exercise so they don’t sit there watching videos while I exercise. They finally did an exercise camp, but charged an extra $50. I already pay them $70 for a “family membership,” just how much of my disposable income am I supposed to dedicate to the exercise of this family?

I do find myself struggling with an antiquated food ideology too. We regularly tell her to “finish your food,” or “stop goofing off and sit down and eat.” Mainly because you can’t imagine how annoying it is to hear complaints of “I’m hungry” every half hour. I really need to learn to say, “too bad.” Then I feel like a total hypocrite for snacking down on some baked chips or a small square of dark chocolate and not sharing.

There are a million reasons for not wanting your child to be overweight, not the least of which is this study in Radiancemagazine.com: “In a study done with six-year-old children, they were shown silhouettes of different people, then asked to talk about them. The children consistently labeled a silhouette of a fat child as ‘stupid, dirty, lazy, slow, etc.,’ regardless of the body size of the child identified in the picture.” The same study provided evidence that teachers and other adults feel exactly the same way about overweight children.

The same article on MSNBC.com sites this: Study statistics are startling. According to BodyImageHealth.org, “almost half of normal-weight third- to sixth-grade girls say they want to be thinner; a third have already restricted their eating to lose weight, and 78 percent say they are very afraid of becoming fat.” How children view themselves is strongly influenced by parental body image, and often this is set by the age of six.

I must point out the connection here. Technically, my daughter is still in the NORMAL weight category. Yet, I’ve been warned by the pediatrician that I need to watch her weight and she’s been put in an alarming sounding “red zone.” No one is ever in a good place, an okay place, or a healthy place if they are in the “red zone.” Why would you put such a dramatic color to something that is probably no big deal. Yellow would be a more appropriate color, or maybe a lovely orange. Almost alarming, but not quite. It seems logical that if the pediatrician persists in putting her in the “red zone” through the third-grade that she will pick up on my (given to me by the pediatrician) anxiety about her body weight and my monitoring of her food and activity and feel like she should be thinner. Of course she’s going to be “very afraid of becoming fat.”

After giving the issue a lot of thought I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. I’ll make a few changes to her activity level, no reading until she’s run around the house at least three times. I’ve got to put my foot down somewhere or she’ll be loathed by the other children and teachers.

Seriously, it’s important to keep in mind that the “red zone” is still normal. There’s nothing necessarily “wrong” with being on the larger side of being a normal child. I blame this on over correction of the child obesity problem. The medical profession is rightly concerned that so many children really are at an all time high for unhealthy weight. They are trying to prevent my daughter from actually having an issue by giving me a red flag “look out, potential problems ahead.”

But, using words like lose weight, watching your weight, too big, chubby, fat, and all other size-conscious words would be a huge mistake. There is potential to turn a minor potential issue into a major problem of body image.

I’ll heed their warning by sucking it up and sharing my expensive diet foods. I’ll say “no” to 75% of her snack requests rather than just half of them. My husband and I will stop insisting that she “finish eating what’s on her plate” (Seriously, come on, it’s hard not to parrot the advice our parents gave us). I’ll suck it up and pay for a few more exercise camps to tide us over until soccer season starts. Maybe I’ll get my bike fixed and take her on a bike ride once a week. I’ll take time away from work to take her to the pool several times a week.

But, I will not mention to her that she is in any body weight red zone. That would be a terrible idea which will make her feel perpetually overweight or in danger of becoming perpetually overweight for the rest of her life.

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by Tracee Sioux

No really, I am a nonsmoker!

To understand just how complete my addiction to smoking was you should read I suck, in which I explain all the f*ed up reasons I completely and totally LOVED smoking.

I credit my non-smoking success to Chantix, a new little-advertised drug that seems to have “turned-off” my addiction. I am not clear how exactly it works, but I suspect it works on the addiction receptor of the brain. You smoke for the first week and then you don’t want to smoke anymore. My own unscientific opinion is that smoking during the first week clues in the brain that this is the addiction that needs to be turned off. I am not a doctor so I can’t get more scientific than that. But, I think there has been ample evidence to suggest that when a person becomes addicted to something whether it’s a drug, alcohol or cigarettes there is a brain receptor which becomes “miswired” if you will and tells your brain “you must have this to lead a happy life.”

In addiction recovery, they call it addict thinking or stinking thinking. In recovery one of the things you might learn is how to will yourself into a different thought process. While your brain continues to say, “You need a cigarette,” you try to change the thinking to “cigarettes are bad for me” through repetition. It’s effective, but it’s a painful and tiresome process. It could take literally years of determinedly praying and willing for this method to really be effective. Those years, to my recollection of being dependent on anti-anxiety medication, are painful ones. In no way do they not suck. This pill, Chantix, took 2 months to change the actual thought process about my smoking addiction.

I feel completely cured of my 20 year addiction to cigarettes. I took this twice-daily pill for two months and I have no more need for cigarettes. I even went to visit my whole family for an entire week with a baby in a mini-van, usually a major trigger for me, and didn’t even think about smoking. At no time did I want to kill any one of my relatives and no one wanted to kill me, at least not because I was jonesing for a smoke. Before, every time I tried to quit smoking my husband would stash one around the house to toss at me when he felt he couldn’t take anymore crap without considering murder or divorce. (Total enabler.)

Considering my previous obsession and/or addiction to smoking my liberation from the habit is a miracle. Not a minor one either. The misery, crankiness, irritability of “trying to quit” for several years was terrible. Simply the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about them as something I needed, (even after quitting for nine months at a time during pregnancies) is a testament to how addicted I felt. After taking Chantix for an easy two months it is as though the addiction has been turned off. Also, I noticed that my desire for other addictive substances is being effected. For instance, my desire for drinking a beer or having a glass of wine has also been greatly reduced.

The relevant piece of information for the non-smoking general public here is that an addiction might be “cured” through medication. Think of the freedom this would provide for millions of people in America and around the world. If Chantix can do this for smokers, what might a similar drug do for the alcoholic? What about the crystal-meth addict? What about people in chronic pain from illness or injuries who avoid taking addictive medications they might safely use if there were a cure for addiction?

Who doesn’t know an addict? Who doesn’t love an addict? Who prays that their own addict might overcome their addiction? Think of all the people who wouldn’t be in prison if they had freedom from their addictions? We could save millions of tax-payer dollars by curing people of their addictions with medication like Chantix. In 2007 alone the President’s Drug Control Budget called for $12.9 billion to continue the war on drugs. Think of all the families that might be saved, divorces that might be avoided, children who wouldn’t be abandoned, financial ruin that might be skirted if there was a cure for other addictions. Addicts might once again become productive citizens as opposed to the criminals addictions make them become.

I’m someone who has walked the path of being addicted and using substances to pacify feelings until becoming dependent on them. I can speak from a place where I know that addictions can be overcome through Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, therapy, faith, prayer, changes in lifestyle, stress management, rehab and just plain holding on to your ass through recovery, but it’s not as easy as it looks. Some people just don’t have it in them to do it without medication. Many die, many go to prison, many lose their children, many lose themselves, many stay shackled to their addictions even through sobriety, all are at-risk for relapse.

Medications like Chantix could prove to be a break-through in one of the most destructive health epidemics ever experienced – addiction.

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