Something fishy

The premature death of the Burdett Birth Center is not just a broken promise, it is an abject example of short-sightedness.

Breathed into life as a compromise, the stand-alone obstetrics and gynecologic facility was the product of the 2011 merger of Samaritan – the last secular hospital in Rensselaer County – with the religiously-affiliated hospital conglomerate St. Peter’s Health Partners. In addition to offering prenatal and birth services in Rensselaer County, in a stand-alone space, the Burdett Center vowed to offer preventive reproductive care unaligned with the Catholic doctrines of its parent company.

Somehow that promise only lived for a decade, and only on a single floor of the center’s facilities. It reneged altogether two years ago, when, citing the economic hardships of the pandemic, Burdett officials "reabsorbed" the floor into the operations of the remainder of the facility.

It seemed it was a viability issue, then as well. 

They just couldn’t afford to ensure women had access to some reproductive health services. Especially, it would seem, the ones that didn't align with the church. 

And now, Burdett can’t afford to supply any of its clinical services to the community, including the urban and rural folks we know to be medically underserved, and for whom traveling longer distances for appropriate care is a burden. 

Perhaps nothing can prove the failure of profit-driven care more than the disappearance of birthing centers like Burdette.

As we crest the first anniversary of Dobbs, a decision that holds that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; and that precedents Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey are overruled, we are in nothing short of chaos. 

Patients are having to travel, placing strain on the healthcare system.

Doctors are now worried about being prosecuted for performing critical and necessary care.

People in need of miscarriage treatment are being turned away from hospitals until they get sick enough to warrant life-saving care.

The courts, out of ideological hubris, have imperiled the Federal Government’s ability to regulate prescription drugs, like mifepristone, creating panic for women and providers in states that have codified a woman's right to care.

And it will only get worse.

Dobbs will mean fewer doctors to care for pregnant patients. Fewer doctors mean worse health outcomes for women and families.

Women will suffer even in states that have professed a commitment to better health outcomes. We can already see it in our own backyard.

We can’t prioritize live birth without prioritizing their mothers.

When will we deliver on those promises?

Maybe never.

Last week we also learned another member of the Supreme Court has shown himself to be an unethical rube. A photograph at the top of the story showed Samuel Alito, flanked by his moneyed friends, smiling for the camera as he held up a trophy catch. 

ProPublica was reporting the justice took substantial gifts from people who had business before the court and had not reported them on his financial disclosures. The piece laid out the timeline of an Alaskan fishing trip gifted to Alito and paid for by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer.

But before that report was filed, Alito busied himself by writing off these perceived moral and ethical shortcomings in an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal. Certain the important people would understand that a Supreme who is so fervent in his conservative beliefs can’t be corrupted by the equally conservative friends who, as it seems, keep him. 

He believes a person would have to be unreasonable and biased to doubt his impartiality in cases where other federal workers would be required to recuse themselves.

Furthermore, it seems from the reporting, Alito is just another high court judge who doesn’t think laws apply to him but who remains unequivocally sure that the Constitution does not protect women’s right to decide their own health care.

He can not conceive of how reproductive healthcare connects with the founders’ three stated declarations of inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And that he’s entitled to the gift of a luxury fishing trip from a person with business before the court because “a seat, (on the private jet) that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.” 

It sounds more like the reasoning of a petulant child than a justice on the highest court of the land. 

The short-sightedness of our leaders in justice and health shouldn’t be so surprising. Yet here we are.

On Time

it's Regents week. And it feels like I'm being tested. 

The boy, you see, is not like the girl.

He has not made spreadsheets with multi-colored sticky notes nor has he committed the schedule to memory.

He will fly by the seat of his pants, knowing full and well someone else is responsible for the laundry. 

I tried to decipher the schedule but felt like a needed a translator. 

“I thought you said you had biology today? I don't see biology on the list.” 

“It's there, but for some reason, they called the test “Living Space.”

Not that he could laugh, since he needed a timekeeper, as we'd already been to school and back twice, since he thought the exam was in the morning rather than midday. 

It had been that kind of day for me, too. The kind where everything that could go wrong had gone wrong.

Nothing major. Just little things …

Although waking up to find we were out of caffeinated coffee should have tipped me off to the way the chips might fall.

I would get through it, but it would be a slog.

Like you had to make six trips between the house and car to gather all the piecemeal things you forgot the first-through-fifth times you tried to get on the road.

And then you can't find your glasses, because they're on top of your head.

And then you get every light. The only thing left to navigate around is a slow-moving tractor. 

Oddly, the farm vehicle never materialized. 

“Are you here yet?”

Had he been in the car with me, and also a kindergartener, we may have laughed for a minute, knowing what the adult parent driving might have said for the four-hundredth time.

I mustered none of my dwindling self-control as I dictated a response for Siri to relay: “I am somewhere,” wink-wink, nod-nod emoticon. “I could be here yet, but also I could be there yet, too.”

The urge overwhelmed my sensibilities, however, and I sent the response off with a tell-tale Whoosh!

I deserved the 🙄 that he sent in response. 

Although I suspect that my absence from the curb where he waits in the pick-up line after school had more to do with it than my droll wit.

When he gets in the car he'll remind me of all the other times I'd forgotten something. Like the time I packed up the car with the little man’s baseball gear, and headed for practice … only to be told by his older sister that I had forgotten to pack him, the shortstop. 

Major-league mistake.

But when I arrive he's all smiles. Two of his friends jump out of the bushes and the three of them commandeer the backseat. 

“It's ok?” He asks. I nod. 

“Where are we headed,” I ask, flipping an imaginary meter and pulling out into the stream of test-day traffic. 

“Well … it's hard to explain. I just tell you when you need to turn.”

Now, let's see if I can find a slow-moving farm truck.

After the smoke clears

 As the quality of the air over the northeast hovered between "unhealthy" and "hazardous earlier this week," the result of drifting smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires, I tried to remain calm.

I know I wasn't alone. As native east-coasters, we aren't used to seeing air quality maps bleeding orange and purple into our allergy alerts, let alone deciphering what they mean. 

I believe we (those of us who are old enough to measure time in half centuries, anyway) have sensed the climate tipping our experience of the world toward calamity for decades. 

Even believers didn't want to believe. 

Still, this blood-orange sky turning mid-day into dusk seemed more than just another novelty. More than a fleeting catastrophe that visits once every hundred years …

It seemed important. Like something I should record for posterity, just as I had with the kids' first steps and their smiles before and after braces. A memory I might post to Facebook so it might remind me of it in a few years' time. 

The part of me fumbling in my pocket for my camera wanted to believe this ominous air was more of an oddity than an omen. 

But I couldn't get a picture of the orange or amber in the sky.

No matter how I held my phone - up, down, sideways - the color above me washed away when I pressed the shutter. The sepia sky was seemingly erased.

As the week wore on, I dug out the masks I’d shelved as the pandemic subsided. It felt strange to wear one outside … the one place that, for most of the last three years, felt safe to be bare-faced. But it did its job, helping me breathe a little easier by cutting the smell of wildfire in the air.

I have to give credit to the wiser west coasters who witnessed us unravel, and who dished advice based on their extensive experience with fire-affected air quality, with heaping helpings of concern instead of derision.

This is a club no one wants to join.

They spoke about the benefits of closing windows, putting home air purifiers in your bedroom, and making other small changes to your routine, such as showering at night.

We celebrated when, after four days, the wind began to shift revealing the sky’s lightest blue. 

And when we smelled the scents of the newly bloomed peonies, instead of char and ash, it felt a little like recovering from that other pandemic.

But we aren’t out of those woods.

Because Canada isn’t out of the woods.

And as our index declines, their numbers rise. The fires continue to burn. Maybe even throughout the summer.

But it will end. And a sense of normalcy will resume once more. 

When it does we hope the thousands of people who have had to evacuate their homes find them standing unharmed or with the help they need to rebuild.

Until another wildfire season begins somewhere else...

We can only hope for resiliency and compassion. 

Because we will all need it now more than ever.

Walk it off

 "Keep your eye on the ball."

That's what I was thinking as I hugged the edge of the trail, knowing it would soon turn from farmland to baseball field.
My slow jog was made even slower by the sounds of the game up ahead.

I had already procrastinated my way to this moment, saving the decision to continue a two-day-old running streak with a single loop around the neighborhood until the sun had just begun to sink.

As I reached the field a kid was stepping to the plate. I took my eyes off the path ahead, not to watch the pitch but to follow the ball should the batter slug it over the fence in my direction.

A swing and a miss.

I should have returned my gaze to the path ahead but I kept focused on the batter waiting for windup.
I'd seen enough leather-covered orbs of unyielding twine hit unintended targets with frightful force. There was that time at the stadium once, when an errant ball sailed past the ear of a knee-bounced toddler only to come to an abrupt stop into the shoulder of his knee-bouncing dad.

There was also the line drive that made its way past the protective gate on my son's helmet and into his jaw, somehow, miraculously, leaving a baseball-shaped bruise (complete with stitching) but also leaving all of his teeth intact. 
The pitch never came.

That's when my surroundings went sideways: green grass turned into blue sky and landed with a thud on the blacktop. I heard my teeth click together and felt the skin on my hands and shins grind against the asphalt.

For a moment that seemed endless, I lay in a heap trying to recover my breath and the composure that the fall had knocked out of me.

It may have taken only seconds to realize in my “baseball-ready” state I had drifted to the edge of the pavement and fallen off of it like a high-stacked heel. But the more I lay there the less I felt I might recover. I had to get up.

My left hand felt all sorts of wrong, but I used it to help my right hand push me into a standing position.

"Walk it off," I thought to myself as I saw all the people draped against the fences, dozens of them passively watching the game but actively ignoring the woman who had just gone "ass" over the proverbial "kettle."

"Walk. It. Off," said the voice in my head a little louder.

I started walking. And using my good hand, I felt all the bones of the bad one, pressing each one from distal phalanges to the carpals, taking deep breaths. I was mildly reassured by the absence of sharp pain. 

Of course, that's when I see the blood. Not a huge amount. But it's dark red and oozing from the patch of skin that is now dangling from the edge of my palm.

"Just a flesh wound," I guffaw aloud with the equally painful airs of an unconvincing British accent.
It would be ok, I told myself.

"Just. Walk. Faster." 

And that's when my inner voice hears the crack of a bat and the crowd erupting in applause.
It tells me to "Run."

"But keep your eyes on the road."

Which I am now happy to do.