Where the Rubber Meets the Road
Well, here we are — the harsh reality of the future has arrived, and it could not be fully anticipated until it got here. On the list of personal dope slap moments comes the first time when I realize I…
Category Health
Unilateral withdrawal
… But hoping for bilateral re-entry again by Christmas time. Thinking back to the surgery on the left hand a year ago April: at least for the first several days, I’ll have to keep my arm elevated to shoulder height…
Deer in the Headlights
One week. That’s exactly how long I have, pretty much to the hour, before I learn (or not) to go without using my right hand for very much. I am scheduled for surgery on October 11, for the other-side version…
Building Better Bees
I sort of miss the latitude of topic possible when, for a brief time, I toyed with the idea of writing a novel. It was going to follow the life-unfoldings  between two friends who diverged after high school. One’s world…
Tires, Turmoil and Toxic Stress
I just bookmarked and read a speculative piece by Richard Louv, (Nature’s Neurons) who wonders aloud about the impact on young brains of growing up apart from the natural world. As much as that lack, natural elements have been replaced…
The Skinny
It was a tough call. Would I rather have had two lumpish hags working over every square inch of my hospital-gowned self at the dermatology exam or the two svelte foxy blondes–the LNP and an intern from Carolina–that ganged up…
Our World: A Caricature of Itself
If it wasn’t so frighteningly real and serious, it would be downright entertaining. Today’s personalities, politics and planetary foibles are so bizarre and distorted and unimaginable in a former time that they seem more like the work of a deranged…
Blue Smoke and Mirrors
While there are those who think too much is made of the nuclear situation in Japan, I continue to have concerns. That the soil levels of cesium 134 and 137 are more than 100 times the levels in the Mandatory…
Thumbs Up: One Year Anniversary
A year ago this hour I was getting a new thumb joint. Some of you will remember. After putting off the inevitable for too long, the dreaded surgery turned out to be a minor agony (no post-op pain) and a…
Treatment Worse Than the Disease? Tick Drops
I would love to be thinking about a hundred other things this morning that blood-sucking, disease-spreading arthropods. But we keep pulling tiny grazers off our own hides, and extracting deeply-embedded ticks off the dog. And it promises to be a…
Why Gramma’s Got the Blues
Maybe a year ago, I installed a free app called FLUX on my computer, making that decision based on what little I knew about the role of light–especially light wavelength–on daily cycles of hormones and other essential biology related to…
Food For Thought: Our Diet is Killing Us
If the information in Forks Over Knives is accurate (and I have no reason at the moment to believe otherwise), and IF Americans responded by changing their lifestyles and diets to achieve the reduction in cancer, diabetes, heart disease and…
Any Fat Kids in Your 8th Grade Class?
It has not been too long that someone I went to grammar school with sent me a copy of a photograph of my 8th grade class, standing on the steps in the front of Minnie Holman Elementary (RIP) in Birmingham,…
The Buzz on Honeybee Health in 2011
What with the extremes of temperature and rainfall, and cursed by more than the usual cadre of pests in the vegetable garden this year, it was not a stellar season. But it will be a memorable summer for this one…