One pill to change it all.

The things you learn when you farm news for pharmaceutical companies: Sunday is the 50th anniversary of FDA approval of the birth-control pill. (What? You say it’s in USA Today? Well, I saw that days ago.)

I also saw this about the same time. It’s an essay by Jonathan Rauch in the National Journal, which sets out to explain the seeming paradox of blue-state divorce rates — they’re the lowest in the nation — and ends up explaining a lot more about the so-called culture war. It does it without resorting to the usual accusatory and/or defensive language. And while you may have a different take on it, to my mind the nut graf was this:

For generations, American family life was premised on two facts. First, sex makes babies. Second, low-skilled men, if they apply themselves, can expect to get a job, make a living, and support a family.

It’s the third sentence that interests me, because it’s a truth that gets overlooked too often, especially by the chattering classes, because it doesn’t apply to them. But it’s at the heart of everything, and it boils down to this: The social contract is broken. The old deal used to be that if you had a great idea, you could get rich, but if all you could was work hard — and there was no shame in being nothing but a hard worker — you could still make a living, and that living could support your family. Not so much anymore.

But that’s not really what the essay is about. It’s about the two things that upended the apple cart — the global information economy and the birth-control pill — and how two groups of Americans, which you can call red and blue for lack of a better term — have dealt with it. It’s not perfect as social theory — it ignores religion, for the most part — but it gets the big things right, and it’s not a terribly long read.

And that is all I can leave you with today. I’m still midway through my food prep, and I have a meeting, a doctor’s appointment, a happy hour and a middle-school dance to fit in around a trip to Costco for the dessert. Sorry, Laura — while bread pudding is a splendid idea for dessert (and shows your growing NOLA attachment — it’s going to be a big mess of cookies made by someone else. At least that’s if the traditional wrap dessert in our little crew (PIE, GLORIOUS PIE) is going to happen.

Have a great weekend.

Posted at 8:46 am in Current events |
 

40 responses to “One pill to change it all.”

  1. brian stouder said on May 7, 2010 at 9:22 am

    (What? You say it’s in USA Today? Well, I saw that days ago.)

    Well, Ms Fancy Pants, this past weekend I watched a surprisingly heated discussion on C-SPAN with regard to ‘the pill’, between a professor (from Wisconsin/Madison?) whose book about it just came out, and her somewhat hostile interviewer (who I think was hooked in with some Focus on the Family or Heritage Foundation-type rightwing think tank). Soon enough the argument itself was less interesting than watching how the professor kept her cool, while the interviewer went steadily further off the rails.

    By way of saying – I knew this a week ago!!

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  2. Sammy said on May 7, 2010 at 9:30 am

    Pie, oh, yum! Have you tried the pie crust with vodka substituted for half the ice water? Makes a fine, fine crust….

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  3. coozledad said on May 7, 2010 at 9:30 am

    There’s also the entrenchment of skimmers as a class, with their own free market Jesus to justify their existence. And they profess to love Adam Smith, except when he says the invisible hand just itches to smack them down. It’s gotten to the point where they believe government exists merely to protect them from the hideous reality they’ve spawned.

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  4. Jenflex said on May 7, 2010 at 9:45 am

    Sammy! A fellow Cooks Illustrated afficionado, I see!

    Ditto on the vodka crust, Nancy.

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  5. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 7, 2010 at 9:48 am

    Well, he said grimly, for broad social theory, you can pretty safely ignore religion. Don’t tell James Dobson, but Brian McLaren has figured it out. It will be back, maybe even in terms of Christian believers, and global affairs are driven by religion as a transaxle for culture, but in American terms, there’s not much trend shifting or shaping coming out of religious contexts.

    On a granular level, you need to take faith commitments into account to explain many individual choices, but I think Rauch rightly overlooks religion in the overview he’s taking. Do I think the irrelevance of religion and church is a good thing? No, but that’s got nothing to do with whether or not it’s the case.

    The religious right as formal movements, typified by “Focus on the Family,” has kidded itself about its influence, ridden that mythic horse into some lucrative fundraising pastures, and spooked a few politicans, but they’re counting on the innate incremental conservatism of American middle classes to screen their essential toothlessness. The liberal denominational offices rail at their lack of social clout, while still making statements and “organizing” efforts that pretend to have the capacity to move social trends.

    There’s a stratum of self-sacrificial giving and commitment to the most vulnerable and intergenerational community out in congregational life among many traditions, but it’s unmoored from any comprehensive structures (and dangerously vulnerable to cultural trends). How or when they’ll reconnect to a larger tradition I can’t say, but they are so swamped by a liberal/conservative mush of marketing driven drivel and moralistic therapeutic deism on all sides they often don’t show up on any radar screens as a moving force. They’re out there, though, which is my one encouraging thought on the day.

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  6. Linda said on May 7, 2010 at 10:15 am

    One of the commentators on Lawyers, Guns, and Money (I forget which one), made a claim that relates to this. He said that marriage in medieval times was important to upper classes, because it solidified wealth between two affluent people and kept it in their families, while marriage was less important to peasants. Now that we are devolving into a firmly have/have not society, the lower working–and non-working–classes have little to gain from marriage, and few resources to consolidate and protect, and so they don’t bother with marriage.

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  7. alex said on May 7, 2010 at 10:18 am

    Sorta dovetails with the recent Rekers discussion. Blue state gays favor romantic love; red staters sneak around with rentboys.

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  8. Dorothy said on May 7, 2010 at 10:45 am

    The Pill/Kenyon connection: Dr. Carl Djerassi graduated from Kenyon in 1943 (Wikipedia says a year before; I’d trust our records instead of theirs).

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Djerassi

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  9. apocalipstick said on May 7, 2010 at 10:51 am

    I was talking to my dad the other day and he said, “When I got married, I didn’t want much. I wanted a house with a little land, a son, and a job that would let me support him. And I wanted to sing.” Thanks to a union job at a canning plant, he had all of those by the time he was 22 (well, the singing came courtesy of church, but still…). He is one of the finest, most honorable and caring men I’ve ever known, and it kills me to think that if he were 21 again today he’d struggle.

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  10. 4dbirds said on May 7, 2010 at 12:12 pm

    I’ve noticed a theme among the ‘haves’ that they work hard and are therefore entitled, totally forgetting that many if not most of the ‘have nots’ work hard or even harder.

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  11. brian stouder said on May 7, 2010 at 12:20 pm

    Nance’s USA Today link is actually not bad, and in fact references the calm scholarly woman who was on C-SPAN.

    In her new book, America and The Pill, University of Minnesota historian Elaine Tyler May calls Sanger and wealthy women’s-rights activist Katharine McCormick, who were in their 70s when they joined forces in the 1950s, the mothers of the pill. They’re the ones who pushed and funded the scientists, namely Carl Djerassi, Gregory Pincus and John Rock, who were credited with inventing it.

    “They knew that women could not achieve full equality unless they had control over their reproductive lives,” May writes.

    I think I shall have to get her book. This 50 year anniversary is interesting; I presume there must be a 40th (or so) coming soon, for VCRs; and another for cell phones.

    And indeed, we’re on the cusp of a whole series of 150th anniversaries, as we roll through the next few years, with regard to our ‘dissatisfied countrymen’ and the catastrophic civil war they inaugurated upon us, a month after President Lincoln was inagurated.

    It will be sublime to see this unfold during the administration of our latest president from Illinois, on many levels; and it will be interesting to watch how today’s crackers deal with it.

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  12. Deborah said on May 7, 2010 at 12:37 pm

    totally off topic, but a couple of blocks north of my office on State is an Old Navy. A guy walked in and shot his girlfriend and then himself. I think both of them are dead. State St is crazy right now. Cops everywhere, people screaming.

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  13. nancy said on May 7, 2010 at 12:41 pm

    Re: Linda @ 6: That’s true — marriage doesn’t seem to offer working- and lower-middle-class people much, and so they don’t bother. But it does, it really does, and that’s where I miss the religion factor in this discussion. We talk a lot here about religion’s pernicious effects, but not enough about its virtues, and here’s one where it helps, supporting two people just starting out in life, aiding them through the rough spots and approving of their, for lack of a better phrase, “good choices.”

    We are gradually losing the middle class and becoming more binary, but we’re not there yet, and while the sort of union work that made Detroit the most successful working class city in the world (for a while) is gone, it’s still possible to start as, say, a bagger in a grocery store and work your way up to manager in not too many years, and from there, who knows? There’s still a lot of success out there for people willing to work hard and not necessarily get a master’s degree, but it’s harder to find.

    On edit: Bad news, Deborah. The Star 80 model of relationship resolution. Shudder.

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  14. alex said on May 7, 2010 at 12:44 pm

    Brian, I don’t know if you’ve seen the latest issue of Old Fort News but there’s a great article in there by John Beatty, one of the head genealogy librarians, about the 1860 election and Stephen Douglas’ visit to Fort Wayne. It talks about the various local newspapers of the time and how each catered to certain prejudices, mostly vile ones.

    No worry about another civil war. The teabaggers are all bark and no bite and the Indiana GOP primary just delivered us the status quo. To wit, our Republican senatorial candidate in today’s News-Sentinel:

    Shaking hands and smiling at the crowd, Coats told the audience of about 40 people that he would have been happy to stay in retirement if it wasn’t for the current administration in Washington. He said he was tired of leadership that “runs around the world singing Kumbaya,” and added, “I believe in peace through strength.”

    See, just a cynical schmuck, not one of the Joe the Plumber rising stars in the statehouse.

    On edit: Not to take away from what Nance says above, but it occurs to me that marriages tend to be happier when people live in societies where they’re relatively free to choose who they want to be with, unconstrained by too much familial and religious interference. Those whose marriage choices are narrowly limited by such constraints are much less likely to be genuinely satisfied, imho. This is the crux of the cultural divide.

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  15. Peter said on May 7, 2010 at 1:29 pm

    Ooh, this hits a raw nerve. One of the arguments in the illegal immigrant debate is that the Mexicans do the jobs that we don’t want to do. That’s only partly true; one reason nobody else wants to do those jobs is that THEY DON’T PAY SHIT!! If the folks who vent on homosexuality and promiscuity would just act as responsible humane beings that value labor and pay equitable wages instead of just exploiting people for all they’re worth we would have the family values that they crave.

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  16. Jim Neill said on May 7, 2010 at 1:34 pm

    I don’t know, Alex. Over the years I’ve met some couples in arranged marriages, where the partners had no say in choosing their mate, and they seemed to be happy. Maybe they were the exception, but I suspect that their cultural support system had a lot to do with making the marriage a success.

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  17. Sue said on May 7, 2010 at 2:02 pm

    Sort of off-topic –
    My local paper has a front-page article on our State representative’s announcement regarding the legislation he’s working on. He wants a Wisconsin law similar to Arizona’s, because…
    oh, dear, this man is such a moron…
    because now that all the illegals are fleeing AZ we have to make sure they don’t come to Wisconsin.
    Of course! That’s the first place they’ll hide! Such vigilance is to be commended.
    This is the guy who sent out a newsletter with an article on what happens when you start giving up your freedoms. It included fake pie charts.
    On another off-topic subject –
    Snow is forecast tonight. Only a little here, 3 – 5 inches in Northern WI.

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  18. Joe Kobiela said on May 7, 2010 at 2:16 pm

    Peter,
    Your right they don’t pay shit, but if you want to keep eating relativly cheap poultry, beef, and eggs,those are the type workers you’ll get. I wouldn’t want to work for Min wage doing those jobs. You raise the wage, you raise the cost to the consumer.
    Pilot Joe

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  19. coozledad said on May 7, 2010 at 2:37 pm

    The administration is preparing to investigate the reasons for yesterday’s meltdown, but one of the commentators at Roy’s, BigHank 53, already has it nailed, I think. Hopefully they’ll include his findings in the final report:
    “Here’s what happened to the stock market: some clever, clever people thought they’d write automated stock-trading programs to sell stuff faster than those old-fashioned shmoes who had to pick up the phone and call somebody. And then they gave their computers a lot of money and went out to snort coke and compare the boob jobs on their Russian hookers. And the computers sold a whole lot of stuff before anyone unplugged them.

    And now those clever, clever people are wiping their noses and pointing fingers everywhere except at those servers in the basement…”

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  20. Jeff Borden said on May 7, 2010 at 2:39 pm

    Several years ago the Wall Street Journal had a reporter working on a series where he worked the worst kinds of jobs for minimum wage. What some of our poorest laborers do to put food on the table and a roof over the head of their children would probably lead me to commit suicide. I particularly recall the reporter’s stint on a processing line in a chicken plant, where the temperature was kept quite cold, the blood was an inch or more deep on the floor and the bird carcasses never slowed down. He talked of the ache in his arms and wrists from cutting those birds, the stench of mottled blood, the cold that burrowed into his bones and remained. . .it was worse than anything Dante ever envisioned. Oh, I almost forgot. The bathroom breaks were monitored, too, lest any of the poor bastards tried to sneak a couple of extra minutes on company time.

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  21. Deborah said on May 7, 2010 at 3:03 pm

    Jeff B, one of the Tom Wolfe novels describes working in a frozen food factory, that seemed like hell frozen over. I forget which novel it was.

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  22. Linda said on May 7, 2010 at 3:14 pm

    Pilot Joe:
    A good book to read re: the sinking wages of food processors is Methland, in which the author ties in the consolidation of money and power into the hands of a few in food production and processing, and the terrible wages and why meth that makes you a “good worker” under those terrible conditions–at least for awhile. Cheap food and goods are not as cheap as they look. The whole economy and social fabric are sinking in the undertow.

    Nancy: I have mixed feelings on the effect of religion on marriages. I have had too many abused female relatives told to take one for the team and stay married to their drunken, abusive spouse because it would be a terrible sin for them to walk out. Sometimes they took it for 40-50 years. And in the deep South, I think the high divorce rate is partly caused by the refusal to believe that your fling might have been a mistake, instead of “true love.” So, rather than breaking up, people marry their romantic mistakes, thinking this makes a relationship legit. No, it just makes it legal, and a real mess to break up.

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  23. Jeff Borden said on May 7, 2010 at 3:42 pm

    Deborah,

    You’re thinking of “A Man in Full,” where one of the characters did indeed work inside a frozen foods warehouse. He’s the guy who is sent to prison after trying to liberate his car from a towing yard, where he gets into a fight with the security people. Quite by accident, he discovers the philosophy of Epictetus inside prison and this leads him eventually to link up with the disgraced Atlanta real estate developer at the heart of the novel.

    Wolfe’s depiction of life inside that medium-security prison is incredibly, indelibly powerful, particularly when you think of the author as a dandy in white spats. Sadly, like all the Wolfe novels I’ve read, this one had a terrible ending that just kind of fizzled out, but some of the individual passages still can raise goosebumps.

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  24. Sue said on May 7, 2010 at 3:44 pm

    Linda, in 1930 life expectancy in the US was 59.7 years. In 2005 it was 77.8. That’s 18 more years of married hell if you belong to a take one for the team religion.
    But in all fairness, most of the people I know in bad marriages aren’t staying because their religion tells them they have to.

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  25. Dexter said on May 7, 2010 at 5:09 pm

    The latest viral video finally reached me this morning and I have been sick from it all day. If you choose to watch it, I’ll warn you it is disturbing, as a S.W.A.T. squad busts into a family dwelling and shoots the dogs as a starter.
    This part isn’t on the video, but the talk I heard indicated all that the guy had was a pipe with a trace of pot residue in it..that’s all. This is just wrong…a little boy has to see his pets murdered by military-style cops over a trace in a pipe?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbwSwvUaRqc

    Here is something else I learned from the TV today: in the Lawrence Taylor case involving a statutory rape charge in New York, it was said that just for the act of accepting services of a prostitute, letting alone the fact that this prostitute was 16, but just for saying “yes” to a whore, that is a misdemeanor and the maximum penalty includes a YEAR in jail. A year? Yes.
    And remember, disgraced NY former guv Eliot Spitzer wasn’t even charged with anything.

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  26. Jeff Borden said on May 7, 2010 at 5:36 pm

    Dexter,

    I saw that video the other day. The bust occurred in Columbia, Missouri and it’s horrible but not particularly uncommon. In fact, this kind of activity goes on constantly as police departments continue to prosecute the ludicrous war on drugs, particularly marijuana. In this case, the cops were acting on a warrant that was 10-days-old, which the police chief now admits was “stale.” The chief is defending the killing of the pit bull, saying it was acting in a threatening manner toward the SWAT team, which most dogs would do if a bunch of strangers broke down a door in the middle of the night. The pet Corgi was wounded in the paw and apparently was collateral damage.

    Context is everything and, apparently, the man whose house was raided had been arrested in the past for distributing cocaine. I can even understand shooting the poor dog if it was snarling and snapping.

    But what cannot be forgotten is the absolute and utter insanity of our “war on drugs.” We piss away billions every year. More than 600,000 people are incarcerated for marijuana-related offenses nationwide. Mexican drug cartels are buying entire provinces with the money they earn selling north of the Rio Grande. But aside from the occasional libertarian, nary a soul questions the ongoing commitment to this travesty.

    Efforts to ban alcohol helped create and nurture the Mafia. You’d think we’d have learned a good lesson from that act of stupidity, but clearly, we have not.

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  27. paddyo' said on May 7, 2010 at 5:44 pm

    Jeez, gang, should a new reader come upon today’s thread(s), he/she might conclude that this great land of ours has its priorities very seriously f–ked up.

    That new reader would, of course, be very seriously correct.

    But thanks, Nance, for picking the scab off that suppurating sore that is the broken social contract. Until we find a way to fix that one (firing squads on Wall Street, maybe?!), it’s tough muddling through the rest, inn’it . . .

    Try to have a good weekend in spite of it, everybody . . .

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  28. brian stouder said on May 7, 2010 at 6:30 pm

    You know, I don’t think there’s ever been a ‘social contract’ at all; although the term works as a sort of rhetorical construct, defining what people should expect.

    Consider the early 20th century factory/mill workers, who got paid spit, had no expectation of a safe working environment, could be fired for any reason, and – if they organized and struck, could find themselves at the mercy of mercenary armies of Pinkertons and the like (if not the police)

    I think that the post-war period – more or less ending in the ’70’s – was a marvelous anomaly. It seems that dusk has fallen (with regard to working class economic power), and we’re headed into the night, when it comes to hard work being valued.

    It seems that the prevailing impulse at the top of the richest corporate organizations is to depreciate the “human assets”, and actively deprecate doing one scintilla more for them than they must, let alone what they already do (thinking health care here)….and this is not new.

    The problem with calling President Obama a power mad “socialist”, is it begs the question – what is the head of British Petroleum (McKay?)? What do we think of a person who runs a firm that racks up a $5.5,000,000,000 PROFIT (not gross revenue); 5 and a half billion dollars profit in 12 weeks of operations – which (we are told) is a nearly sacred thing for “their share holders”; it is their success, and they get to keep it all, and do with it what they like, and how dare anyone try and tell them what they must do in their daily operations….and when things go utterly to hell, and all the affected property owners along the gulf coast and small business people suddenly lose all they have – the consequences are for them!!

    If BP was an international terrorist organization, they couldn’t top this spill of theirs (except by repeating it)

    By way of saying – there SHOULD be a “social contract”; yet everytime someone tries to actually work on one, the derisive cry “socialist!!” goes up, and many thoughtless people begin to bob their heads in agreement with the derision…UNTIL it’s THEIR turn in the barrel (so to speak).

    I must be tired, today

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  29. Holly said on May 7, 2010 at 6:53 pm

    I have been away for awhile. I started reading Nancy again and what are the topics. Petrified Poop and Vodka Pie Crust. I love reading this blog. You all bring a smile to my face.

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  30. LAMary said on May 7, 2010 at 7:02 pm

    Jeff B., our “war on drugs” is helping keep the violent Mexican drug wars going. Possibly worse than the mafia.

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  31. moe99 said on May 7, 2010 at 9:38 pm

    Back from my second opinion at Seattle Cancer Care. I love that oncologist. Anyone named Renato from Brazil is a god in my book. The fact that he’s on top of his game, knows where the clinical trials are that I can participate in, if I get the tumor tested (which Group Health has been resisting all along) and it turns out ok. Well, this is far better than the handwringing I endured last week. At least this guy is aggressive and he has some ideas (not to mention a very lovely accent). But I digress….

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  32. MichaelG said on May 7, 2010 at 9:50 pm

    That’s wonderful, Moe. I’m so pleased to hear some encouragement.

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  33. Rana said on May 7, 2010 at 10:10 pm

    Oh, good to hear that, moe. 🙂

    I think that the post-war period – more or less end­ing in the ’70’s – was a mar­velous anom­aly.

    Yup. Having just taught this period, I can confirm this. And it was also heavily skewed in terms of gender and race – basically, if you were a white man (and preferably a middle-class vet) you had it made. Women, on the other hand, were denied access to things like credit and home loans, as were people of color. And the working classes, while doing better than before the war, were still down at the bottom of the heap, kept out of the nice new suburbs by restrictive covenants, redlining, and so on.

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  34. Sue said on May 7, 2010 at 10:11 pm

    Moe, does that mean you are getting the tumor tested? It’s a little unclear. Will Group Health approve the procedure(s)?
    And speaking of the war on drugs: Wisconsin’s legislative session just ended. You can still bring your kid into a bar to supervise his drinking, but hell no, medical marijuana is not going to happen.

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  35. moe99 said on May 7, 2010 at 11:53 pm

    Yes, thanks Sue. Group Health has agreed to get the tumor tested to see if it carries the EGFR mutation. If it doesn’t, then I am halfway to being approved for a clinical trial of a drug designed to treat tumors that have something called an ALK mutation. I just have to show that the tumor is ALK positive. Group Health has been resisting testing my tumors in this fashion because of the cost (anywhere from $700 to thousands of dollars according to who you talk to). The drug I’ve been taking for the past five months was designed for tumors that are EGFR positive and it doesn’t work. So in essence I’ve been getting all those zits all over my body for no reason. This also might lead one to conclude that my tumors are EGFR negative. But no, we have to do the test to get into the clinical trial. So now I just have to get GH revved up to scheduling the surgical procedure by which they remove the cancerous lymph node from my neck so they have enough tissue to test. Moving with glacial speed we are……

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  36. MichaelG said on May 8, 2010 at 1:57 am

    Jesus, Moe. How depressing. It’s not enough that you have to fight a horrible disease, you also have to fight a bunch of mindless, heartless assholes to get the right treatment. And fight them when you’re deathly ill. It really brings home the fucked up state of health care in this country.

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  37. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 8, 2010 at 10:39 am

    As with Nancy’s point about marriage, this is where you need family and/or faith communities to help fight your way through deviousness and distraction and diversions — no plan in the works is ever going to change the fact that when you’re sick is often when you have to make your hardest decisions and push to get out ahead of the curve of where “the system” (insurance companies, federal allocation panels, your plan’s treatment protocols, whatever) is still fighting the last war. You can’t do it alone, and you need someone who can just listen for you sometimes — it is very hard to hear anything a doctor or nurse says to you after the words “cancer” or “mortality” or “unlikely.”

    That’s not going to change, and neither is the fact that the newest and most promising treatments won’t be widely available until they’re widely available. Which means however we end up deciding to get it all paid for, we’re going to have to help each other be their own best advocate and activist in their own treatment.

    When people get a major diagnosis, the first thing I suggest to them as a pastor is “buy a pocket notebook, and carry it with you.” You never know when you’ll be told or just catch a hint of something crucial for your treatment or care, and you never know — especially if you’re on new meds let alone chemo — what tricks your memory will play. And you can’t even count on being able to find the medical personnel individual who said the thing that later you can’t quite . . . and given their pressure levels, they may not remember even if you can find them again.

    Write it down, and don’t be afraid to ask questions — or ask for 2nd opinions. Moe, nil illegitimi non carborundum! Or as Churchill liked to say, “KBO!”

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  38. moe99 said on May 8, 2010 at 11:46 am

    Jeff tmmo,
    Which is why I wrote the doctors back yesterday after the second opinion consult with Dr. Martins at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. It is now memorialized and for use in the future. http://moesmisadventures.blogspot.com/2010/05/second-second-opinion-at-seattle-cancer.html

    And of course there is an immediate issue. One of the GH doctors wrote back to warn me that it could be 2-3 weeks before the test results were back. I found a testing company online that promises a 5-7 day turnaround and this am just heard from Dr. Martins that UW can do it in 5 days. Hmmm…Guess I am going to have to transform into a cancer bitch around here to get anything done. So sad. A year ago I was a huge fan of Group Health. Not so much anymore.

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  39. Deborah said on May 8, 2010 at 4:08 pm

    Before little bird was diagnosed with NF, I knew something was amiss. None of the pediatricians knew a thing about it. Finally one of them sent us to a dermatologist, because he thought that since the tumors were on her skin it had something to do with dermatology. Luckily the dermatologist recognized what it probably was and referred us to a neurologist. Even after the diagnosis I had to do a lot of research on my own. Years and years worth of research finally led to a visit to a neuropsychologist and voila a lot of things fell into to place. The reason I am writing this is because I have found that health care is a process. A long, slow, frustrating process. I don’t know it it’s like that for everyone but it sure was for us.

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  40. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 8, 2010 at 5:54 pm

    We heart Cancer Bitch! Deborah, that’s perfect, and I plan to steal it as soon as possible: health care is a process. Which often needs a swift kick in the proctological protocols.

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