Makes me feel better: Other teachers' experiences.

Some of the committee members for a committee I'm on at the art school got together a few weeks ago to hash out some stuff informally.

We were talking about the writing needs of art student freshmen, and I said it was like pulling teeth to get students to recognize the difference between a semicolon and a comma, even when I pointed this out across feedback on multiple assignments, and gave strong personal recommendations to use a friendly, short online resource.

"But you have to realize that a lot of graduating seniors leave here and still do that," the head of the art school's writing tutoring service was like.

"But how can that happen?", I was like.

"I know," she was like.  "But that shows how we're conscientious teachers, to worry about that."

That made me feel so much better, to realize that people were facing the same pedagogical problems that I was facing, and getting the same results when trying to address them.

It makes me realize that I'm not doing something wrong.

Addendum: Insurance card and ID.

At the hospital, they not only ask for your insurance card, but also a photo ID that has the same name as on the insurance card.

A lot of people are passing around insurance cards, to try to keep down costs for uninsured friends and relatives.

Hospital (4 of 4): Final reflection.

Lately, when I've felt ennui or troubled, I've been reflecting on the situation of other people.

Like, though I don't make much money, I still make more money than many of the people I meet in everyday life, who are trying to raise families on minimum wage.

In a way, the hospital was nice, since it was like I was living my life in solidarity with other people, going to the same places that they do.

The next day, though, I thought that even that was a privilege, to have precautionary tests like I'm having, compared to the availability of medical care in so many other parts of the world.

Hospital (3 of 4): Details.

When the space-y (middle-aged) (East African) nurse returned after the vein episode, she asked how I was, and I said they had a hard time finding a vein.

"How?", she was like.  "What happened?"

I then told her that I didn't want to talk about it because thinking about it made me sick, but she kept asking for details, and then started getting more and more graphic about what might have happened, whether they put a needle in and couldn't find the vein, whether the vein collapsed, etc.

"Please," I was like, "Please," but she still kept asking till I strongly insisted she stop and she finally stopped.

She was a bit space-y.  

When she was getting me prepped at first, she said that in her experience, the best thing for colon problems was ginger in your tea, and she had always had mild diarrhea and bloating until she started having that.

Hospital (2 of 4): Veins.

When the nurses were going to get the IV in me,

the first prominent vein in my arm didn't work all of a sudden

-then-

the second vein deep in my arm they couldn't quite find

-then-

the third vein elsewhere deep in my arm they couldn't quite find, and as they moved the needle around it was like someone was stirring a small knife in my flesh as my flesh resisted

-then-

and finally they just the vein near my elbow, where they usually draw blood.

That night when I was in bed and about to go to sleep, I thought about how bad the pain was from the 3rd time that they tried to find my vein, and how even though I could barely deal with pain of that level - I started involuntarily moaning and saying "Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck" - that torture would be much, much worse, and how I probably couldn't stand up to torture like POWs and other people who've faced it.

Hospital (1 of 4): The hospital, in general.

A few weeks ago I went into the hospital for some precautionary biopsies to check up on stuff that runs in my family, and b/c I'm on the cheapest version of the mid-level Affordable Care Act insurance, I could only find one specialist in city limits who'd take it, and he only does procedures out of this one hospital to the south/southwest of me tucked away in this bad neighborhood that's decently hard to get to by public transportation.

I already knew the neighborhood from barhopping and actually had already known where the hospital was, on this street that had closed up businesses from Eastern European immigrants and their kids, in a rundown neighborhood that was mostly African-American but starts to get Mexican the farther west you go, on the edge of this big, glorious park with rivers and bridges and soccer fields and flowering trees in the summer.

Additionally, I had read that a church near there regularly holds prayer vigils for the beatification of this Eastern European immigrant foundress of a Roman Catholic religious order.

When I walked into the hospital, people in the in-patient services area were *all* black, and the hospital was clean but a little bit on the rundown and worn-out side like nothing had been changed since the early 1960s, and it made me think of the huge difference between there and the big shiny university hospital skyscraper downtown where I used to get precautionary tests back when I had different and better insurance.

There, when I'd get out of the elevator, I'd walk over to the floor-to-ceiling window and had this glorious bird's eye view of downtown, and could see rooftop pools and luxury apartments and everything.

Anyhow, when I got up to the 2nd floor and the in-take for outpatient surgery, I noticed these pictures of a (white) nun, one of them with a framed sheet of paper with dense writing next to it, and I went up to it and it turns out that it was a picture of the Eastern European immigrant foundress and a description of her life, since her order moved into hospitals at one point and they had actually started the hospital I was in.

I thought a lot about that, about how she started the hospital for people of her own ethnicity and about how it outlived them and was now mostly helping all the African-Americans who now lived in that neighborhood, and about how she had never probably ever anticipated a future for her charitable works like the one that was happening now.

Defaced signs: Street sign near my apt.

The other day I was biking one street up from the street that I usually bike on as I head west, and as I reached the Canal St. intersection, I looked up and saw that someone had defaced the street sign so that it read -

ANAL

. . .