Will I get to stitch today???

Every woman should, with gratitude !

My knee surgery produced a fairly sizeable infection which almost made it necessary to amputate my leg. The infection was spawned by the inflamation caused by the staples. I always thought they were made of surgical steel. Well, they are not, and they have zinc. Very bad. Caused great inflammation and rapidly went into infection. I had to go back into the hospital for them to give me a PIC line so I could have IV at home. AGAIN. Nothing's easy.

(...)

I never meant to imply parents can't be bothered t stay home. I feel for people who have no choice but to work. On the other hand, there are people who absolutely do and would rather be working than taking care of their trophy chidlren. Fortunately, they are far and few between.

I also feel for kids who are in the super daycare places where they learn to read and write and even speak a language by the time they are three or four. I don't have children, but when do they get to play? How do their imaginations develop if they are always working to learn all day?

It's a hard world to grow up in these days.

I was referring to in recent years WRT the upsurge in the past 20. Sorry, should've been clear.

I think you're saying essentially what I said. Allergies are definitely an interplay - which is part of what's so interesting in studying immunology. I'm sure you've seen it with children, myself with my sibling. DB - allergic to practically nothing until recently he started to show allergic response to Sulfa. We discussed this - as I'm allergic to most standard antibiotics (cylcenes, penicillin & any related cillin compounds, sulfa - even things with a very minor sulfanomide contributor, as well as NSAIDs, ASA) which makes my treatments tricky. Same parents, grew up same household

- but I was also allergic to milk as an infant and was raised on soy. Not so for him. The thing that breast feeding seems to do is help with locking in that so to speak early immunity. But, IIRC my peds class correctly, some of the maternally donated immunity - I believe the acquired (b-lymphocyte type) dissipates around the time an infant is 6 weeks old. Breast feeding beyond that time may extend that immunity. It's all really interesting to me.

Ellice

I keep a pack of diaper wipes in my car and found they're also good for spills on clothing - esp. if you end up eating in your car or slurp your coffee a little too enthusiastically on the way to work.

Hand sanitizer - uh, no thanks - soap and water is fine by me. MelissaD

Some also think that it may help in sort of the same way as allergy shots, via desensitization because some of the proteins make it into breastmilk. That's why they recommend no peanut products for nursing mothers when the baby has a family history that raises the risk of peanut allergy, and why some nursing women have to get off dairy all together if their babies are allergic to cow's milk. This may also confound some of the research into the effects of breastfeeding on allergies (hard to know what sensitizations happen via breastmilk and which through other avenues--could be that breastfeeding could have been protective if other foods hadn't been introduced, especially since such a small proportion of babies are exclusively breastfed through 6 months as recommended).

They do seem to think that's the mechanism by which one sees the clear drop in things like respiratory illnesses in breastfed infants. They know there's ongoing communication between the mother's immune system and the baby's via breastfeeding after birth (it seems to be a complex mechanism, and may require actually nursing at the breast. Kind of freaky, really.

Best wishes, Ericka

Sorry, I know you didn't. Someone else (forget who) proferred that explanation.

Well, you know, if they don't get cracking they won't make it into Harvard.

There are daycares and preschools that are designed to be developmentally appropriate, and the better standards groups (like NAEYC-the National Association for the Education of Young Children) strongly emphasize developmentally appropriate curricula that are based around play, but there are parents who are gung-ho for early academics, so there will always be daycares and preschools that cater to those desires.

For some, certainly. On the other hand, life's pretty good for some kids and some things are way better than they used to be ;-)

Best wishes, Ericka

Amen.

The doctors were quite firm in standing up to me in refusing me the appropriate meds for my condition because that wasn't what they wanted to prescribe. They should be just as firm in standing up to people who are asking for INappropriate medications.

If I'd had my own prescription pad, I would've been back to work in a couple months and never would have gotten as sick as I did.

I once worked with someone who had compromised immunity from transplant anti-rejection drugs. Every year at the beginning of flu season, The Big Guy would hold a meeting to announce that anyone who brought germs into the office rather than stay home would have their pay docked for every sick day that they caused -- the implication being that if she was hospitalized for weeks, you were in deep doo-doo.

I don't think it would have been legal to actually carry out that threat, but it made the point that losing you for two days is better than losing 25 people for two days each (and her for two months).

True. The responses I get to the notion that there is no cure, and really not even an effective treatment, for what I have, tend to hover around the theory of "why don't you ask a doctor instead of assuming?", because the medical system really has persuaded them that there's nothing they can't fix.

It's not that *I* say they can't do much, but that the experts say they can't do much for me. I've talked to the experts myself. If you don't know for sure what causes it, you can't cure it.

And in some cases, even though the law says you're entitled to maternity leave, the employer exerts pressure for you to practically deliver the kid on your desk and get back to work 5 minutes later.

What exactly do you have which gives you CFS? I have it from viral infection and cirrhosis. I will need a liver transplant, eventually. I can go into liver failure at any time, or I can outlive my diagnosis; there is not way to predict. My lifestyle doesn't support furtherr damage, but the virus does. In Janauary I will more than likely have to go back into treatment, which means daily injections of chemo drugs. That also contributes to my chronic fatigue.

(...)

What is a breastfeeding friendly workplace? Wouldn't that mean you'd have the baby there at work with you? I don't know if I was an employer that I'd want a baby around all the time.

If you meant something else, what else could that mean? Can a woman use a pump? Maybe I'm old fashioned, maybe I'm just very fortunate, but shouldn't all of these factors be thought of prior to giving life to a child? Sometimes that's a very difficult decision to make; whether to have children or not. For me it was not. I didn't want them. Nor does Mark. A match made in heaven.

I think people try to do too much. I can't see any enjoyment of being a parent when some stranger is the one who raises it in a preschool somewhere. Daycare is another slippery slope IMO. I'd be a nervous wreck! But I am not trying to put my own fears onto someone else. There are millions of children who do just fine who are in daycare programs. I'd personally want to raise my own. I think. At this poiint is can only be a guess since I don't have any.

While some offices do that, more likely it means having an appropriate place where women can pump (i.e., not in a bathroom stall), maybe flexibility in scheduling where the job permits, that sort of thing. If you're particularly interested, some magazine or other rates workplaces on how breastfeeding friendly they are, and you could probably google up what their criteria are.

Having a child in daycare doesn't mean that someone else is raising the child. People have different feelings about how much time is too much time outside of parental care, but no child in daycare is confused about who his or her parents are.

Best wishes, Ericka

I didn't way the child wouldn't know who the parents are. My neighbor had her kid in daycare at one month old for ten hours a day. You do that math. Six in the morning to six in the evening. Go home, eat and go to bed. Five days a week. Who is raising that child? I'd say the daycare center is. Weekends were sheer nightmare for those kids who just wanted some down time, rightly so. But, the mother had them doing chores all day long. If found that so unfair to those kids.

That may be an extreme example. This mother was also married three times, so not too stable IMO.

Now this is getting downright spooky! I also loathe the idea of mobile phones and I staunchly refuse to own one. If anyone wants me, I'm at the end of the landline. If I fail to answer that, then clearly I'm not available for other purposes. I don't mind the kids having them, as it gives me a connection to them when they're away from home. I severely dislike the ringing of the stupid things during, say, school speech nights or church services or (perish the thought) funerals!

The Ugly Sister has a filthy mobile phone and it rings constantly when she comes to visit. So, instead of having an absorbing conversation with her, it's usually punctuated by silly calls from her kids or DH asking how long she's going to be at my place and generally results in her leaving sooner than she otherwise would. I *hate* the things!!!

My cousin did the same thing, which horrified me at the time! Her daughter is a fortnight older than mine, but you'd think she was, maybe, five years older now. She's much more self-reliant and assertive than DD and is much less gregarious too. I don't know how much of her behaviour is because of being a daycare kid or just because of her own personality, though.

Thing is, each one of has has to deal with his/her reality. There's the way I'd do stuff and the way you'd do it and the way the bloke up the road would do it. There's no correct answer and every solution has its pros and cons. I've been a SAHM and I can see clearly that my DD could be a lot more pro-active and motivated to get stuff done than she is. Probably a result of having things done for her. I dunno. But by and large, she'll turn out all right, as will my cousin's kid, who is a nice girl too.

One thing I've observed is that you can see kids who've been apparently totally spoilt grow up into quite nice adults. You can also see kids who've had great family lives go off the rails and wreck their own lives through foolish choices.

Another thing I've observed is that totally 'spoilt' kids go out into the workforce and learn in pretty short order that co-workers and bosses are much less likely to put up with precious behaviour than their loving Mum will! It doesn't take long for most intelligent people to learn to pull their heads in. Childhood is the time when it's OK to be petulant and cranky and selfish - the time to make your mistakes and, hopefully, learn from them. I tell my kids all the time: 'Yuu're a kid. You're expected to get stuff wrong occasionally. Just be smart about it and learn not to do it again!' If a person is still awful as an adult, then that's the time to worry and, perhaps, to criticise.

Raising kids is so much of a lottery and not one of us gets it 100% right all the time. The thing to remember is that very, very few parents set out with the purpose of ruining their kids' lives. Each of us tries to do the best he can under the circumstances.

In 1987, I had a severe virus (105 fever for several days), and whenever my immune system is depleted for any reason (e.g., having a sinus infection), the virus gets the upper hand again.

Although improving the quality of the sleep does not "cure" the disease, it does let my immune system recover enough function to start beating the virus back into submission.

The one treatment which has been shown to work is an anti-viral (not yet FDA-approved, long story). However, even that doesn't "cure" it ... when the drug is discontinued, the virus revs back up again, sometimes worse than before.

National CFS Foundation has funded some research that showed the same virus in CFS patients as in MS patients, which would square with the fact that the symptoms are 90% similar. Older research showed that CFS (back when it was called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) travelled in side-by-side epidemics with polio, (which got it the nickname NonParalytic Polio) and the patients who got ME were immune to later polio epidemics, so there may be a shared virus there, too. Again, a lot of symptom overlap between CFS/ME and post-polio.

Yes, providing a quiet discreet place with an electic outlet for a pump constitutes "breast feeding friendly", and in some areas it's made clear by court cases that area canNOT be the bathroom (which is not the safest place, since it's full of germs).

Great if you're a lawyer with an office with a door, not so good if you're in the secretarial pool and your desk is in an open area with no place to hide. One of our girls was told to use the conference room, and came up with a very good question, what if the conference room was in use at the time she was scheduled to pump? She couldn't wait till the people in the conference room left at 5, and certainly wasn't going to interrupt a deposition to announce "everybody out, I gotta pump".

And yes, these factors should be considered, but too many people don't think of them when they're "in the mood". And then there are my friends who took precautions and got pregnant despite them. And the