boobs & swine

Today has not been the best of days.  Part of the problem has been the change in mammography recommendations for women that was announced a few days ago (here's a pretty good article talking about the new recs and the controversy surrounding them).  For some reason this is weighing heavily on my mind... well, ok, maybe because I disgree with it or at least feel pretty worried about it (huh, kind of ironic...).  It seems a lot of the reasoning behind it is that for those women with slow-growing cancers, they'll have plenty of time to catch it by other means before it's too late, but women who happen to have fast-growing, aggressive ones... well, it's like they're saying "we're not very good at catching those and so we're just not really gonna bother, it's not worth it for us."  Which kinda feels like shit.

Zach instead feels it's a perfectly reasonable recommendation, that mammograms aren't that good at catching cancers anyway, and that this is a good way to lower health care costs.  We seem to be having trouble discussing this issue in a civil manner.

So last night we had a big fight about it, which left me in a complete and total funk all morning.  So D got to watch a lot of the Mighty Machines videos on the computer.  I really needed the break.

Things got better in the afternoon-- it helped a lot that I got a call from my doctor's office (Kaiser Permanente, by the way) to alert me that they'd (finally!) received a new shipment of the H1N1 vaccine for young children and that I could come in today to get D his shot.  I have to say I'm very impressed that they took the time to call their patients.  So after D's nap we went in, and I was afraid it would be an utter madhouse, but the wait was short and the whole thing pretty easy.  Except for the shot itself-- D is quickly recognizing the room where they give the shots and started crying even before the nurse got the syringe out.  But he's seemed ok all the rest of today.

So that's one big check-mark off our to-do list.  We'll see if they still have any left in a month when he needs the booster, but they also said this first dose gives 80-90% of the protection so if we don't get it for a while I'm not too worried.

And now it's Friday night and I'm up waiting for Zach to get home (went to a networking thing), and at least tomorrow's the weekend. And next week is Thanksgiving, which means a few extra days off (for him) and time with Jenny, who'll come down for a few days to eat turkey with us.  Looking forward to that.