Hurry up and wait

"Hurry up and wait. Imagine the best. Purge your thoughts of the worst. Keep the best. But when you discard the worst, don’t ignore what might be real symptoms," said the woman who ignored all the clues that something was wrong.

So since my last status report I’ve completed my brain radiation, spent time with my extended family who came from as far as Texas and Alaska to celebrate the life of my brother in law who died after a 5-year siege, joined Silver Sneakers and started to use the treadmill every day (today is day 5), attended my first metastatic support group and the Support Center’s memoir writing group (talk about talent…check out Carol's video here. ), and begun to change my diet. The time with my extended family made me feel like Wayne chose this time to die because he knew how much I needed their arms around me.

I turned down a work project. WOW! Turning down work? I don’t know the impact of my Christmas Day trauma and the radiation on my brain and don’t feel ready to handle the stress, despite the lure of additional income.

Yes, I'm bald.  I’ve watched many YouTube videos to learn to wrap and tuck turbans. And, I’ve been putting all those scarves from my hospital administration days to good use.

We're exploring juicing to see whether it will fit our lifestyle.  So far,thinking about it is the most we've done.. Do you juice? Have you done a juice fast? Any tips to share?

I’m off the steroids now so I expect my activity level will slow. This week I had my first day when I thought I’d just like to sleep all day. Or, at least keep my eyes closed while I hurried up taking control of my attitude, exercise, diet, and whatever else comes my way.

Cancer, eh? Ain't Life a Bitch?

On Christmas Day, at my sister's in New Hampshire, I had some kind of event, maybe a seizure -- net result: two weeks on the neuroscience unit at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Diagnosis: advanced breast cancer.

Neuroscience? Yes, my brain decided to be the organ to bring this to my attention. I'm doing well,though. And, after completing all the testing, everyone is optimistic about my prospects. I'm up and around. Can attempt do anything I've always done except drive. Everything depends on my stamina and current brain functioning. My energy level and concentration level have been improving daily.

 (Photo credit: Unknown)

So many people have asked to stay current on my journey that I decided a blog would work best.  You can decide what you want to read and when. This is the place. Directions for getting posts by email are in the right-hand navigation column.

Here's my current status:

• I've a team of MDs helping me put a short term plan in place. The team in Albany  connects with the Kingston folks. 
• I'm currently having  three weeks of brain radiation therapy to shrink this sucker. It has already helped control my immediate symptoms. I function better every day. I'm slow. Reading and research-- the core of my daily existence in the past-- is slow and challenging. I can't always trust my thinking (eg. I fought with the pharmacist. She,of course was right). Now the hard work starts. Learning about both conventional and non-conventional treatment alternatives and self-help.
• The MD's are optimistic. They've started me on hormone therapy.They say my tumor type, which I don't understand, is receptive to new treatment protocols. This is an example of the research I need to do. 

I never realized the pressure that comes from trying to deal with business, income, and community responsibilities at the same time you're trying to cope with a catastrophic event which has triggered this.

Friends and colleagues have found alternatives for my business and community responsibilities. Glenn and I have found ways to deal with most of the business/financial issues. Ain't that a bitch dealing with the financial bureaucracy while in the midst of a medical and emotional crisis. 

I can't tell you how supportive Glenn has been. And, he frequently makes me laugh, he's so irreverent and we disagree about so much! Keeps us talking.

I am balancing this medical life with some entertainment, fun, socialization.  We've been going to lots of concerts and enjoying home-cooked meals. (Thank you, Richard and Joy, Doris and Irwin, and Irene Miller.) I'm beginning to see friends again. Everything is so new and my functioning so changeable. 

Related articles

• Using unique combination of diet and radiation therapy, researchers successfully destroy brain tumor cells
• 5 New Breast Cancer Discoveries
• Researchers Gather To Discuss Therapy Alternative For Breast Cancer
• That bitch with cancer, again

What we can learn from Lady Gaga

 I don't know a lot about Lady Gaga, but she's got my vote. I especially love her quote about the choice between pursuing a career vs. men! We can all learn a lot from how her team markets her.Thanks, C3/SelectNY.Paris10 Ways to be a Marketing Genius Like Lady Gaga

View more presentations from Powered by C3 / SelectNY. Paris.

Celebrate Women in Science and Technology Today

Image via Wikipedia

It's Ada Lovelace Day - an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

I posted about Ellen Swallow Richards on the AAUW Kingston Branch Blog. She's responsible for clean tap water and food safety standards; the first woman student and instructor at MIT. She also co-founded AAUW.

Later today I hope to spend some time surfing the list of woman people have chosen to celebrate. Maybe you'd like to read about a few, too.

Access, Access, Access - Kristof's Column

I'm tired of the health care debate. It's been going on for decades and I don't understand why. Please read Nicholas Kristof's NY Times op-ed column in its entirety. Are you weary, too?

Op-Ed Columnist - Access, Access, Access - NYTimes.com: "If Republicans succeed in killing Mr. Obama’s reform package, the share of Americans with medical coverage will continue to drop. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation estimated this month that if significant reforms do not pass, the number of uninsured Americans could grow by 10 million over just the next five years.

Partly because of lack of access, American health statistics are notorious: Our children are two-and-a-half times as likely to die before the age of 5 as children in Sweden. American women are 11 times as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as Irish women. The average person in Honduras or Vietnam is expected to live longer than the average African-American in New Orleans.

Opponents of health care reform claim that America’s health statistics are poor simply because of America’s racial diversity and large underclass. But there is one group of Americans who do fine in international comparisons — and that’s the 65-plus crowd. They have Medicare.

One careful study after another has shown that uninsured people are significantly more likely to die than insured people. That’s because diseases are caught at later stages on uninsured people, and they don’t get treated so well.

There’s one group that should be particularly passionate about supporting Mr. Obama’s efforts: opponents of abortions. There’s abundant cross-country evidence that the best way to hold down abortion numbers is to improve access to health care and thus prevent unwanted pregnancies."

Technologies that Empower Women: Tom Watson

Tom Watson, in his post Technologies that Empower Women, talks about the surprising ways that new technologies change the lives of women and their families for the better around the world.

"In most cases, it's not cool social-media widgets or super-wired gadgets that are making a difference. Much of the social change being driven by technology involves local innovation, local investment, and local custom. Technology that can be sustained at the country or regional level and through public-private partnerships—without massive international aid—is the kind that often brings the most lasting change. Often, this kind of transformation entails looking past the established solutions of the developed world and adopting canny new technological shortcuts."

Here are the technologies Watson cites. Are they the technologies you would have guessed? Used in the ways you would expect? Do read his article. It's fascinating.

1. Video Everywhere
2. Clean Cooking
3. Birthing Kits -- 25 Cents each
4. Electronic Election Monitoring (note: not electronic voting)
5. E-learning
6. Clean Water Nanotech
7. Mobile Digital Banking
8. Peer-to-Peer Funding Networks
9. Micro-Agricultural Technologies
10. Connected Communities

Searching for Saddam: how the military mapped his social network

What could people learn about you by analyzing your photos on Facebook, Picasa, or Flickr? Well, our military learned enough about Saddam Husein's social network to capture him by analyzing the pictures in his family albums.

Slate has an interesting series about social networking and its role in searching for Saddam Husein.  The series underscores the difference between activity that is top-down directed -- Husein's government -- and networked -- his protectors after invasion.

The younger military interrogators knew the importance of understanding Husein's social network earlier than the leadership. In fact, they kept two diagrams -- one to show the brass, including the big names, the other, the real one,  that included his loyal friends, mostly bodyguards and nobodies in the former government power structure.

Here's a link to a brief video overview of the process to uncover Saddam Husein's social network. And here's a link to the series.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Saddam Hussein's private photo album (boingboing.net)

Iris Apfel -- Rare Bird of Fashion

If you like style, design, fabrics...here's an interesting four minute video of Iris Apfel you might enjoy.





I don't know why the Peabody Essex Museum prepared this -- I'll have to investigate -- but it's a museum I remember fondly from my childhood. I grew up in the next town --Peabody. They had a wonderful feature article about the ancestral farmhouse they bought in China, took apart and reassembled at the museum. It's on my list to return the next time I'm back in Massachusetts.

Wi-Fi Turns Arizona Bus Ride Into a Rolling Study Hall - NYTimes.com

Wi-Fi Turns Arizona Bus Ride Into a Rolling Study Hall - NYTimes.com: "Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.

“It’s made a big difference,” said J. J. Johnson, the bus’s driver. “Boys aren’t hitting each other, girls are busy, and there’s not so much jumping around.”

On this morning, John O’Connell, a junior at Empire High School here, is pecking feverishly at his MacBook, touching up an essay on World War I for his American history class. Across the aisle, 16-year-old Jennifer Renner e-mails her friend Patrick to meet her at the bus park in half an hour. Kyle Letarte, a sophomore, peers at his screen, awaiting acknowledgment from a teacher that he has just turned in his biology homework, electronically."

Sounds like a good idea to me. I wonder what percentage of Hudson Valley kids have laptops, though. This school district has invested in technology for years.  

What's happening in your school district?

Making it fun to change

Change can be fun? Hmm, it's certainly worth a try. So how do you make a diet fun? or reinforce new behavior you want to become a habit? How do you make a project team fun to work on?

G and I have just started the blood type diet, Eat Right for Your Type -- pretty tricky since we have different blood types. But, worthwhile if my sister's experience is to be trusted. Glenn is an A. I'm a B. We're challenged to master our own beneficial and neutral lists, never mind the things we can share.

[This change is for our health, not weight loss, per se, although I hope I lose some.]

So, how can we make it fun? Add your ideas, PLEASE!

• Teaser meals -- make yourself a meal of things he can't have. Yesterday for lunch I had a baked sweet potato with ricotta cheese and pesto -- great for a B; poison for an A. Taunt him while you eat it.
• Put on some great music and clean out the cabinets of everything you can't have. Make an A cabinet; a B cabinet; and a shared cabinet. Music to sort your cabinets? Get a job - Sha-na-na-na.
• Prepare a meal you both can eat of foods you've never cooked with before -- millet, you say? Rate every new dish, one to five stars.
  

What Does A Network Weaver Do (remix)

This brief slideshare deck describes grassroots organizing beautifully. I love how well the images work with the text. Thanks, Danielle.

What Does A Network Weaver Do (remix)

View more documents from Danielle Brigida.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

Check out how an expert communicates to an audience. No Bullet Points!

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

View more presentations from Carmine Gallo.

Psychic benefits? Women's work? Any excuse.

Someone said to me this morning, men won't take jobs in human services because they can't support their families. The women have spouses or partners, so it's ok to pay so little.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

To many woman working in nonprofits are single family households and are one or two paychecks away from homelessness themselves. They frequently work two, sometimes three jobs.

They are dedicated people who have spent as many dollars and years on their degrees.

They deserve better.

in reference to:

"In 2003 BusinessWeek surveyed the compensation packages of MBAs 10 years out of b-school. The median compensation package with bonus was $400,000. By contrast, the average 2004 salary of the CEO of a $5 million-plus health charity was $232,000 and of a hunger charity, $84,000. There's no way you're going to get people with a $400,000 annual pay package to take a $316,000 annual pay cut on the basis of the psychic benefits that await them. Instead, consider the enormous psychic benefits that people in the for-profit world enjoy as philanthropists. Think about this: It's cheaper for the MBA to donate $100,000 a year to the hunger charity than to go work for it. She gets $50,000 in federal and state tax savings, which leaves her $266,000 ahead of the game. On top of that, she gets a seat on the board of the hunger charity; indeed, probably chairs the board. She now gets to supervise the poor bastard who's running the hunger charity. She gets to dictate his strategy and how he goes about executing it. And if that weren't enough, the MBA is now elevated to the status of respected philanthropist in the community (while the hunger charity CEO gets demonized at the annual board meeting for wanting a $10,000 salary increase — "shame on you, that money could be going to the needy," they tell him). And, with a $100,000 annual contribution to the hunger charity, at some point the "philanthropist" gets her name on the top of the charity's headquarters. And maybe she loves her for-profit job on top it. Sounds like an awful lot of psychic benefit to me. Don't fall for this Puritan self-sacrificial psychobabble. It's not the poor who are asking you to work for less. It's the donating public, including many a wealthy donor. They're asking you to end poverty and every other great social problem and to do it for them at a discount. And they're exploiting the images of the poor to get you to agree. The fact that someone makes a one-time sacrificial gift doesn't mean you're obligated to make a lifetime sacrificial career choice. If you do the math and the psychic benefit comes up lacking for you, then ask the people who want you to make the world a better place for another kind of benefit that begins with a "p." Pay."
- The "Psychic Benefits" of Nonprofit Work Are Overrated - Dan Pallotta - HarvardBusiness.org (view on Google Sidewiki)

What about differences within nonprofit sectors?

in reference to: Amaze Your Friends with these Nonprofit Factoids | Blue Avocado (view on Google Sidewiki)

I'd like to see these figures broken out by sectors within the 501 (c)3 category, as well. If, as you mention below, you take out the hospitals and universities, I believe the differences would increase even more dramatically.

Why? The impact of unionization and/or more men working in hospitals and and universities?

Thanks, Rick Cohen at Blue Avocado, for pulling together the data.

Political genes?

Other deadlines interfered with my good intention to post on climate change on Blog Action Day yesterday. But, deadline behind me, I've spent some time reading what others posted. It led me to this post on Planetizen.

The post sheds some light on what I've often thought of as people being born with a Republican or Democrat gene. "Egalitarian" and "individualist" may be a better description, though, and linking such disputes to "clusters of values that form competing world views" is more useful than waiting for science to discover the politics gene.

in reference to:

"Some of my acquaintances believe that climate change may end human life (or at least civilization) and that the only way to save humanity is to massively reduce economic growth and consumption. Other acquaintances believe that climate change is, if not an outright hoax, a minor problem—and that even the slightest attempt to regulate emission-creating industries will itself destroy American civilization.
Whole lotta head-shakin’ going on.Most of these people are not scientists (let alone scientists specializing in climate-related science), so I strongly suspect that their opinions come from Al Gore’s movie and Rush Limbaugh’s talk show, rather than from a comprehensive review of the footnote-filled scientific papers addressing climate change. Nevertheless, they are as certain in their opinions as real scientists are. How come?"
- The genesis of the climate change stalemate | Grist (view on Google Sidewiki)

You Can Make Music with Bobby McFerrin

What a great three minute break. This little excerpt is wonderful.

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event "Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus", from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009.

Another Woman Who Made a Difference: Wilma Cozart Fine

I'm always interested in reading about women who have made a contribution, especially in a field dominated by men. Wilma Cozart Fine had an extraordinary talent.

This NYTimes obituary provides a good overview of her contribution to classical recordings.

in reference to:

"Mrs. Fine was one of the first women to excel at record production, a field that is still dominated by men. She brought sensitivity and taste to her work, which included notable recordings by the conductors Rafael Kubelik, Antal Dorati and John Barbirolli; the composer and conductor Howard Hanson; the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Detroit Symphony; the pianists Byron Janis, Gina Bachauer and Sviatoslav Richter; and the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

With Mr. Fine, an ingenious recording engineer whom she married in 1957, she developed recording techniques that, even in their early monaural recordings, seemed to capture not only the performance but also a sense of the space in which it took place. The Fines were among the first to make mass-market stereo recordings, and in the early 1960s they experimented with recording on 35-millimeter film instead of on magnetic recording tape. Among their productions were sonic spectaculars like a 1954 recording of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” by Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony, with bells recorded at Yale University and a cannon recorded at West Point, and a 1958 remake, with different bells and cannon.

Mrs. Fine also had a brilliant marketing sense. One of the first things she did when she joined Mercury, in 1950, was persuade the label’s president, Irving Green, to sign the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, then floundering. Mercury’s first recording with that orchestra, overseen by the Fines, was Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” with Kubelik conducting, in April 1951. When the recording was released that fall, along with another recording of works by Bartok and Bloch, Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times that “unless this recording has flattered the ensemble’s competence out of all recognition, one must welcome the Chicagoans back to the top rank of American orchestras.”"
- Wilma Cozart Fine, Classical Music Record Producer, Dies at 82 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

All Washed Up: using influence to change behavior

Here's a great study in how to use influence to change behavior from the folks who brought us Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations. Now they bring us Influencer. Well worth the six minutes. Tell me what you think you could apply this lesson to.

The Challenge of Maintaining Creativity

I love to take a break from work and watch/listen to a TED Talk. Here's one on education and creativity that I think all my clients providing after-school programs should watch. Actually, I think we should all watch it. And, enjoy laughing, too. Sir Ken Robinson is very funny.

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: How to Poll on the Public Option

Image by ^Berd via Flickr

Someone called me yesterday to ask my advice on a questionnaire they planned to distribute at a large event later this week. As I thought about the difficulty of designing clear objective questions I remembered that I had a note to myself to blog about this post by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.

Nate describes the essential ingredients of a good poll. He goes on to say that the health care debate is suffering from poorly designed polling questions. I recommend you read the whole post, but here's the difference a well designed public option question can make.

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: How to Poll on the Public Option: "So, who gets it right?

Regrettably, almost all of the polls on the public option succumb to one or more of these sins. However, there are two exceptions. One is the Quinnipiac poll, which asks:

Do you support or oppose giving people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan that would compete with private plans?

This is a perfect question. It makes clear that the public option is an insurance program, rather than a program to provide health care services. It uses the less ambiguous phrase 'government' rather than the more ambiguous phrase 'public'. It makes clear that the public option is a choice. It avoids leading the respondent by comparing the public option to Medicare. And it asks in unambiguous terms whether the respondent supports or opposes the proposal.

62 percent of people support the public option in Quinnipiac's August 5th poll, versus 32 percent opposed."