Category: Blog

Maybe someday scanxiety will stop having such a hold on me. It persisted through the long time (almost a week) that it took for Hopkins to post the results of all the tests Robert had done last week. The reports I read last night confirmed what Dr. Lipson found at our visit last Tuesday – no evidence of disease. Whew!
The visit with Dr. Lipson was encouraging – to me, at least. He didn’t see or feel anything suspicious, and he looked at the brain MRI and abdomen/lower extremities CT scan while we were there. But I heeded his caveat that he’s not as good at reading the scans as the radiologists are, and I also wanted to know the results of the chest and neck soft-tissue scans since those are likely places for a recurrence (due to proximity to the primary site). All the results were posted yesterday. There were a couple of nagging things to look at, having nothing to do with melanoma. Each scan report specified “no evidence of metastatic disease.” I slept well last night, for the first time in a few weeks.
Another reason the Hopkins visit was encouraging is something Dr. Lipson said to Robert (with a little prompt from me). I try not to nag Robert about not exercising – and I mean not exercising “at all,” not just “enough.” The weather’s not good for bike riding, but even when it was, he didn’t choose to go. And the gym just isn’t his thing. But I hate to see him getting soft … My inquiry to the doctor about whether Robert had gained some weight raised eyebrows – but the scale showed no gain. Even so, Dr. Lipson chided Robert a bit by saying, “I plan to keep you alive for a long time, so you need to take care of yourself.” That allowed me to breathe more easily during the day. It was only at night that it caught up with me.
So, scanxiety is over until May 1. We have lots to do between now and then!

I think I was born an editor, not a writer. In fact, for most of my life writing has not come easily for me. Throughout my life before I retired from BNA, I was able to do it successfully from time to time – occasional good research papers during college come to mind, along with one or two well-done market research reports and product proposals near the end of my employment. But being a freelancer with a heavy writing project load was difficult. And, until recently blogging was particularly difficult.
As I noted in mid-December, I went through a fairly severe writer’s block last fall – the first time in my life that I remember it being like this. Typical me – I tried to make it go away by ignoring it through most of November and into December. Then, I started thinking about what might be different this time, hoping to come up with clues that would help me unlock my words. Eventually I came to understand that the style of writing I’m doing now (mostly blogging) needs a different approach.
I never found covering meetings particularly easy, and it was my least favorite part of traveling for business during my time as editorial product development manager for BNA’s tax subsidiary. I needed to go to meetings to meet people, to find out what was going on and figure out how we should cover the subject of whatever project I was working on at the time, but I dreaded writing about the meetings afterwards. The press of deadlines helped me push myself to make sense of what I had heard and file a story or two, usually the same day, for Daily Tax Report. Most of the time I think I did ok, but probably not as well as a reporter would have if we had been able to send one with me.
Editing was always my thing. Someone else gives you the words, and all you have to do is think about what they wrote and figure out whether/how it could be clearer, more complete, easier to understand (sometimes, more correct). Prototyping publications was always easier when I had someone else’s words to work with. When I didn’t – when my job was to write, to demonstrate the kind of material we would publish – I would labor over it, outlining and planning and finally making myself put the words out there. “Labor” is the important concept there.
Market research reports and data-driven articles, both before I retired and as a freelancer, were much easier. I think that’s because you had to spend a fair amount of time analyzing the data before you could write anything down. For me, data analysis is coming up with a series of bullet points, observations, questions left unanswered – writing down my thoughts. The main activity is thinking, not writing – but once I have those bullets, fleshing them out is more like editing to me.
Now that blogging is my primary writing activity, I had to find an approach that would break through that block. For some blog posts I have been able to assemble a “notes” file so that I would have something to run through while thinking about what to write. That helped for a lot of my early melanoma posts, when I was still researching a lot about the disease and trying to figure out what everything means. It’s not as good, though, for more personal posts – like this one, for example.
What  seems to have worked best for the posts I’ve written since mid-December is to capitalize on that “main activity” I mentioned before – thinking. If I spend enough time just thinking about a subject, figuring out what I think about what I’m writing about, I have an easier time getting the words out. That’s how this post got written. And the same goes for many of the ones I’ve written over the last six weeks.
I’m lucky that I have the luxury of time for thinking, now that I’m mostly retired. We live such busy lives during our “productive years” that time is at a premium; we just can’t get everything done if we steal minutes (let alone hours) to figure out what we think. But the lesson for me over the last month is that taking that time to think makes my working/writing time so much more productive.
Now I’ll try to make myself think about what to write for my chapters in the SPJ Freelancers Guide … Wish me luck with that!

For a while it seemed as though I might escape the dreadful scanxiety this time. But as we approach Robert’s appointment at Johns Hopkins on Tuesday, it’s making up for lost time … I’m sleeping poorly, awake during the night, waking up hard (not refreshed) in the morning after strange dreams.
Maybe it’s not the delayed start of this pre-scan worry that’s causing the intensity this time. Another possible cause, or at least a contributing factor, is the five-month interval since the last appointment with Dr. Lipson in mid-August, just before we left on vacation. We were supposed to be on quarterly schedule for skin checks with the dermatologist, plus scans/oncologist visits every four months. But this set of scans needs to be done this month because it’s the one-year follow-up for the GVAX trial that Robert participated in, which ended January 29, 2013 when he had his last injection. We couldn’t do it in December, four months after the last set of scans.
I noticed that scanxiety was creeping up on me a few weeks ago when I started monitoring the Melanoma Patients Information Page more frequently. The MPIP forum, sponsored by the Melanoma Research Foundation, was a mainstay of mine through the first year and a half after Robert’s diagnosis. In the fall I found that I wasn’t going to the MPIP as frequently and saw that as a sign of recovery from the intense melanoma focus I had been living with. But I’m back to monitoring it every day or two now. Perhaps that will slack off again after Tuesday, assuming there is no evidence of disease (N.E.D). We’ll see.
Several people on MPIP recently have reported recurrences of melanoma after about 10 years. Considering that in May 2012 we thought we were looking at 8 to 10 months, I’ll happily take another eight years!! One drawback to reading MPIP regularly is that people with early recurrences (in the first year or two), those with active disease, stay on the forum and some people with N.E.D. don’t post very often. That makes 10 years look really good …
In addition to the time Robert and I would have together, a longer interval before recurrence would give researchers more time to find a cure. And there’s one more reason to look for a long interval – offered by Celeste, another melanoma blogger (see Chaotically Precise: Life, Love, and Melanoma), in response to one MPIP poster with a recurrence after 10 years: “One thing in your favor is that since you went 10 years before a recurrence of your melanoma, it is rather ‘indolent’.  Not all melanoma waits around like that.  But, it seems, and some research indicates, that patients with those long breaks between melanoma episodes have something going for them..though the researchers and docs are not sure exactly what that is.”
I hadn’t heard this before, and I love her use of the word “indolent”!! I love the concept of a lazy micro-metastasis waiting around for 10 years before deciding it’s time to party. No micro-mets would be better, of course, but I’m all for giving them time to find a cure. And we have every reason to be positive about Robert’s ability to fight if recurrence comes, considering his immune response to the first lesion and his participation in the GVAX trial.
If it sounds like I see recurrence as inevitable in Robert’s case, rest assured – that is not so. But I am reminded, again, that the way I best deal with this passive melanoma prescription of “watch and wait” is to be optimistic and realistic at the same time. If I don’t get to dance with N.E.D. this week, I’m sure I’ll be in shock. But if that happens, I think this time I’ll be able to bring myself out of it more quickly and without chemical assistance. And meanwhile, we’ll keep planning for the time we spend together, making sure we take every day as a gift and making every day count.
I’ll post Tuesday or Wednesday with the results. Meanwhile, keep on keepin’ on … 

This morning a newly diagnosed melanoma patient posted a query on the Melanoma Research Foundations’ Melanoma Patients Information Page seeking advice on how to deal with all the new information she was learning about melanoma – sentinel nodes, wide local excision, micrometastases, Stage 3, 5-year prognosis, complete lymph node dissection, lymphedema. Her story was full of information she got from her brother, an oncologist but not a melanoma specialist, and her father, an orthopedic surgeon.
Her statement that all the statistics meant nothing to her at this point prompted me to reply. I’m cross-posting my response to her here. If you follow MPIP you can skip the rest.

[It looks like you have] some complex “stuff” to deal with. Not your melanoma, necessarily, but definitely the family situation!
I’m the daughter of a pediatrician, and that was helpful when my kids were little – I checked every little thing with my father and generally found a way to make sure he was satisfied with our decisions regarding his granddaughters’ medical care. He was just one of several medical people in our lives. When my husband got a (Stage 4 metastatic) melanoma diagnosis in 2012 I turned to my cousin-in-law all on the opposite coast  because she’s a pediatric dermatologist. She put me directly in touch with the head of the melanoma program at our hospital, who trained in her department several years ago and whom she knew very well. She did not try to give us advice, other than to see to it that we were consulting with someone who understood melanoma at the highest level possible. And, most important, she assured us that she would help us understand anything our chosen melanoma specialist said.
Long story short – the initial staging from the pathology report is not what we now understand. We have been dealing with Stage IIB melanoma. Getting the communication channels open with the RIGHT people has been critical to our mental health, particularly in those early weeks.
Your feeling that all the statistics mean nothing may not go away – and I recommend that you fight for that mental state. It’s hard to ignore a brother who is much more knowledgeable about the subject than you are, but perhaps you can “gently” ask him to only give you constructive information. Also, he might be the conduit for information passing from your melanoma specialist to everyone else in your family – that could be quite useful. But I really hope you can find a melanoma specialist you connect with, one who gives you all the time you need to understand what’s going on and where that fits into the limits of current knowledge about melanoma.
It’s great that your dad got your birth mark removed and then got you the wide local excision so quickly. You now have the initial pieces of information to understand what you are dealing with. Considering the rest of what you wrote and what’s on your profile page (Stage III, primary depth 2mm-4mm), you can take the time now to decide what’s next. 
A melanoma specialist can help you weigh the recent research report [referred to by another MPIP member in a previous reply] and help you decide whether a complete lymph node dissection is the right thing for you. Your instinct that this is a drastic step was correct. Follow that instinct and give yourself time to decide whether your case warrants taking that step – with a specialist at a Melanoma Center of Excellence whom you trust leading your team.
You have much to learn. Don’t rush this surgery just because you (and your medical doctor family members) are scared.
Please come back and let us know how things are going and how we can help you get through whatever you decide to do next.

Today’s opinion piece in the Washington Post by Juliet Eilperin goes a long way toward answering a question I’m sure many of our family members have wanted to ask – why Washington? It’s such a fickle, hyper-political place, and “Washington journalists” are such a despicable lot. Whatever made us want to come back here 30 years ago, to raise our kids in such a fast-paced, high-cost environment?
Juliet’s answer, and ours, is that this is a place where our work could have a meaning beyond making a living. “It is cool to make fun of Washington’s superficiality and detachment from the rest of America,” she wrote, to chide the “Beltway-itis” that afflicts so many people who come to D.C. for a perhaps-limited purpose and then never leave. But by choosing to stay, disenfranchised though we may remain (as U.S. citizens who don’t have a voting representative in Congress), Robert and I have both had opportunities to do important work while raising children, now adults, whose cares and efforts extend beyond their immediate circumstances.
Juliet’s article more closely answers the question as it pertains to me because I have remained a journalist. I had found my way into a company (then known as The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. and now know as Bloomberg BNA) that aimed to disseminate information about how the government works, primarily to businesses and people for whom that information could make the difference between success and failure, profits and losses. For several years Juliet’s mother, Sophie Cook, worked there, too, as a lawyer with expertise in alternative dispute resolution who edited a publication on that subject. So, I would like to think that Juliet’s introduction to journalism as something of a “BNA brat” had some effect on her career path. (In truth, I’m sure it had more to do with the social consciousness of her parents and the environment they provided to help shape her character as she was coming up.)
In our case, I’m sure the work we did when our kids were young had something to do with their development into caring, giving people devoting their lives to helping others get through the challenges life presents them. Our dinner conversations would as often touch on Constitutional debates, becoming lessons in human rights and responsibilities, as on what they learned in school that day. We talked most nights about something to do with the government – in my case environmental regulation, science policy, and tax and in Robert’s case press freedom and the criminal justice system. We also talked about the societal ills facing less-fortunate populations of the District.
I’m not sure what would have become of Robert’s and my careers had we not moved back to D.C. in 1983, but I can tell you this much: mine would not likely have been in producing journalism that matters. BNA gave me the opportunity to develop not only as a journalist but also as a person. I simply can’t imagine what my career, or may life, would have been like had I stayed in Hartford, Conn.
Robert’s decision to go to law school was based on his desire, when he started, to carve out a niche for himself as a journalist, but his nine years as publications director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press gave him the opportunity and experience to specialize instead in something else: appellate ligation. Representing criminals in the appeals courts most likely did not enter his mind at that point. In addition to his law practice, he remains active in First Amendment law as well through the D.C. Open Government Coalition. His “work that matters” continues.
I’m sure all of those factors have had something to do with the people our daughters have become. Allison’s decision to go back to school in her mid-30s and earn a master’s degree in social work was a long time coming, but the seeds were planted long ago, perhaps at our dining table or otherwise in the social rubric of this city. Loren’s advanced degree in public policy and her career concentration in global health and development speak for themselves. I take no credit here – the hard work has all been on their part. We simply chose to raise them in an environment where what matters to others, their real concerns about how to get along in sometimes-hostile surroundings, also matters to us.
None of this addresses our decision (so far) to stay in D.C., with its fast pace, high cost of living, and disenfranchisement still affecting our lives. Perhaps I can write about that in another post.

Which of the following would you agree with?
a)      I’m retired
b)      I’m busy
c)      I’m overcommitted
d)      all of the above
If you guessed d), you got that right! This post talks about what that means.

Now that Thanksgiving’s over and I have a little more time to think about my busy-ness, I’ve been doing just that – thinking about it. I think it’s mostly healthy, and I’ll be working on how to eliminate c) and still keep the commitments I’ve made.
First, let’s deal with the “mostly healthy” part. I seem to have been able to move on, by and large, from the melanoma misery. Don’t get me wrong – I know the risks remain. But we have done what we can, and now we are in the “watchful waiting” phase of being a cancer survivor. And, despite what I told our friend Larry on Sunday, I am not actively terrified that melanoma will revisit us any time soon. Robert will have scans and doctor visits as often as prescribed to make sure there’s no evidence of disease (my friend NED), and we’ll both go on living our lives.
I wrote in March about the philosophy I’ve adopted – to be realistic and optimistic at the same time. I wasn’t sure I could achieve that goal, but looking at my current state of mind I think I’ve done it. I’ve been able to make commitments and to complete projects on realistic schedules, and that demonstrates my optimism that we aren’t facing an imminent recurrence of Robert’s melanoma.
That is measured optimism, to be sure. A melanoma patient I met through the Melanoma Research Foundation’s Melanoma Patient Information Page (MPIP), Paul from the West Coast Washington, had a satellite lesion removed shortly after he finished the vaccine trial Robert was enrolled in. But other satellite recurrences I’ve read about on the MPIP recently have come nine or 10 years after the primary lesion was removed. I’ll take nine or 10 … 20 or 30 would be better, though! More time for us to do things together. More time for a cure …
Progress report
I started my quest for a more normal, less melanoma-focused existence by taking on a small project for work. This was not a lucrative venture – I spent many more unbillable hours than the time I got paid for. But I learned some new things, met an interesting neighbor, and had fun, so I have to consider it “time well spent.”
I’ve also made some other commitments to organizations I belong to. Actually my commitment to get the Kehila website redesigned and updated is very self-serving – once the project is done others will be able to take over more of the work to maintain the site. Still, it’s a big project – it will include a workplan, a Request for Proposals, and then the actual work. Months and months, not enough resources. And, I’m still maintaining the old site.
The other commitment I’ve made is to the Society of Professional Journalists. I’ve joined the SPJ freelance committee, which is committed to morphing into a “freelance community” in the spring, another big website project. Up my alley on all fronts. I volunteered to write several sections of the online freelancers’ guide, currently published as a PDF but planned as an HTML subsite for the community relaunch. Writer’s block is no fun. I’ll have to get over it …
And perhaps this blog post is the first step of getting over it. Only part of my inactivity on this blog  since September has been because of over-commitment. I’ve thought through several blog posts over the last two months, and in the past, when I’ve thought them through first, I’ve been able to sit down and let them flow. That automatic scribing hasn’t worked recently – until today, that is.
So maybe this is a good sign that I’m conquering the PTSD that I wrote about in April. A big step forward. Another sign will be if I am able to keep writing blog posts, so please check back from time to time if you want to know what’s up with me.

This is a very challenging time of year for Medicare “beneficiaries” – or, “sufferers” if you want to know the truth. It’s not that I’m not happy with the benefits – I am. But making sure we are in the right prescription drug plans (PDPs) is a challenge beyond belief. And, it can be very expensive – in dollars and/or time – if we don’t choose the right plan.
I’ll cut to the chase here: how are we supposed to know what coverage in the 31 PDPs in our area will cost? The government supposedly tells us on Medicare.gov, in a plan finder tool that’s probably not far off from what the new health insurance exchanges offer. But the information in the finder appears not to be correct.
How do I know? Well … I’m also shopping through ExtendHealth, which Bloomberg BNA uses to manage health care reimbursement accounts (HRAs) for retirees. We get enough of a stipend each year that, so far anyway, a big chunk of our out-of-pocket costs are reimbursed from the account. So far, so good.
ExtendHealth also is supposed to help us shop for plans when we first sign up for Medicare, and then annually during the open enrollment season. It’s necessary to shop again each year if you have medications that you take on a routine basis. That’s because the plans change each year, as do their formularies (lists of drugs they cover and the coverage level, or tier, that determines how much of the cost you will have to pay). So, you need to be aware of how much the premium has changed year-to-year as well as whether your medications are still on the formulary and in the same tier. The amount of your co-insurance or co-pay also can change from one year to the next. And, if your medications have changed this is your chance to make sure the new ones are covered and your plan will pick up as much as possible of the cost.
Here’s what I found out by shopping on both sites – it appears that the basic information about the plans on Medicare.gov is not always correct. Just taking one plan – the AARP “saver plus” plan – as an example, Medicare.gov says the premium is $22.50 per month. ExtendHealth says the premium is $15 a month. ExtendHealth says the deductible is $325; Medicare.gov says it’s $310. Who am I to believe? Well, ExtendHealth of course – they will pay the premiums directly from my HRA, so if they quote me the wrong price they might have to sell it to me for what they said it would cost.
I wish the complications stopped there, but they don’t. Now we have come to understand that the prices of the drugs are different from one plan to the next and among pharmacies – and even for two plans from one insurer at the same pharmacy. So, we are down to creating a spreadsheet that shows the retail cost at CVS, Walmart, and Safeway (important comparisons if the plan has a deductible, if the drug isn’t on the formulary, or if it’s in a tier with a high co-insurance percentage). A recent inquiry found that annual costs (premiums + deductible + copays/coinsurance) for one plan would be about $700 and for the same drugs at another plan could run almost $3,000. This is crazy!
I’m just scratching the surface here and my brain already hurts from researching to write about it, so I’ll stop. But before I close, I also want to mention another aspect of PDP coverage – mail-order pharmacies. Medicare.gov tells what the drugs will cost at the company’s mail-order branch or contractor – but so far I haven’t found that on ExtendHealth’s site. In most cases I’ve researched, the cost is less for a three-month supply  than it would be for the same medication purchased in 30-day supplies at a retail pharmacy. So, I’m writing down the retail pharmacy information from ExtendHealth and then turning to Medicare.gov for the mail-order information – which may be about as accurate as the premium and deductible data available there.
Mail-order is where we got caught when Robert signed up for Medicare last year. ExtendHealth was up front about the fact that the plan with the lowest premium plus drug costs had no mail-order pharmacy. We were concerned, though, that this plan offered a $0 deductible only if the Rx is filled at Walmart or Target – neither of which is convenient for us. One medication he takes is a controlled substance, for which he must get a paper prescription from the doctor each time it’s refilled. That can be a pain if you have to do it every month, so he asked about getting a 90-day supply. The ExtendHealth representative told him he could do that at the retail pharmacies. Not true. So, we’ve trucked off to Walmart once a month to refill his prescriptions. It can’t be called in, so we always have to wait.
This year we wanted to make sure that he has access to a mail-order pharmacy. To find out, and to find out which are each plan’s network pharmacies and preferred pharmacies (where the cost is even less), you have to read the fine print on the ExtendHealth site. Or, you can go to Medicare.gov – if you trust them to be giving you accurate information.
I could make a full-time job blogging about being a health care consumer. I’ve written a lot about health care since retiring from BNA, and unfortunately more than I have wanted to write on this blog as a health care consumer for the last year and a half. As a topic to parse and write about, this is the worst I’ve covered.
Give me taxes any old day!!

I haven’t exactly declared that Hazel Becker Editing & Publishing Services is open for business again. However, I have agreed to do a project for a neighbor and she has agreed to pay me for doing it.
I’m not sure what this means! I love being retired, and I really don’t want to change that. I’ve had no problem filling up my time with volunteer work-like things (like maintaining Kehila Chadasha’s website, which by itself could be a half-time job if I would let it!) and reading. I still work out, one way or another, every weekday and try to do active things on the weekend.
But when a neighbor whom I did not know put a notice on the Chevy Chase Listserv looking for someone to help her scan some family photos and arrange them into a book along with text she will provide, I answered and gave her a low-ball price. We’ve met twice, and I have just delivered a contract for her to sign.
I will learn some new publishing skills. I haven’t produced my own files to send to a publisher in more than 10 years, and the whole printing/publishing scene is different now. I hope I won’t have to invest all my earnings from this project in new software that I may not use very much – though I certainly would enjoy learning to use the software. But my first and primary learning task will be to find out what resources are available for having color photo books printed and what kind of files are needed. I’ve done investigations like this for my entire professional career, and I always enjoy the process.
I might even enjoy that part of the project, and learning new software, more than actually doing the work. I’m not a natural designer (ask my sisters!). But I’ve been producing publication layouts and touching up photographs for a long time. I’ll muddle through and hope I can muster up enough visual creativity to please the client.
I’m not spending a lot of time pondering the bigger meaning of agreeing to go “back to work,” even on this limited basis. For the moment, I’ll just take it as a good sign for my mental and emotional health.
This first project will give me the opportunity to see if I can work again without letting it add any stress to my retirement. That’s the goal. Wish me luck!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the advice Steve Buttry of Digital First Media gave to a group of journalists last month on how to begin thinking “digital first.” Following Monday’s embarrassing display of bad journalism, as every news source I consulted reported unsubstantiated and too-often wrong information about the shooting at the Navy Yard in Southeast D.C., we should all be thinking about it.
Monday was, as Jon Stewart said on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” the next day, the kind of day that 24-hour news media were created for: a day of “urgent, soul-crushing breaking news.” Days like Monday give good news organizations the opportunity to compete with each other on the toughest playing field around, one on which the landscape is constantly changing and new “tips” and bits of information are coming in all the time. But on Monday, September 16, I couldn’t find the good news organizations in among the others.
Much of what Buttry said in August at the Society of Professional Journalists’ convention (held jointly with the Radio Television Digital News Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists) was targeted more to print media and their online presences, and I don’t remember him speaking directly of cable news organizations covering a big, messy breaking story like Monday’s shooting. But I hope there were broadcasters in the audience listening because they needed to hear what he said as much as the newspapers, which I believe had as bad a showing Monday as most of the other news outlets I consulted as events unfolded.
I guess it’s just too tempting for them not to follow the lead, once one news operation reports that, for example, some first-responders were sent to another shooting at another D.C.-area military base. It’s too easy to dispense with our obligation to verify before publishing by qualifying our report with “someone said” or “another news operation reported …”
As Buttry said, “Don’t give up your standards of good journalism just to be first. You don’t have it first if you don’t have it right.” I’m writing about his advice out of context here; he was talking about online publications, not live television reporting. But I think the principles apply to broadcast reports as well as online reports published by newswires and online news outlets.
“The importance of verification needs to be stressed,” Buttry said. In the online context, he advises linking to your sources because “if you can’t find something credible to link to, it might be wrong.” So, even in the live broadcast context, think about what credible sources you would link to – “it will help you do better journalism.”
I suppose news directors of live broadcast operations would say they just don’t have time to check everything if they are going to beat the competition. In a 24-hour news operation there’s just not enough time to verify every tidbit we hear and also publish it as soon as it reaches us. But what good is it to be first if your information is wrong and you then become the source of all the other media’s wrong reports?
That goes for all the media I consulted on Monday. Everyone got it wrong. There were not three shooters. There was not a shooting at another military base in the D.C. area. Who knows how much the hype created by the 24-hour news media reporting unsubstantiated, incorrect information contributed to officials’ decisions to keep frightened workers in place, and children from their parents, for hours and hours after the lone shooter had been killed?
All day Monday, I heard Buttry’s words in my head: “The importance of verification needs to be stressed.” And “you don’t have it first if you don’t have it right.”
Thanks, Steve. And thank you to any journalist out there who takes time now to reassess. We all need to be thinking about this.

It’s been a while since I’ve done my normal exercise routine. I’ve had a few injuries that have kept me from working out the way I used to, and the last few weeks have included much time away – perhaps not a bad thing, considering the latest injury. But I’m ready to go back now … here’s hoping I can shed the pounds I’ve been gaining lately!
First, let’s dispense with the injuries. The major one was numbness and tingling, and sometimes outright pain, in my right hand. It built up over time, and finally I asked for a referral to physical therapy. Thanks to Jeff Robinson at C.O.R.E. PT, I think that one is mostly licked. Jeff also helped me recover from some strain in my left shoulder caused by who-knows-what. A lot of this is just aches and pains that come from using my muscles wrong. It gets bad when I ignore it for too long – and that’s what happened to my right hand. Just before we left on vacation Jeff and I agreed that we’ve worked on that about as much as we can. So, between that fix and the total rest I’ve given my left shoulder over the last three weeks, I’m ready to go back to lifting weights the way I used to.
Jeff also convinced me to have an xray and see what was wrong with my left foot, which I damaged walking across a ball field with Chewey the Friday before we left for vacation. He said he thought I might have a fracture in the fifth metatarsal, and indeed, that’s what it was. I’ve been wearing a “short boot” whenever I have to walk any distance, and with the orthopod’s permission we did some walking and hiking on vacation – permitted as long as I wore good hiking boots. I only overdid it twice but actually have not felt pain in that foot for quite some time. I’m ready for him to say it’s OK to exercise again … more than ready.
Meanwhile, Robert and I did a lot of stuff on vacation, though not the hikes we would have done otherwise. Yellowstone’s major sites have great boardwalks from which to view the geothermal phenomena (and they are phenomenal; I can’t wait to get my pictures posted!). Wildlife viewing was done for the most part from the car. I hobbled around the Getty Museum in L.A., and we’ve been using a handicapped tag so that I haven’t had to waste too many steps on parking lots. I’m looking forward to seeing the orthopod on Tuesday and getting permission to do weight-bearing exercise again.
I haven’t been very good about eating, though. And the diet my rheumatologist had me on to increase my bone density coincides with a six-month period over which I gained eight pounds. Admittedly, one or two of those were added during vacation – I just can’t stick to my calorie count on vacation! But most of it, I’m sure, is because of the two-yogurts-a-day instruction. The rheum-doc agrees that gaining weight at that rate isn’t good, so I’m back down to one yogurt a day and trying to get additional calcium in other foods. We’ll see how it goes in another few months.
I’m sure the month off weight-bearing exercise (except for boardwalks and a few mild hikes) hasn’t helped any. After I returned from Asheville I started going to the gym again, riding a recumbent bike so I wouldn’t aggravate any remaining injury to my foot. I burn more calories on the elliptical machine and in my very advanced aerobics/weight-lifting classes, though. I want to get back to normal.
So, here we go again – starting over again with a new weight-loss goal that has to be in sync with my bone density, high cholesterol, and kidney stone history. Managing my health can be complicated – but I’m determined to master it all!