April's CR Diary

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May 9, 2005

Unafraid of the Future

There are only two things that can inspire me to quote Disney sountrack lyrics. Love, and a good campaign. I've quoted plenty of song lyrics related to love, so this one is going to be about a good campaign. Contract campaign, that is.

This morning I was listening to my Anastasia soundtrack, jamming along to that duet between Richard Marx and some then-starlet female singer whose name I don't even remember. That song was for me the theme song to a contract campaign I worked on in 2003, and is a really cheesy happy song, pure Disney. I was thinking of it because we are once again involved in a difficult contract campaign, this time at our second largest hospital, and many of the issues are the same. In the contract campaign of 2003 at our largest hospital, one of our major victories was winning the best retirement package for nurses of any hospital in the state of Pennsylvania. The average age of a nurse in this country is 49, so retirement is a huge issue. It's horrifying to think that people who spend their entire adult lives caring for the sick have to worry about whether or not they'll have enough money to live on when they retire. On Wednesday in negotiations, we were discussing the issue of retirement. Our lead negotiator brought up the fact that nursing is such back breaking physical work that most nurses can not physically do the work until the age of 65. It's even worse now that cuts in ancillary staff have forced nurses to do almost all the heavy lifting. Patients are getting heavier and heavier, and most nurses are women. I know very few nurses who don't struggle with daily back pain. They are so short staffed and pressed for time that they make choices between protecting their own health and saving their patients' lives.

So the idea of working on a nursing unit until the age of 65 is hard to entertain for those nurses whose bodies are already collapsing under the strain of the work. Retirement is a big, big issue.

I have oddly mixed feelings when we discuss the issue of retirement. On the one hand, of course I want nurses who spend their entire careers caring for acutely ill human beings to retire with dignity and security. No question about that.

But on the other hand, it makes me very sad that people expect their bodies to be mostly destroyed by the time they're in their fifties. The hard physical labor of nursing is difficult anytime, but the fact that we simply must assume that most nurses will be physically unable to keep working until a normal retirement age at 65 strikes me as a tragedy.

Lots of steps could be taken to improve this situation. If hospitals hadn't cut back so much on ancillary staff, there would be orderlies to help lift, move and transport heavy patients. If nursing staff weren't cut to the bone, nurses would have more time to take more care in lifting so as to minimize injuries.

But what about those heavy patients? My nurses tell me that their patients have gotten dramatically heavier in recent years, so that now nurses regularly have to lift patients who weigh 300 and even 400 pounds. And that's not on the bariatriac treatment floor... that's in the ICU. Cause guess what? All those statitstics you read on how obese people end up having heart attacks and strokes and diabetes? Well guess who takes care of them when they get sick? Nurses. Mostly women, mostly in their forties or older. The obesity epidemic isn't just hurting the obese -- it's breaking the backs of those who care for them.

And nurses themselves, like most anybody else in this country, aren't exactly paragons of healthy lifestyle. Many smoke and most are overweight. Between working at one of the world's most stressful jobs: twelve hours or more at a time often with no break even to go to the bathroom, much less to eat a meal, and then running home to take care of spouses, children, aging parents, etc., nurses don't have much time to take care of themselves. So the cycle of starving all day and then overeating the second they come into contact with food, not to mention sleep disturbances from years of shift work, creates a vicious circle of stress, weight gain, illness, injury, and more stress.

They just can't make it, working like that, to 65. Desk jobs are few and hard to get, so many leave the profession all together. After years of sacrificing their own health for the health of others, many are forced to take low paying jobs in the service sector to make ends meet. And the effects of years of physical labor and unhealthy lifestyle make it difficult to work a job that requires standing all day, as so many in the service industry do.

I'm horrified at the lack of respect for these hard working professionals who hold our lives and the lives of our loved ones in their hands. When I think about the people I care about who are alive today because of the work of nurses, nurses whose names I'll never know, I become even more dedicated than ever to the fight for dignity and respect for nurses everywhere. Someone could well have been on her eleventh hour of work, exhausted and hungry and worried about picking up her kids on time from daycare, when someone I love ended up in the emergency room. Someone ignored her own needs and put all of her life's energy into saving a stranger's life.

And then she came back in the next day, and did it again. And again and again, maybe for thirty years or even longer.

I wish I could go back in time and space and thank all the nurses who have taken care of people I love. The nurses who cared for my mom at Duke Hospital back in 1974 when she had a dangerous high risk pregnancy and a terrible emergency C-section three weeks early, all the while fearing that her child was brain retarded because the doctors didn't quite know how to use the ultrasound yet and had measured my head wrong. The nurses who cared for my grandmother when she had colon cancer, from which she made a complete recovery. The nurses who took care of my father on the public ward at Duke when he was barely out of college and had a miserable operation for a slipped disk in his back. Even the nurses, Chris and Jim, who took care of me at Yale New Haven in the summer of 1996 when I showed up in the emergency room after dropping a couch on my foot. Being in the emergency room at Yale New Haven with the gunshot wounds and stabbing victims was more upsetting than the pain in my foot, but Chris and Jim managed to make it all better, even though it meant drilling a hole in my toe! They promised me I could wear open toed sandals again, and many successful pedicures later, I am able to wear all the cute shoes I want to, due to their quick action in the face of sure disaster.

So what in the world does this have to do with CR?

I believe that nurses should be able to retire with dignity and economic security and health insurance at 65 or even earlier if they need to. But it makes me sad and angry that we live in a society where even the most highly educated of health care professionals can expect no better than to watch their bodies slowly degenerate so that they are physically unable to do the work they love, just as they are reaching the peak of their skill and experience.

Age related degeneration and disease don't just happen, they are a result of specific processes that we have the power to slow down. We can't stop them or reverse them yet -- that's why you need to click the "Contribute" button and donate to the Mprize! -- but we can slow them down. And CR is the way to do it.

Not everyone is going to want to be quite as hardcore as MR, or as I hope to be. But even mild to moderate CR could make the difference between that nurse who saved the life of someone you care about ending her career at 55 in pain and ill health, or going on to save many more lives. Everyone loses when age robs society of experienced, skilled people, in any profession.

And most nurses don't even know about CR! The medical community is so slow to embrace anything weird and new that the lifesaving information isn't even out there! Even for those who do know, our entire society is set up to make doing even the mildest form of CR very, very difficult. The kids want to go to the Wendy's drive-thru. The husband can't live without his steak and potatoes. The hospital cafeteria -- THE HOSPITAL CAFETERIA! -- sells only high carb, high fat gak and a few limp greens on a "salad bar" that is only open at lunch time. Healthy convenience foods are almost non-existent, and information about how to cook FAST, healthy food, is hard to find.

I do my little part every day to write the blog and teach you how to make quick, easy, yummy food that your non-CR'd partner and kids will eat (and I offer to set you up with some nice CR'd men who have jobs and everything if you get tired of the whole non-CR'd dating scene, which I certainly did. I once said to a brother, "I won't settle till I meet a man who can make a good salad!"). And I do my part to help nurses get the respect they deserve. Sometimes I even manage to put the two together... when the nurses notice that I've lost so much weight and ask how I did it, I tell them about CR, and they do get interested.

I want to live in a world where people have choices about how they live their lives, even as they become chronogically older. Where people have the information available to them to slow down their own aging process, and the support that it takes to CR successfully. Imagine a world where you went to the McDonald's drive-thru and ordered an eggwhite omlet with a side of steamed broccoli! Or where instead of ordering a pizza, you might be able to order a vegetable stir-fry a little Quorn mixed in for protein (calling all Quorn lovers... VLC and I are going to feast on Carolina bbq Quorn tomorrow night!). Where kids ate healthy food in the school cafeteria, and everyone knew how to cook quick and easy CR friendly meals.

The nurses I work with, who have sacrificed their own health for the health of others, look to the future and they're scared. They don't have enough money to retire on, and they don't think their bodies are going to make it even to 65, much less beyond. They've given so much, and now what do they have to look forward to?

When I look at them, I sometimes imagine that I see the faces of the nurses who saved the lives of the people I love. I can't go back to those nurses and thank them... I'll never have any idea who they are. But I will do everything I can in there here and now to fight for their right to retire with dignity, and show by my example how we can live healthier now, so that retirement will be a choice, not a surrender.

[Serious, impassioned entry ending. Nutrition information beginning.
See, you can have it all!]

Food List : 5-9-05.FLS
DATE : 05/09/05
Num. Foods : 18
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #2 : Fish oil, menhaden 1 teaspoon
Food #3 : Grape juice, frozen concentrate, sweetened, diluted with 3 volume water, with added vitamin C 1.0 servings
Food #4 : Dannon Light and Fit Yogurt 1 cup
Food #5 : Salsa, med. chunky 2 tbsps
Food #6 : Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, November thru May average 50 g
Food #7 : Arugula, raw 20 g
Food #8 : Olives, ripe, canned (jumbo-super colossal) 12 olives
Food #9 : Lemon juice, raw half lemon
Food #10 : Yogurt, fruit, low fat, 11 grams protein per 8 ounce 1 cup black cherry nonfat
Food #11 : Broccoli, raw 150 g
Food #12 : Nuts, almonds, dried, unblanched 15 g
Food #13 : Coffee, brewed, prepared with distilled water a lot
Food #14 : Wheat bran, crude 1 tbsp/5g
Food #15 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 6 oz
Food #16 : Turkey, all classes, light meat, raw 17 g of protein worth
Food #17 : Lettuce, cos or romaine, raw (veggies in subway salad)
Food #18 : Olives, ripe, canned (small-extra large) (in subway salad)

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1015.76__cal 51%
Protein 73.79__gm 134% RDA
Total Fat 32.79__gm 50%
Sat. Fat 5.91__gm 30%
Mono. Fat 19.19__gm 66%
Poly. Fat 5.51__gm 83%
Carbohydrate 85.48__gm 28%
Fiber 15.49__gm 52%
Cholesterol 85.76__mg 29%
Vit. A 4837.62__IU 97% RDA
Vit. B6 1.08__mg 68% RDA
Vit. B12 1.81__mcg 91% RDA
Vit. C 191.95__mg 320% RDA
Vit. E 14.43__mg 180% RDA
Thiamine 0.40__mg 36% RDA
Folacin 226.54__mcg 126% RDA
Riboflavin 2.16__mg 166% RDA
Niacin 8.99__mg 60% RDA
Panto. Acid 3.37__mg 67% SA
Calcium 1129.22__mg 94% RDA
Copper 1.15__mg 58% SA
Iron 12.66__mg 84% RDA
Magnesium 260.99__mg 93% RDA
Manganese 2.89__mg 96% SA
Phosphorus 778.71__mg 65% RDA
Potassium 2524.77__mg 126% RDA
Selenium 62.68__mcg 114% RDA
Sodium 2979.81__mg 124% SA
Zinc 5.40__mg 45% RDA
Tyrosine 4.14__gm 432% RDA
Lysine 8.76__gm 1216% RDA
Phenylalanine 5.09__gm 530% RDA
Leucine 9.03__gm 941% RDA
Valine 6.28__gm 748% RDA
Methionine 3.05__gm 1015% RDA
Cystine 1.62__gm 541% RDA
Tryptophan 1.33__gm 740% RDA
Threonine 4.83__gm 1007% RDA
Isoleucine 5.54__gm 770% RDA

Breakfast: eggwhites and flax oil, grape juice to wash down creatine
Lunch: plain yogurt with salsa, arugula salad, tomatoes, olives
Snack: black cherry nonfat fruit yogurt with almonds (Zoning my snacks???)
Dinner: Subway turkey club salad -- entered as turkey and lettuce and olives
based on amounts of protein, fat and carb in the Subway nutrition information.

Should have had brewers yeast but am working late so had to grab something.

P:C:F = 29:42:29

Zoning my world, one day at a time.

Posted by april at May 9, 2005 8:04 PM

Comments

Posted by: Jacob at May 10, 2005 7:41 PM

Posted by: april at May 11, 2005 7:47 AM

Posted by: Jacob at May 13, 2005 2:17 AM

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