Nice coverage in the paper of my daughter’s bus accident.  Nicely done, and thank you, Wendy!

http://www.shoppernewsnow.com/news/110209BeardenA.pdf

Created on http://www.make-me-mini.com/

What do you do when reporting to the scene of your own child’s accident?  I did it.  I barely registered these peripherals:  A firetruck.  A police car.  An ambulance. A school bus FULL of alert, chattering faces, all looking out at us.  More firemen than could possibly have fit in the truck.  A red car  which was clearly the culprit.  The dear bus driver.  The neighbors who had knocked on my door.  The sudden and miraculous appearance of a friend from across town, offering me a ride to the hospital following the ambulance. 

My daughter wanted to use my phone at the hospital to Facebook her friends about the accident, and I didn’t let her, as we needed to be  attentive and helpful  to the people who were still attending to her.  

But perhaps even more, I felt that Facebooking from the hospital  was unseemly in a way I couldn’t quite explain to myself.  Was it Inappropriate attention-seeking, when she hadn’t really been “harmed?”  (but of course she’d been harmed.  Someone HIT HER BODY.  With a CAR.) 

We came home and she immediately headed for the computer, and I heard myself telling her not to “over-communicate.”  Then I realized I was censoring her, and for no good reason. 

“Why not?” asked the wiser woman inside of me. 

Why not let her reach out to her friends, immersing herself in a reassuring buzz of  “Plz tell me what happnd!” and “I am so GLAD ur okay!”   Why not let her tell her story over and over, processing it by sharing it?  Why not allow her to redeem her own story by taking the lead in telling it?

So I changed my mind.  “Communicate AWAY!” I said.  “ALL you want to!” 

And she did.  She tapped away for a couple hours on Facebook, where the news was already spreading through Middle School Land.  Several new “friend requests”  appeared from breathless thrill seekers who wanted to be closer to the action.  Chat messages bipped like popcorn from friends and people she hardly knew. 
 
Was it unseemly?  I decided not.  My daughter was motoring along on her own power, getting what she needed, and learning she could at the same time.  Why did she deserve it any less just because she hadn’t actually broken any bones? 

And, as I reminded myself, there WAS hurt here.  My little girl’s trust had been violated, her PERSON had been violated in a way she didn’t expect or deserve, by someone who had physically struck her with a lethal ton of steel. She had been exposed to a bus full of her adolescent peers who had eagerly watched her for 30 minutes in the immediate aftermath of the accident, some even snapping pictures of her with their cell phones.  So why shouldn’t she re-fashion herself as a bit of a heroine?  Why shouldn’t she even have, YES, a bit of a bask in her 15 minutes of fame? (She confessed, a couple of times, to wishing she had at least a splint…)
 
School the day after was much more of the same for her.  Everyone was talking about the kid who had been run over… by a car? a bus?  The nurse called her out of class.  The principal called her out of class. It could have been awful, but my daughter chose not to let it be.  And how proud my daughter’s friends were to know her, getting their OWN share of attention by bearing the much-coveted details. 

On the bus home the day after, there was silence as my daughter walked down the aisle to her seat.  The bus driver stood and gave a lecture to the kids about safety, calling my daughter  ”one lucky chick” and describing how he’d almost had a heart attack watching her get hit the day before, and almost hadn’t come to work this day. 
 
And when her bus stop came, there was silence again as my daughter got off the bus.  She carefully crossed the street, turned, and waved.  And the entire bus burst into cheers! 

Cue the theme from “The Natural,” and Hurray for The Kid who Lived to Ride the Bus Another Day!

My daughter was hit by a car yesterday just as she was getting off the school bus.  May you never get a phone call like that at your house.

She is fine, thank God, but  I hope you will hear three things that this Mom has to say today:

(1) Drivers must yield (which means STOP!) when a school bus is also stopped.

(2) Children need to be very careful when they exit a school bus, even if the bus has employed its stop signs and flashing lights.  It’s important to keep re-enforcing these 1^st grade rules, because even an 8^th grader will be distracted by a bus driver’s frantically honking his horn at an oncoming driver.

(3) The degree of impairment caused by talking on a cell phone while driving, (even when using headsets) has been proven in several major studies to be the same as driving drunk.  Driving with cell phones is not yet illegal in our city as it is in more and more others, but we don’t need to wait for a law. It is VERY IMPORTANT to limit this very popular distraction. 

Thank you very much for listening. 

- Almostgotit

About time someone brought it up, and I’ve been a bit peeved about Dumbledore, too.

As well as all the other mysterious, magical, avuncular characters in fantasy tales who tend to alternate their saving attentions with utter neglect and abandonment.  I mean, what’s the deal?  Small, helpless little people ask for your help, and all you can give them is cryptic little poems, a “good luck with that” and then leave them to the orks and dementors?

Ahem.  And since this came to me by way of an Anglican priest, it would be a bit disingenuous to leave out mention of Aslan, wouldn’t it?   Comments, anyone?

(Hat tip to Fr. Dave in England.  And wondering: do you talk like this now too, Dave?)

Does that sound great, or what?

I just received this invitation for a party, in a bar, in Chicago. 

Unfortunately, I’m so perfectly qualified to attend that I can’t go, because I failed either to live in Chicago or to have enough money for a plane ticket.

According to the latest issue of The New Yorker, it was a health department worker in my own city whose comments led to a widespread panic about the H1N1 vaccine.

Then, “38% of parents oppose new [H1N1} vaccine,” my city’s paper announced this week.

Here in my city, we also had our first child die from H1N1 this week.

Okay, here’s the thing.  Well, here’s three things:

1. 38% of parents may not be reading what the major health experts are saying about the H1N1 vaccine, but that doesn’t stop many of them from listening to non-experts, nor from proselytizing their friends, peers and colleagues as if they had either the qualifications or informed knowledge to do so. 

Whatever happened to critical thinking?  What ever happened to feeling responsible for how we impact other people around us with our thoughtless, uninformed talk? 

If more of us would simply cite our sources, that would be a great help — not to mention a great MODEL for all the other people who keep making up stuff and see no problem with that approach.  Bonus points if the citations are actually from reputable sources.

2. I read somewhere — :0)  – that everyone who catches the flu passes it on to 3-4 others.  Getting a flu shot is about more than protecting ourselves: people who are vaccinated protect other people as well.  The child who dies may not be your own… but YOU could be the one who caused his or her death! 

H1N1 IS a serious disease, just as the seasonal flu is a serious disease (ask my friend Cyn.)  And yes, H1N1 can kill you.

3. The Mayo Clinic admits that some cases of Guillain-Barre have been traced to flu vaccinations.
 
Okay, so let’s suppress our inner- toddler- response to that information and just do some math:

In the United States, only about 1 in 100,000 people are affected with Guillain-Barre syndrome
each year. Further, the fatality rate of GBS is only five to ten percent of THOSE. And remember: at least some (if not most, if not ALL) of these cases CANNOT be traced back to an influenza vaccination.

Meanwhile, between 10-20% of of us are infected by influenza each year (= between 10,000 and 20,000 per 100,000).

Of those, 30,000 to 50,000 people die each year in the U.S. as a result of influenza viral infection.  (the fatality number is indefinite because citing influenza as cause of death is only required for children. )   

And please note: that’s the fatality rate not from the vaccination, but from the INFECTION.   

Finally, we already know H1N1 is much more dangerous than the seasonal flu for children.

So which is the greater risk, class, both of infection and of mortality: Guillane-Barre (or any other potential complication) or influenza itself (including H1N1)? 

Bonus Questions:

• Who will the person who CANNOT get innoculated because of a Guillane-Barre or some other risk depend upon for their own protection against the flu, if not you? 
• Who will YOU depend on for your own protection, if you simply elect not to get vaccinated, except for all the other folks around you who do get vaccinated?
• Please explain why people expose themselves or family members to the flu on purpose?   The 2009  H1N1 is not a perennial virus like chicken pox — as if exposing oneself to that potentially fatal disease makes any sense, either.  So why try to catch a 2009 strain to protect oneself  from catching a 2009 strain?  When a vaccine does the same work for “free?”
• And please explain how the “I already have a natural immunity” argument can mean anything else but “I’ve never  been exposed to enough virus to get sick either because I’m a hermit or because everyone else (and everyone else’s children) around me has been immunized.” 

It is hard to know at this point whether I am really a “quitter” or if I have been unusually prone to getting myself into situations, lately, which eventually become untenable. 

It’s also hard to know if I have accomplished enough in the end that it’s even been worth my trouble.

Volunteering as a board member and neighborhood communications person for the past few years has taken HOURS and mostly involves hearing complaints about pretty much everything, including pretty much everything I DO. 

It also draws out all the crazies. 

One of my neighbors decided to circulate a petition about his potholes the other homeowners hadn’t fixed for him (with our personal backhoes and private stashes of asphalt.  Which he’d asked us for telepathically, apparently.).  Half the neighbors on our block signed his petition without bothering to see what it was all about, rumors and hysteria expanded exponentially, and guess who had to fix THAT whole mess?

Another woman has been reporting various neighbors to the authorities while taking clandestine photos of a few of them.  She also has taken to calling me regularly to accuse Mr. Pothole, her former best buddy, of vile felonies. 

A woman up the hill, meanwhile, has tried variously to tear down our playground equipment, build a gazebo on top of the (often overflowing) sewage grate, and install funerial urns upon our entrance gate – none of these in consultation with anyone but her own infallible self. 

Several folks have complained to me about the noise from a local nightclub, as if I owned it or something.  Yes they’ve called the police about the noise – once, or maybe even twice, but nothing has changed.  I’ve tried responding with encouraging stories, mainly about  the overflowing sewage grate (thankfully still gazebo-less) which I had to call the city about over and over for several YEARS before it was fixed.  

The neighbors don’t want to hear my stories, though — they want me to wave my magic wand and make things all BETTER, or barring a magic wand, to go ahead and spend the next several years making phone calls on THEIR BEHALF.  

(Not.  Going. To happen.)

I’ve even tried being direct, e.g.: if one feels strongly about potholes, noise, or proliferating felons, one might try taking some responsibility for these things one’s self.  Which, for example,  might entail calling the police a third or even (gasp) a FOURTH time when the noise wakes one’s babies up at 2 am on yet another Sunday morning.

Yet another couple went ballistic and accused us all of illicit weeding behind his garage, proceeded to drain our community fund dry, threaten a lawsuit, and then build a retaliatory fence on property that isn’t theirs.

Oh.  My. Lord. 

Is it ME?

I got another angry email from a neighbor this morning, so I told the neighborhood president I quit.   Done.  Finito.  Moving ON. 

For this kind of crap, at least my previous bosses PAID me!