Sylvia's Journal

As we drove home from Duxbury I read Axel the chapter in Jerome Groopman’s book (How Doctors Think) called Marketing, Money and Medical Decisions. It showed us why Hillary did not make much headway with her healthcare reform early in her husband’s administration. It also shows why, to this day, no one is making much headway as all the interests and stakes are like one giant Gordian knot.

Last night we saw Anna Deavere Smith’s wonderful play (Let me down easy) in Cambridge. The play is about grace and she gives the audience a view on grace through many windows: clergy, Rwanda, horse-racing and healthcare, acting out the voices of various stakeholders she interviewed; the performance highlighted one facet of the healthcare knot, the book another, and our own experience yet another. There are probably a thousand more and all of them show the same tangled knot. I am glad I can forget about it for awhile, until I get to see the high and mighty top docs later in November.

On the way back from the play I slept while Axel fiddled with the radio to get the latest on the Red Sox. There was no one on the road but us. Sita and Jim were at Fenway Park for the very long time it took to arrive at the game’s disappointing ending. We saw them briefly this morning and heard more wonderful stories about her trip around the world, especially her encounters with Billy Jean King, Sally Ride, Melinda Gates and other powerhouse women. Unfortunately she had to leave early to take care of her bills and invoices. She headed back to their home in Western Mass leaving Jim behind at his dad’s for work in his Manchester office; a bit of a LAT relationship these two have.

Tessa and Steve, even though they live here, we never even saw over the weekend. They left together on the 7 o’clock train this morning like an old married commuter couple, off to their respective jobs in Boston. We get to take care of the dog and wonder whether we can be the kind of grandparents this very energetic and playful creature needs. I took her out for a walk, or rather she took me out, rushing after anything that moved; this included acorns falling from the trees by the thousands, squirrels and chipmunks and even wild turkeys. We were both panting when we got back home.

My workday at home was productive if you can call it productive to get a phone mess cleared up and achieve ‘zero email’ at the end of the day without indiscriminate deletes and actually reading, responding and forwarding emails that required reading, responding or forwarding. I used to have an empty inbox at the end of each workday until we fell out of the sky. It has taken me 14 months to get back to where I was on July 13, 2007. There is actually a video about this idea (Inbox Zero). I think it is a movement of some sort.