J. Jason Lazarus Blog

I’ve been keeping my focus on other things lately - namely my family - and haven’t made much effort to blog.  I’ve had several FCA concerts to photoshoot in the past month (Les Yeux Noirs & Ira Glass), managed two phototrips over the last month as well (Cleary Hill Mine & Scafford Mine) and aside from that, work & family has kept me busy.  Heck, lately I haven’t even made time for video games - I’m still churning my way through Final Fantasy 13!

Anyways - I thought I’d share as most of you out there don’t have a direct bookmark to my Youtube videos - here’s some new videos of Aidan!

Aidan at Build-a-Bear workshop almost two months ago near his second birthday - this was his first Build-a-Bear and he’s been loving the Dog (whose, coincidentally named “Doogie”) ever since:

We had a really small celebration at home for Aidan’s Second Birthday as we were heading down in mere days to Kenai to visit his grandmother - still, he managed to piledrive his face into the cupcake:

Aidan’s Second Birthday at his Grandmother’s in Kenai:

A short video of Aidan sledding at my parent’s place right before all the snow started to melt (about a month ago). We, unfortunately, have a very flat piece of land so sledding doesn’t really work over at our place - on the other hand, it’s perfect down my parents driveway!:

Aidan’s turning out to be quite the baseball fan - he got a kids glove for his second birthday (via Deanna’s parents) and he’s been wanting to go outside ever since to play with it. Now with the snow melted, we’ve been trying to take him out, at least weekly, to play ball. There’s a huge part of me that can’t wait till the Goldpanners season starts - he’ll LOVE that!

Aidan’s gotten to that point where he’s making up his own games - this one seems to be some kind of “Ready Set… Sumo!” game where he chases around his mom afterwards - who knows whats going through his head but he’s loving it! He ends the video by taking his mom down acting like a Zombie Baby:

I’ve been making good use of my iPhone 3GS lately to make most of these videos - follow me on twitter to get updates on new videos being published as well as a bit of a more consistent update on what is going on in my life - I’ve been a horrible blogger lately and I don’t see it getting any better anytime soon.

After my experience with Aidan at the hospital back in January, I’ve decided that the last thing we need to be focusing on, as a country, is an all-inclusive, comprehensive health care plan.  Both sides agree, health care is broken - but there are two fundamentally different ways to fix it - one forcing us to reconsider the entire structure while meticulously criticizing each morsel of the entire system and one that intends to mend what we have as a system with a huge bandage while piling on an extra 30 million people into the fray.

I speak not from a Republican or Democratic soapbox but from personal experience - I am one of the millions of Americans with respectable employer-provided Health Care.  My son spent two days, full of frustration, confusion, redundancy & excess, at our local hospital - and I doubt the story would be any different at any number of hospitals across our country.  I was raised by two nurses, so before I start I’d like to say that I have a high amount of respect to ALL individuals that choose medicene as a profession.  I whole-heartedly believe that these problems aren’t the people (nor do I blame, individually any doctors, nurses or professionals) - it’s the system itself.  I could go on for days for why this system is broken, why it doesn’t need a greater load of subscribers and why only mending the wound won’t help - so I’ll try to keep it fairly concise on why I believe this old horse called Health Care needs to be taken out to the field and shot.

Lack of supervision, recordkeeping & overall intervention:  Here you are, a very concerned parent, in a hospital where your son is battling Pneumonia, Broncitis & RSV (all at the same time) and you want nothing more than to get your child home.  You find that it’s the lack of effort of those around you that’s preventing you from knowing anything about anything - your world has already been turned upside down and the lack of effort on the part of specialists around you isn’t helping at all.  Specifically:  Aidan wasn’t hydrated enough for him to effectively fight the infection - so we were asked to push fluids or risk an IV.  IV’s being ranked pretty far up on a kid’s “scary-meter” so we desperately tried to avoid that.  Yet, no matter how much we pushed, with each successive nurse that came by to check, it was still not enough.  When asked how much per hour needed to be pushed, we got a cryptic message that didn’t explain anything aside from the fact that we weren’t doing enough.  Through several shifts of nurses, we desperately tried to avoid an IV - but without the previous nurse recording our progress & our attempts at hydrating him, the next nurse just started the process over again with little encouragement: keep on pushing it, you’re not doing enough - and to boot, acted like we had been sitting there doing nothing since the last shift she saw us.   There was no acknowledgment of what the other nurse said, how far we had come or how far we needed to go - just simply that we hadn’t done enough, hadn’t made any progress and that our lack of attempts were dooming him to being hooked up to yet another tube.

After the first day in the hospital, our doctor outlined some goals for us to meet before he could go home - one required his oxygen level to be consistently high without the assisted oxygen.  For the next several hours, I battled nurses that would lecture me every time his Oxygen level slipped below 90 - a fairly high level given that he had to maintain 94 to go home.  I use the word “lecture” lightly - more accurately, it felt like belittling - and at that, stubborn belittling as they were unable to listen to simple rationale: that a child eating couldn’t have a an oxygen tube in their face, that children struggle when foreign objects are thrusted in their face and that when fussing, oxygen levels might, just might, go down.  Apparently my son should’ve been virtually hogged-tied, unable to move for 48 hours straight and not fed at all to keep some of the nurses happy.  At that, because I constantly had a nurse hounding me, I couldn’t even test whether Aidan could hold his oxygen levels above 94 until certain nurses were off-shift: keeping us in the hospital, easily, another four to eight hours than we needed to.  Anytime I tried to explain the doctor wanted to us to test him off the oxygen, they refused to believe me, refused to check the record for a note of said suggestion and, in not so many words, said that they knew best.

Another stipulation for discharge was that Aidan maintain healthy levels of hydration while lowering the amount the IV was providing.  This took me four hours of badgering the nurses - and several of them at that - to advance Aidan’s treatment at all.  They, once again, refused to believe me, took over 3 hours to check the records and kept us, once again, in the hospital for more time than we needed to be.

Slow to treat, slow to heal:  Aidan’s doctor stopped by every 12 hours - that counts four times in a two day period that we had five minutes of contact at a time.  I’m not critizizing the doctor personally - we love our doctor and think that they do stellar work - it’s the fact that it’s standard to only expect to see them only a couple times during your entire stay.  There were several times during our stay where Aidan surpassed the goals set by the doctor prior to her next visit - and not by just a couple minutes/hours - we’re talking 6-8 hours extra on expensive Oxygen, 2 extra respiratory treatments that he didn’t need and 4 hours extra on IV.  If doctors in the same specialty (or the same private practice) would somehow be pooled together so that a team of two or three doctors could take shifts on any given hospital ward and check on the progress of their colleague’s patients (as well as their own) we could provide checkups every six (or, God forbid, even less) hours on even the less crucial patients.  I understand my Son wasn’t of prime concern - I don’t expect him to be treated like a child who is actually struggling with life - but if I’m being admitted to the hospital, obviously it’s a bit more serious than “four checkups in a two day period” seems.

Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy:  Even though the doctor wasn’t there enough, my son’s room was consistantly flooded with other people.  Nurses apparently no longer take vitals - forcing someone else to trail the nurse five minutes later to take the measurements that the nurse needed five minutes before - easily prolonging treatment adjustment and progress.  A Respiratory Specialist needs to administer the nebulized treatments - but only the ones that the nurses can’t give - yet they still need a nurse to help them with the procedure.  To boot, I have to pay for the specialist to come in every four hours and administer a treatment that, oddly enough, is alright for me to do, by myself, at home for my son once he’s discharged.  This happens at the same time that I’m being reminded how much my son needs rest to get better - something you can’t do with half a dozen people prodding you in a given 4-hour period.

What makes me so irate about this whole situation is that no matter what I did, it wasn’t enough; no matter how certain I was I still couldn’t tell which way was up; no matter how much my child needed to feel safe, I couldn’t muster up the certainty to provide the grounding that he needed.  I didn’t ask to be placed in the middle of a war of attrition between doctors and nurses - and that’s exactly what this felt like.  The nurses fell short of saying that the “doctor doesn’t know what they’re talking about” but you could see that’s what their actions (or inactions, in this case) were intending.  I hate the logic that you should stay in the hospital as long as possible to insure a rebound doesn’t occur - not only does it start to chafe away at my wallet but with the lack of individualized care or specialized supervision, I have a hard time not concluding that some of our hospital stay felt like an overpriced hotel room with a persistantly annoying custodial staff.  I also despise the logic that if I’ve got insurance, I shouldn’t worry about it - “it’ll all be covered!”  That’s the mentality that’s gotten us in this mess in the first place - although my premiums and extent of coverage will be minimally impacted by Aidan’s stay at the hospital.  Multiply that same effect across the entire country - consider if, on average (completely hypothesizing) that Americans stay 4 hours extra at the hospital than they need to - that adds up amoungst 300 million.

Let me say that I respect all of those that choose the medical profession - Nurses, Doctors and Specialists are all amazing individuals that truly do care much more than I’ve just alluded to.  I’m convinced that it’s the system itself that has forced all of them to be so ineffective at what they all strive to do - I don’t blame the nurses or doctors individually, I blame the system and how its caused these care providers to become so procedural and outwardly callous.  Whatever we do to health care, I hope that we actually fix it rather than sweeping the mess underneath a rug of procedure laden with red tape.

Yeah - so updating often apparently didn’t work - and unfortunately, I don’t have much to show this time around either in the way of content - a few video and photo updates but not much in the way of writing.  The last two months have been, in the least, extremely hectic.  Much of January was spent with me about ready to pull my hair out over things non-family related as well as some hectic times with Aidan spending two days in the hospital and about another week at home under, practically, house arrest.

Aidan managed to, during mid-January, pick up Pneumonia, Broncitis and RSV all at the same time - his cough that was totally dry quickly turned ugly, mucus-laden and made it difficult for him to breathe between the coughs.  We took him into the doctor’s after a weekend of doctor-prescribed “wait and see”.

I won’t go into the specifics about the hospital stay - let me just say that it’s for another post and rant that I hope to finish sometime soon - needless to say, the hospital stay was one of the most aggrevating things I’ve had to endure in recent memory and has made me an ardent supporter of overhauling the industry dramatically before we even think of giving anyone else coverage under Obama’s plan.  Aidan took two days to get off of an IV drip for fluids, Oxygen to keep his Blood O2 levels up and a regiment of respiratory treatments every two hours or so.  Talk about scary times.  After two days, we got to take him home with treatments every four hours for the next week - but as soon as we left the hopistal, we had our real boy back which made us happier than anything.

Since then, he’s been talking up a storm - taking in another two to five words a week, putting them together in rudimentary sentences and surpassing many people’s expectations.  We’ll be starting potty training soon as he’s beginning to be actively interested in not only proclaiming the fact that he has done the deed but also he’s got interest in using the toilet.  The eariler we get him potty trained solidly, the eariler we can look into getting him into the Bunnell House on campus - a classroom/lab for pre-preschool kids that has high marks everywhere we’ve heard about it.

Since then, he’s also had his first haircut - something that he was a perfect angel for - no crying, no fussing - in fact, he was excited about it!  All the new pictures, from Halloween till now, can be seen on the gallery starting on this page.

I’ve also started a Youtube account with some of my iPhone videos (upgraded to a 3gs for Christmas) - you can find all the videos under the username “gimpiuaf”.  I finally gave up on the hope of hosting all my videos here locally and submitted to the one-click ease of youtube.  I haven’t uploaded many, but here are a few that I’d like to share:

Again, I’m hoping that sometime soon I’ll be able to blog more - I’ve kept a pretty busy schedule lately that hasn’t allotted me the time that I’m so used to having - not to mention, by the time I get home at night, being a Dad is my priority - and, admittedly, by the time he goes to bed?  Gaming manages to be my priority - that or my wonderful wife - depending on which one will have me! Either way, I’m sure that my lofty aspirations will force me, once again, to not blog for a while - I do, however, keep my twitter feed going most days - catch up with us there!

I am alive.

I know that I assured you all that blogposts would become more regular with the last couple posts but it has obviously not faired so well.  For the last week I’ve been pretty much off the grid at my In-laws house.  Albeit, there is a suitable internet connection available at the house, something is keeping me from wanting to go through the hassle of setting it up (requires login info, etc).  I think it’s a silent protest of sorts - being that I do so much tech-related work on a day-to-day basis that on my vacations the last thing I want to spend any time doing is tech debugging.  That being said, my connection to the outside world has been limited to twitter updates from an unreliable EDGE connection via my iPhone - apparently down on the Kenai the wind is so hard it disrupts cell service.  A signal will spike at 3 bars and immediately disappear without any movement or fair warning/cause.

I have done Photography on my trip, though.  I found an abandoned house and broken-down boat in Homer to photograph - I’d like to share the results if I had a card reader with me right now.  See, this is exactly what I mean - blogs manage to be so darned complicated! I’m am using my Rollei more - I assure you.  Yes, indeed, I am using my $500 investment into professional-level medium format cameras.  Although a small part of me still lusts after a Hasselblad, my pocket screams in agony at its prospective price.  Now I just need to actually get around to developing the film from my Rollei!

Aidan is doing fine.  He’s talking more and more each day - managing to put words together more and more each day.  We’ll be starting potty training soon enough - something that the doc suggests we wait on until his second birthday - it’s amazing just thinking that its just around the corner!

I hope to have more soon.  This just serves as a quick update only - try to hold me to that.  I’ll leave you with a few pictures of Aidan & Santa this year that, if you follow me on Twitter, you’ve already seen - either way, the results were much better than they were last year! <link>

Aidan in Dragon Suit

Gosh.  Has this last couple of months been busy - or should I say that I’ve been keeping myself busy enough to where blogging hasn’t exactly been my idea of a good use of free time.  In fact, the last 2-3 weeks, I’ve been fighting something really nasty - somewhere between the flu, strep and an overall lack of energy.

That being said, while I was downloading my most recent pictures off of our three digital cameras this morning I noticed that I hadn’t done an update on Aidan for any of you good folks out in the cyberether.  In fact, I was shocked to find that a few of my cameras haven’t been updated in the gallery of Aidan pictures in over six months - and I know that there are a select few out there that get through the day with adorably cute pictures of my son.

Aidan at Tanana Valley Fair

It’s been a month since Aidan’s 18 month checkup and he’s been meeting or exceeding each goal developmentally as well as height/weight wise.  Last month he measured up at 29lbs (80th percentile) - which explains all too much why our arms are so tired - it’s surprising we don’t both have amazing pectorial muscles!  He also measured up to 33 inches long (75%!) and he keeps on getting taller and taller each day.  That head of his is still uncontrollably massive at 19.5 inches (95%!!!) which consistantly makes me wonder when it’s going to inflate more, don massive blodd vessels on the side and go completely bald ala Star Trek’s telepathic beings from another world.

Developmentally, he keeps on adding more and more words to his vocabulary.  He’s gotten down “Mama” and “Da” quite profeciently but also signs both “Please” (rubbing his belly) and “Thank You” (which he does by blowing a kiss and saying “Muh!”).  He’s got “Juice”, “Car”, “Train” down, knows where his Nose, Mouth, Belly and Feet are (points at them) - and he’s also got several noises down as well.  This week we’ve gotten him answering questions like “What sound does a Dragon make?” (Rawr!), “What sound does a Vampire make?” (Hiiiissss!) and “What sound does a Train make?” (Choo-Choo!).  Overall, he’s adorable and loves learning more.

Aidan playing with trains

As you can probably guess from the photos, he’s slated to be the most adorable dragon in all of creation this Halloween.  Since we picked up his dragon suit at Old Navy about two weeks ago, he’s already worn it twice and had a blast running around in it acting like a Dragon.  He’s also a rabid Thomas the Tank Engine fan.  As much as I was hoping to completely keep him away from hyper-commericalized characters and let him enjoy more classic toys, this has been my one slip-up in that department.  And given how wholesome Thomas is, the fact that it plays into my own interests to do model railroading later on with him - I see little harm in it.  We have been trying to avoid spoiling him, though.  With little else to splurge on in our lives and no other kids to spoil, it’s hard not to - but we’re maintaining the high ground on this one.  He doesn’t randomly get to point at something in the stores and get it - and he also realizes that fussing won’t get him anything. We have been frequenting the local toy stores rather than the box stores and have gotten him interested in quite a few non-licensed classic toys - from foam swords covered in ornate silk that he uses at SCA events to little wooden people much like Playmobil toys - he loves what both Enchanted Forest and Toy Quest has to offer.

Aidan eating mom's cake in Anchorage

We’ve got him into quite a routine now and he’s pretty aimiable about all parts of the day - to waking up on time each morning to going to bed by 9-9:30 each night - he’s got a pattern that he follows with little fuss at all.  In fact, really the only time that he fusses is when he’s either sick or recovering from being sick.  Right now he’s got Croup Cough which sent us to the emergency room at Fairbanks Memorial at 3am on last Friday morning - but now he’s doing much better and has almost fully recovered.

Don’t know what else to say - hopefully I’ll get back into the habit of blogging once a week here soon.  We’ll see, enjoy all the new photos in the gallery - going all the way back to March of this year!