My Notes - Stacy Kess

Of course the teens aren’t alright!

Don’t sound so shocked

I don’t know why everyone is so shocked.

Wars. Climate change. Racism. Gun violence. Book banning. Sexual harassment.

No, the teens are not alright!

Yet the headlines are met with shock — shock! — that the girls are experiencing depression and considering suicide and the boys are angry and agressive and the LGBTQ+ teens are feeling everything.

In fact, the headlines themselves sound full of dismay. “We should be alarmed,” says an opinion piece in The Globe.

First, sure, let’s be alarmed, but also recognize that while the data — the most complete the CDC has collected since the first time it conducted the High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey since it was first attempted in 1991 when participation was, to put it kindly, scant — is simply revealing hard truths.

Second, let’s also admit that many of us dealt with some of the same things in high school.

I, a GenXer, happen to remember a little band from Athens, Georgia, named R.E.M. who wrote a song that described exactly how I felt. “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine!” I’d yell along to the chorus as I’d play the song in my room at top volume back then.

So, if you’re an adult reading this, try to remember what it was like way back when.

But this? This is not for you, dear adult. This is for the teens.

This is to tell you teens that I understand. To tell you that we, the adults, for as shocked — shocked! — as we act right now, know how shitty junior high and high school can be because we were there. And we didn’t fix it. Some things we’ve just let go. In many ways, we made it worse.

That sexual harassment and abuse girls experience? Not new. In a Washington Post piece, one teen girl described being sexually assaulted by a boy in her high school — in the hallway in sight of a teacher. The boy went unpunished. I cannot count the number of women I know with stories that range from comments about their breasts (or their lack of) from junior high and high school to bra snapping to being pushed against a locker and touched inappropriately. I know too many women who were raped in junior high and high school by a “friend” at a party. Of course, we didn’t know what to call it, so we didn’t call it rape. And other than telling each other, we didn’t tell an adult because at least one of us at some point had told a teacher or principal when someone was touched inappropriately or raped at school. The result was always the same: “Did you ask for it? What were you doing to lead him on? Boys will be boys.”

And you ask why girls are depressed, cutting and suicidal? Do you adults who find this shocking really think this wasn’t happening when we were teens?

Then there’s the boys, whose hormones are surging, but are not learning constructive ways to let out that energy. Oh, and don’t forget the media — in our day it was magazines; today it’s streaming on YouTube and TikTok and Twitch — to make sure they have all the machismo of a man. Many of them have no idea how to handle their feelings or energy, except maybe sports. And we encourage them to be competitive. We encourage them when they win. We admonish them when they fail. And we fill their heads with aggressive messages.

And you ask why boys are angry, aggressive and the most likely to commit acts of violence? Do you adults who find this shocking really think this wasn’t happening when we were teens?

What may be new to many adults is the visibility of LGBTQ+ youth. When I was a teen, I had friends my age who were open about their gender identity and sexuality with me. But they were not “out” in general. And I can tell you how much they struggled overall. Now, adults are fight over hard-won gains for the LGBTQ+ community. They are banning books in school that allow you, LGBTQ+ teens, to feel seen and heard. No wonder you feel like the earth will split open and swallow you.

And you, adults, wonder why LGBTQ+ teens have the highest rates of depression and suicide? You are creating the most hostile of environments for these teens.

Yes, there are pressures we didn’t experience as kids that you do experience. Schools are shooting ranges and we didn’t experience that. (While my high school experienced a few bomb threats that caused evacuations, we never trained what to do in the event of a mass shooter, and I cannot even imagine doing that.) But if our politicians had the will, we could fix that.

But when I was a teen girl, there was pressure to look a certain way, dress a certain way and fit in. And I didn’t do any of those things. I was too skinny, flat chested, with frizzy black hair and a style that read, “You aren’t from here, are you?” I was called “freak” regularly, got into at least one fight, was touched inappropriately in the hall more times than I can count, and hated every morning when the clock hit 7 a.m.

When senior year rolled around, I had completed enough credits to start leaving campus early for work in the afternoons. It was the best thing that ever happened to me — until my male boss made me feel uncomfortable in the office. Every evening, sitting in my powder blue Plymouth Horizon in traffic on the freeway, I’d think, “I could keep driving north to Canada, cross the border and never look back.”

So no, my young friends, I don’t know where all this shock from adults is coming from because we went through much of this too. Worse, no one is telling you what they’ll do to fix it. You deserve better. And I’m sorry.

Now back to the adults reading this: Put yourself in your way-back machine — but leave your rose-colored glasses at home — and remember your junior high and high school experience. Now, come back to today and take a long hard look at what these teens are telling you. Sound familiar? It’s about time we did something to fix what we went through back then and what the teens are going through now, don’t you think?

And maybe it could start with something no adult ever did for us when we were young. Let’s start by asking the teens, “How can we help?” And then actually following up on it.

Let’s really talk about it

Ya know what? Let’s talk about it.

Black and Brown parents have The Talk with their kids. Little girls get a different kind of The Talk from the women in their lives. Jewish and Muslim kids get a version of it too. LGBTQ+ families have a version too. All for certain scenarios.

What do you do if you run into a situation where you are singled out for who you are and aggression — maybe even violence or death — is likely to come your way? The Talk is always given in a way where we, the potential victim, are told to do our best to be calm, collected, proper, polite. We are supposed to do everything right. Whether you are a Black father giving The Talk to your son about how to interact with the police or a mother explaining to her daughter how to avoid date rape or a Muslim family explaining how to avoid an anti-Muslim confrontation to your teen daughter newly wearing the hijab or an Asian-American parent talking to your child about what to do if confronted with anti-Asian hate: You know I’m right.

I know what I’d do because I’ve lived through several situations, some where I’ve frozen, some where I’ve ran and some where I’ve fought back. I know what I was supposed to do in each scenario, but my fight-flight-freeze response took over — because I’m human.

I survived in every situation. I’m lucky. My body froze when it needed to freeze. I ran when I needed to run. I fought back when I needed to fight back. But what if I hadn’t?

When I saw Tyre Nichols get up from the first set of beatings and run, I saw a person running for his life. I saw fear. I’ve felt that. But he was running from five police officers with weapons who caught him and beat him so severely that his injuries were fatal; there was no escaping that outcome.

Perhaps you’ve never been in a situation where you were confronted with the possibility of violence just because of who you are — just because of the color of your skin, or your gender, or your religion, or your disability, or anything that makes you different from those who hold power in a situation. If you haven’t, imagine yourself in that scenario and tell me what you would do. You imagine you’d do everything right, everything your elders told you to do. And still you are beaten. Still you are raped. Still you are terrorized. Still you are hunted. Still you are murdered.

This is the America – née the World — far too many of us know.

Bye, bye, Birdie: Twitter fires Accessibility Team

I didn’t want to write about the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk.

In fact, I was hoping I’d never write about Musk at all.

Not here in my notebook.

Not in a news article.

Not ever.

Ok, maybe the occasional snarky remark, but besides that? No.

But here we are.

On November 4, Musk fired a huge number of his Twitter workforce because he spent too much money on a social media company that he decided he wanted to buy, then didn’t want to buy, then bought in the end for money than it was worth and now he claims he has to fix the fiscal mess that Twitter’s in.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

In the process, he fired the entire Accessibility Experience Team, announced by Accessibility Experience manager Gerard Cohen on Twitter at 1:30 p.m. EST.

This team, some of whom identify as disabled themselves and often engaged people from the disability communities in their work, is responsibility for all the features that makes it possible for those with a wide variety of different needs to find Twitter very usable. These needs come from an array of disabilities.

These features are everything from an easy ALT text for screen readers feature that was oft-promoted to dim mode for low visual acuity. Cohen said in his thread there were more projects in the work.

I’ve used many social media over the years and quit using most of them. I’ve also had a few web sites and worked with a few designers. I’ve worked with a number of content management systems (CMS) and I can say that I found Twitter’s accessibility tools extremely user friendly on the creator end — like adding ALT text — and on the user end, when viewing ALT text. And it’s not always that way. (I’m still catching up putting back in the ALT text, one of the many broken things, since the Great StacyKess.com Goes Kersplat Because of Incompetent Web Host of October 2022 — but that’s another story for another time.)

I am very concerned for the people of the Accessibility Experience Team, their work and for those of us on Twitter they welcomed with amazing user tools.

I don’t know what will happen to Twitter without an accessibility team. Will the existing tools break? Probably not outright. If and when they do break will they be repaired? Probably not. But will new accessibility tools roll out? No. Will disabled users feel a difference without support? Yes. Is this a major problem? Yes.

My hope for the people of the former Twitter Accessibility Experience Team is that they quickly land on their proverbial feet — that they find a place that supports them, their work and their mission. I hope they go on to create even better social media and web experiences for disabled users.

For the disability communities of Twitter, I am wish I had a positive outlook. Social media has been a major part of our organizing since, well, social media became a thing. It’s also how our communities, dispersed all over the world connect with each other. After all, about a quarter of all people — I’ve even heard up to a third — identify as disabled for a wide variety of reasons.

Without accessibility at Twitter being supported, certainly Twitter should not be the social media of choice for disabled communities.

Likewise, as human rights teams, curation teams, pubic policy teams and other teams supporting tools that assist and protect communities have been deeply cut or eliminated, I am beginning to wonder if what the future is of Twitter.

What I do know is it will be resigned to the history books of social media and content sites collecting dust.

Will we remember it with rose colored glasses like MySpace?

Or will we remember it as it going down in disgrace?

Or will it be, “Hey, whatever happened to Twitter?”

I’m grieving too

I’ve thought a lot about grief.

When I was 15, I lost my maternal grandfather with whom I was very close. I woke up at approximately the time of his death — somewhere around 2:30-something in the morning — and could not go back to sleep. The faith in which I was raised had very organized rituals around death and grieving, but it didn’t help at the time.

And I still grieve his loss to this day.

In the past few years, I’ve lost a number of childhood friends to different cancers. In the past few weeks, a dear friend who was suffering from Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) and its related pain and destruction chose to apply for Canada’s version of physician-assisted suicide. I don’t blame her; she’s been under 100 lbs. from related gastroparesis for years in addition to dealing with the physical pain, organ failure, and so much more. Then, this week, a friend of my family who was like a second mother to me also died after struggling decades with another connective tissue disorder, systemic scleroderma.

I’m grieving the best way I know how: writing about it, distracting myself, humor and more distraction.

A lot of distraction.

I can’t even tweet about the hurricanes, to tell you the truth, because for the most part it brings back some painful memories that I try to not engage. I’ve been sticking with health news and a few funny things here and there.

I’m terrible at grieving.

Then again, I don’t think anyone can say they are “good at” grieving. We have this idea that grief comes in neat emotions: sadness, anger, denial, bargaining and then we come out the other side. Or something like that. There’s variations. Hell, even corporations have gotten in on the “grief” curve and adapted it to their purposes.

The thing is, grief is messy. Emotion comes how it comes: sometimes all at once, sometimes delayed.

When I was officially diagnosed with EDS, after four decades of living with symptoms of the disease and its related cruelty, I spent the first few weeks elated. I had answers. I had answers after decades of begging people to listen to me, to stop telling me it was all in my head. Then when I came back to my regular health care system with a list of recommendations from the geneticist/EDS specialist but couldn’t get the help I needed because doctors here either disagreed or saw me as a loose confederation of organs, the anger began to set in. The anger lasted months. And months.

And months.

Until it became all consuming.

That’s when I started exploring grief. I bought fresh copies of “On Death and Dying” and “Grief and Grieving,” by the late Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, and I went to an intensive therapy program. I tried to write a book about grieving diagnoses, be they chronic, terminal or both.

It helped personally, but I couldn’t finish my book about grief. (I blame this on the fact that I’ve never written an article more than a few thousand words. A book? Inconceivable!)

Now that I’m personally grieving and that so many are grieving following almost three years of a destructive pandemic, two terrible back-to-back hurricanes, the war in Ukraine, the never-ending civil war in Syria, the proxy war no one likes to talk about in Yemen, and so much more death and injustice around the world that I’m not even listing here, I thought it was time to try writing about grief again.

But all I can come up with is this:

Your grief is valid.

Your anger, confusion, sadness, bargaining, denial, crude humor, tears, awkward laughter and however you are muddling through it are valid.

Feeling it all at once is valid. Not feeling it for a while is valid. Distraction so you don’t feel overwhelmed is valid. Doing the next right thing, proverbially putting one foot in front of the other to get through the day and just breathing is valid.

Just surviving is valid.

Your grief is valid.

You are valid.

You are valid.

Lessons from a rescue dog

Four years ago, I had puppy-fever.

Whenever I saw a puppy, I cooed. I walked unabashedly up to the puppy’s human and said, “May I snuggle your puppy?” I repeatedly, wistfully said to my partner, “I want a puppy.”

At the time, we were living in a crowded one-bedroom apartment graciously shared with us by our 7-year-old dog who my partner had taken in from a rehoming situation only a few years prior and our almost 2-year-old skittish cat that we had adopted from the Humane Society the previous fall.

Let’s be real: It’s their world and we just live in it.

In the time we had been together, his dog became my dog. But wouldn’t a puppy just complete our little family?

“I want a puppy,” I’d say as we snuggled in to watch a movie and a cute little blob of fur waddled into frame.

“Ooooh, puhp-PEEE!” I’d coo as we walked by the pet store’s window display with pictures of baby dogs playing with toys.

One cold November evening, as I waited for my partner to return home from work and errands, my phone rang. “Come to the back door,” he said.

Oh no, I thought, what huge thing did he buy? I looked around the apartment and imagined rearranging for his new indulgence. That’s when I heard strange sounds clattering up the back metal steps.

He swung open the back door and walked in with a gangly puppy, nearly all skin and bones whose paws seemed to go in all directions. I gasped and dropped to the floor. The puppy ran over to me as if he already knew me and crawled into my lap and began licking my face in earnest.

“What’s this?” I asked?

“You said you wanted a puppy,” my partner said, “so I got you a puppy.”

I looked at the wild-eyed thing in front of me. His fur smelled of urine, he was wearing a Thunder Shirt, and every bone in his body was visible – even those under his Thunder Shirt. It would be days later that I learned the whole full story of how my partner picked out this puppy. And for that, I’ll tell it like he – a fantastic storyteller – tells it.

My partner and I both have a dedication to adopting. He decided as we already had one who had been rehomed (and prior to that was a side-of-the road rescue, then a graduate of a prison training program, then an underutilized adoptee) and another who was an adoptee from a no-kill high quality shelter, he would visit “the worst of the worst” shelters: the county pound. He said many dogs – big, medium and little – caught his eye. But there was this tiny strange looking creature in the back of a small cage who met his gaze. Every time he walked by, the dog was barking non-stop. As he and the pup locked eyes, the strange looking dog would stop barking – just for a moment.

“I’d like to see that puppy, please,” he told the shelter attendant.

The attendant – a 6-foot-something burly man with a shaved head and muscles as big as my partner’s head – told him, “That guy? You don’t want him. He’s crazy.”

My partner persisted, he related to me later, and the attended gave in, picking up the tiny dog, a golden miniature pincher, under one arm.

“This guy is crazy,” the attendant ominously warned again. In fact, it turned out, this puppy had already been adopted twice and returned to the shelter after only a couple days each time. A two-time reject. Before that? The scars on his body and in his behavior told the story: there was a healed tear in his ear and old scars everywhere, and they had the dog labeled as a year old. The dog, full of “behavior problems” and deemed unadoptable, was likely to be euthanized.

In a meeting “room,” the puppy bounced off the walls, occasionally pausing in my partner’s lap. But he said, he saw something in the puppy, maybe that he needed the kind of radical love we could provide, that we could provide him with a chance to live or even that the strange creature could provide us with something.

“We’ll take him,” my partner told the attendant.

Again, the attendant warned him off. “This guy? This guy is crazy.”

“Great,” my partner said. “His kind of crazy will fit with our kind of crazy.”

With a small payment and a name and address, the puppy was ours.

At his first physical exam at the veterinarian, we soon found out that dog was younger than a year. We called in a behavioralist and learned it was likely that he had experienced head trauma. The pound had sent him home on trazadone; we worked with first one vet and then another more familiar with traumatized and injured dogs until we came up with a medication regiment right for him. Still, what we knew about our dog is that what he needed most was time and love.

In that first year, the puppy learned how to eat and drink out of a bowl, how to walk on a leash, how to properly potty outside, to bark a whole lot less and how to play. It took two years to get him up to a healthy weight.

Last year, he finally started becoming more comfortable being apart from me, going off to his dog bed on his own to nap whenever he wants.

This November will mark the fourth anniversary since we adopted the unadoptable puppy. He physically and mentally still acts a lot like a puppy. We continue to have trouble with barking inappropriately. He still plays like a puppy. He still gets scared like a puppy. He still flops his legs around like a puppy. He even still looks like a puppy.

In these years, as a family, we have also learned a lot of patience and unconditional love. This dog will not develop on anyone else’s schedule. He is joyous and loving, and very smart, but he is going to grow up on his own timeline. And we’re not going to rush it in anyway.

I’ll get my booster, but I’ll continue to wear my mask too

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the bivalent COVID booster shots Wedensday – a reformulation split between the orginal mRNA vaccine formula and an updated version targeted to the most recent Omicron variants.

It’s a formulation long overdue. Afterall, Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 swept the world this summer. But it’s a formulation that offers no gauruntees since we don’t know what variant will come next; if it will be in the Omicron line or if it will escape the immunity provided by this booster; the previous vaccines and by previous infections. And that’s why I will continue to wear a good fitting mask that provides fine particle filtration such as an N95 or similar.

I won’t go so far as I did the first two and a half years of this pandemic. You see, I sat out the beginning of COVID as a reporter. In fact, I also sat out most of 2020, 2021 and 2022 from society.

I tend to get sick easily, and despite my strong belief in vaccinations, I don’t have a very good history of seroconversion. It often takes multiple boosters or full repetition of vaccine series for my body to show immunity from a vaccine.

My household took extreme cautions early in 2020 to protect me: good masking beginning in March 2020, isolating me as much as possible, etc.

In the last couple of years, we learned that while my risk for catching COVID isn’t necessarily higher because of my diagnosed disease, Ehlers Danlos, or its associated complications, I am at a higher risk of complications from COVID because of some of my complications such as multi-valvular regurgitation and aortic insufficiency; heritable thoracic aortic aneurysm and dissection (hTAAD); and gastroparesis and micro-deficiencies. Additionally, if I did catch COVID, I am not eligible for the drug Paxlovid due to a drug interaction with my cardiac medications.

My partner and I finally caught COVID in the first days of June 2022. We don’t know where we caught it. It could have been one of several appointments where I was the only masked person in the waiting room. It could have been one of his side gigs where he took off his mask to drink something.

The first day of symptoms I excused as just having an bad day; EDS and its complications can leave me feeling drained sometimes, and joint pains are common.

The second morning, I lost my voice. Vocal cord troubles are something that comes anytime I have a terrible upper respiratory infection. (Remember: connective tissues are everywhere, and if something such as a respiratory infection irritates or inflames my connective tissues such as those involve in my vocal cords, my voice is sure to be affected. I took a rapid antigen test (RAT), and it immediately turned positive. I woke up my partner who also took a RAT and got a positive result.

I phoned my internal medicine doctor, who said he’d need a few hours to figure out exactly how to get me some treatment; in the meantime, if any of my vital signs or symptoms worsened, I needed to get to the emergency room.

By 10 a.m. that day, despite my heart meds, my heart was racing and my blood pressure was sinking. My pain level was rising, and my chest hurt from my rising heart rate. My partner and I knew it was time to take me to the hospital. I grabbed my rapid test and my iPad (to work as my voice) and he drove me to hospital, where he dropped me off at the ER entrance at 11 a.m. not knowing when he would see me again.

When I made it to the nurse check-in desk, I showed my positive RAT, motioned to my chest to indicate chest pain and to my throat and mouth to indicate that I had lost my voice. She checked me in and led me back to a crowded triage area. I was called back, and showed the triage nurse a short SBAR — an old nursing acronym for situation, background, assessment and recommendation — that I had typed up about myself. The nurse took my vital signs, and I was sent for some blood work and an ECG. Then, I was told to go wait in a crowded, mostly unmasked waiting room. I pulled my mask tighter, not wanting to infect anyone.

As I waited hour after hour, my phone would occasionally ring: a nurse checking on me, letting me know they couldn’t have direct contact with me since I had an airborne infection; registration checking me in via phone from a room 10 feet away where they were checking in the other patients, apologizing because of “airborne precautions.” But there I sat, in the packed waiting room, where some patients were forced to stand while they waited.

As I waited, my headache grew worse, and my joints grew to a level of pain I had only felt once before – years earlier when I had been infected with H1N1. I began to wonder if I was finally feverish. I walked up to the front desk and asked the check-in nurse for acetaminophen. She called me a few minutes later and passed a medicine cup and small cup of water through the opening in the glass.

Sometime around 9 p.m., I was finally called back; an isolation room was ready for me. I showed the nurse, followed by the resident, then the attending my SBAR, and offered to type up answers as it was becoming extremely painful for me to try to use my raspy whisper of a voice. The resident asked me if I was certain I had COVID and not streptococcus. I showed the positive COVID RAT and used my remaining voice to explain that I’d had strep throat so many times — four times in a single year once — that I could assure her this was not strep simply by the way it felt. Still, she was unconvinced. She wanted to order a strep test.

Instead, they ordered another RAT and then asked me more about my current conditions. I carefully — my remaining voice barely audible — explained EDS, the cardiac complications and that ivabradine is contraindicated with Paxlovid. I said that my chest hurt and that this happens when my heart races for long periods of time, and I am on ivabradine to try to control inappropriate sinus tachycardia. I suggested that perhaps she or the attended consult with my congenital cardiologist or EDS specialist, either of whom would be happy to help in this situation. I said even my internal medicine doctor would not mind a page at this hour if it meant I get good care. I was told they didn’t need to page anyone because they are the ER.

Finally, after much discussion between the attending and the resident, a course of monoclonal antibodies (MAB) was chosen.

Shortly after midnight, after the shift-change for the doctors, I was given the MAB injections. “You’ll feel better in 3 days or so,” the nurse told me.

By this time, I was in so much pain, I could not sit still on the gurney. I had to pace and move around simply to keep from my joints freezing. The nurse re-checked my blood pressure, heart rate, pulse ox and around 3 a.m., I was released to go home.

When I returned home, I rechecked all my vitals, including my temperature: 103.9. I had already maxed out my acetaminophen for the day, so I cooled myself with a cold shower.

That’s the last thing I remember for about a week.

My partner recalls that there was much of the week where I was so sick that he thought I was dying, but he didn’t want to take me back to the ER because they had released me with a high temp, they didn’t know what to do with me when I was there, and he knew that per my wishes if I was going to die, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be in a hospital without him by my side.

For the first couple of days, he said I didn’t get out of bed at all. For the days after, I only got out of bed for broth. After that, I began trying to be out of bed more, but he tells me, I wasn’t very present.

My memory starts back in the second week of COVID. My partner was on the mend by this point and back to exercising. I was trying to get out by helping him walk the dogs around the block, but it was slow going. Things beyond that are a little spotty.

By the third week, my mind was active, but my body was a little sluggish. My brain was ready and raring to go, but I was still coughing, aching and tired. I was frustrated. My partner told me that I had told him, “As long as I don’t die, end up on a ventilator or get long COVID, the monoclonal antibodies did their jobs.” I don’t remember saying that but I’m fairly smart, so I can believe I said it.

I’m happy to say I survived COVID, and it seems that I have no long-term consequences. But I fear for another infection.

So while I don’t know how protective the new booster will be against any future infection, I do know I will get it because I’m taking the chance that it will help. But I’ll also be wearing a high quality good-fitting mask because I don’t want to struggle to survive COVID again.

It’s more than just a threat

As a health reporter, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in hospitals.

For the brief time that I practiced nursing, I took many days off my life in the hospital.

And I’ve spent too much time in the hospital as a patient.

When I read this morning about the bomb threat called in not even 24 hours ago on Aug 30 to Boston Children’s Hospital, I reacted viscerally.

The police identified the threat as being just that: a threat. Beyond that, neither the hospital nor law enforcement is saying much other than the investigation is continuing. There is much speculation that because of so much recent maligned attention from TikTok star and social media personality Chaya Raichik who goes by “Libs of TikTok,” conservative talkshow hosts, rightwing bloggers and even conservative Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green to Boston Children’s care for transgender patients, the threat could be retaliation for the hospital’s care for transgender patients.

The bomb threat was called in at 8:05 p.m., at a time when emergency rooms are bustling, night-shift nurses are doing their evening rounds, and families are saying goodnight to their loved ones who have inpatient stays. At Boston Children’s, the clinics are long closed by 8 p.m. and the visiting hours end by 8 p.m., so it was the staff, patients and guardians who were staying with patients overnight who bore the weight of that bomb threat, though I’m certain staff took great pains to put patients and families at ease. Local media reports streets around the hospital were closed off for nearly two hours while law enforcement investigated. Fortunately, no physical threat was found.

First, some facts: Boston Children’s provides trans affirmative care to trans youth under 18. This consists of puberty blockers, a reversible drug option; psychological and psychiatric care, and as the child enters late adolescence discussions on more options such as hormone therapy. The hospital provides genital surgical care for trans patients over 18 and will provide in rare cases consultation for patients 17 years old.

Rumors have swirled as to what kind of diabolical things the hospital might be doing to children, but there is nothing diabolical about saving children’s lives. Gender affirming care is the standard for children under 18 and that includes exactly what is listed above: therapy, allowing the child to come to terms with where they are on the gender spectrum (male, female, nonbinary or gender non-conforming), and providing puberty blockers if necessary. Then, as the child ages into late adolescence and turns 18, providing additional care as necessary: hormones, and top/bottom surgery. Not all trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming people choose hormones or surgery. Some choose one. Some choose both.

Not to minimize this part of Boston Children’s services, but this hospital also provides a spectrum of care from life-saving transplant surgeries to every day to treating cancer to treating childhood sleep disorders to working with children who experience chronic illness.

Still, last night and in the last few months, extremists haven’t cared about any of that. Or about the fact that gender affirming care – such as simply using a child’s proper name instead of their deadname – is life-saving care as studies have shown. Such care reduces suicidal ideation and suicidal behavior among trans youth.

No. Instead extremists have only cared about rumors that doctors are doing nefarious things that I don’t care to repeat here. And that brings us to last night when a place filled with doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists and pharmacists and aides and cooks and janitors all serving the tiniest and most vulnerable in our population was threatened because of one among many clinics they have, because of one type of care they offer among many – in a state where it is perfectly legal in a country where we speak of individual freedoms to live our lives the way we want to live our lives.

As a health reporter, I wonder if perhaps my profession has failed to properly report on what trans affirming care actually includes while allowing conspiracy theorists to let their imaginations run wild.

As a nurse, I’m angry. You threatened healthcare workers. These are my people. You threatened my people.

As a patient whose care team includes a few doctors who practice such specialized care that they see both children and adults, I am heartbroken because I worry: Will their facilities be next?

Mostly, what I want is for this to stop. There is no need for violence or threats. A children’s hospital is a place where the whole team does everything – and I do mean everything – possible to put patients at ease and to save children’s lives. To this staff, every child is a gift, and they will go to all lengths to do what is best for the child. You may not agree with that what or how the hospital does that, and that’s your right as an American. But when people start committing crimes – such as calling in a bomb threat or worse – we’ve crossed a line into into a dark place.

Where do we go from here?

We can save the small-town newspaper

Every time a hometown paper dies, a little piece of me dies too.

Perhaps that sounds a little melodramatic, but I cut my journalistic teeth at small town papers where high school sports can hold up a Friday night deadline, and subscribers read about their family, friends and neighbors.

My first college internship was at the Jackson Citizen Patriot in Jackson, Mich. To the locals, the Cit Pat, a local family-owned paper back then, ended the day like the sunset. You could count on a Cit Pat reporter to be at every Jackson event, whether it be the Hot Air Balloon Jubilee or the Jackson County Fair. Of course we covered the state penitentiary, which sat just north of downtown, the city government and the hospitals, which at the time numbered two to serve what was then a town of more than 36,000 and a county of more than 158,000. The Cit Pat building was at the southwest end of downtown in a beautiful two-story stone building, with the newsroom on the second floor. I don’t know if it’s still there. What I do knows is that now the Cit Pat is owned by MLive, a conglomerate of local Michigan papers owned by Advance Local, which is owned by Advance (owner of Condé Nast and a major shareholder in Charter Communications, Warner Bros. Discovery and Reddit).

My second internship was at the Bloomington (Ind.) Herald-Times. The H-T took on a shaved-headed college student reporter who had just left college with only a semester to go for a myriad of reasons but was certain she wanted to continue to pursue a career in journalism. That college student was me. In that semester-long features internship, I had the opportunity to join an all-hands-on-deck coverage of an Indiana University campus riot and do a piece that required me to make international calls to a local man who was recently detained in the West Bank for protesting Israeli settlement expansion. At the time, the newspaper was owned by the small communications company Schurz Communication, which started in the latter half of the 1800s with another Indiana paper, the South Bend Tribune. I’d love to tell you Schurz still owns both papers – or at least one of them – but it doesn’t. Somewhere along the way, as Gatehouse and Gannett swallowed up paper after paper, until they merged in 2020, both the H-T and the South Bend Tribune came under Gennett ownership.

In 2004, I landed at the Monroe (Mich.) Evening News as health editor and reporter. I pushed for the four-page health section to be filled by news written in-house instead of pulled from the wire and revamped the monthly section for children, Your Health for Kids. But after a year at the EEOC, the business side of the Monroe Publishing Company no longer saw the need for a health editor to oversee the section. I was offered the open role at the company’s weekly free paper that covered the community of Bedford Township, a growing suburb of Toledo, Ohio. I saw it as a way to step up to larger market media in the future. I unfortunately was running headlong into the Great Recession. Now, The Monroe News is owned by Gannett and runs on a skeleton staff, and Bedford Now is no longer published.

The recent round of layoffs at papers by Gannett, emptying out newsrooms, reignited an idea I’ve been mulling over for a long time: a nationwide network of individual newspapers in each community that works on donations. Think of it as your local public radio station but as a newspaper – or news site since most of us read our newspaper on a screen these days. I call it a “public newspaper.”

The first time I started to think about the concept of a “public newspaper,” I was sitting at a media professionals conference in Seattle.

It was 1998, I think. Maybe 1999. We were in a hotel downtown, maybe a 20-minute walk from the famed Public Market, discussing how the internet would change the future of journalism. Some said it would be the death of the newspaper industry while others said it would bring a resurgence of long-form journalism to newspapers both local and national.

I don’t think anyone had their eye on a nearly two decade-long slump that included venture capitalism firms buying up whatever small-town papers in the Midwest Gannett and Gatehouse Media didn’t buy first, followed by a merger that was used as an excuse for more newsroom cutbacks. No one discussed things like paywalls; declining readership and subscription rates; personals, sales and wanted ads moving to Craigslist; or ad buys dropping significantly and having a whole new rate model on the web.

As I listened to older, wiser editors and reporters conjure the future in their cracked crystal balls, I thought to myself, what if newspapers worked on the same model as public radio: a network of local news radio programing or stations that feed a national news organization, National Public Radio, that then provides national news programing in return – and the whole network works on donations?

Throughout my career as a reporter, as I’ve seen slight ups, big downs and what sometimes seems like the bottom falling out, the idea keeps coming back to me.

Local newspapers are the backbones of communities, and for too long we have seen them bought and sold, downsized then decimated. Every village and hamlet and town and small city should have a local newspaper with a newsroom of reporters who know the local business, the local principals, the local school board members, and the local city council members as well as the know the town elders who have regular seats at the diner and the parents at the playground. Every town has news, and every town needs someone to cover it, whether it’s the Friday night high school basketball game or the town parade.

Trust in our media comes from our local media. The better the local coverage and the more the reporters get to know the community, the more the community trusts the news.

Now imagine all these tiny towns, with their daily or semi-weekly papers, contribute to each other and national reporters contribute to the entire network of local papers. The best part? All the papers are free. You can choose to donate if you like, but you don’t have to pay.

Today, most people read their newspapers on an app or on the web site rather on the newsprint. The Washington Post has an app. The New York Times has an app. The Wall Street Journal has an app. Many newspapers have an app. Even NPR and many local public radio stations have an app for listening, reading, merchandise and more. This would be the way to deliver not only a newspaper in 2022, but also a nationwide network of newspapers – and additionally could be a great way to ask for donations a couple times a year.

Of course, I say all of this with the realization that I know very little about how a donation-driven news service such as public radio actually works as a business. My degrees are in the areas of health and science, not finance, business or management. I can manage a health section and a handful of reporters, but I certainly know (to use a colloquialism) bunk all about running a national network of news sites that run on donations, or about collecting donations to run those news sites for that matter. Heck, I don’t even know how to build a news site.

What I do know is that of all the papers I interned or worked for full-time, only two are not currently owned by Gannett and even those are running on a skeleton staff at barely the quality of reporting they once did.

Journalism won’t be saved by “citizen journalists,” by venture capitalists buying out small papers and destroying them, or by less news from fewer reporters. Journalism and trust in journalism will only be saved by more professional, well done, strong local news in every town.

Every reporter needs an editor

I am teh matter of tyos.

Oof. Let me try that again.

I am the master of typos.

That’s not to say that I don’t proofread my own work. Quite the opposite. I poofread. Make that proofread. And I use spellcheck. And I read it allowed. Correction: that should be aloud.

The problem is that I have a block when it comes to my own writing. I know what I meant to type. My brain is often able to substitute the correction for the mistake in my own writing. And I’m not the only writer who has this problem. This is actually quote — nope, quite — a common phenomenon. As our fingers work quickly on the keyboard, we make typos, but our brains substitute what we meant to write in for the mistake. Even when we go back to edit ourselves, we still see what we intended rather than what we actually typed.

Despite this, I’ve worked as an editor several times, and I’m fantastic at finding the errors in the writing of others. Why? Because it’s not my writing. I don’t know the words they intended to write; I only see what is in front of me on the page, so I can look at it without my brain substituting in the completed or corrected picture.

There’s actually a lot of brain science behind this, and was a much discussed topic in the media in 2014 when psychology researcher Dr. Tom Stafford of The University of Sheffield performed a typing experiment using 19 subjects who could see neither the keyboard nor the screen. He found the subjects slowed down just before they made typos. In interview after interview — from Wired to Insider, he said over and over again that we can’t see our own typos because we type from a routine, and we know what we intended to say.

It’s essentially based upon the same principles of how we learn to read. First we learn letters; then we learn words. Eventually, we’re told to read a whole sentence for meaning, content and context. So we take a whole sentence at a time, not each individual word. In fact, often times, our brains skip over a word here or there and fill in the “blanks.”

When I took on a self-funded reporting project in 2011, the first thing I did was find an editor. I knew that if I was going to be writing the articles for “The Night Shift Project,” I couldn’t be my own editor. I hired author, journalist and editor Jeff Fleischer to edit the project because I knew that I was going to miss my own typos and my tense disagreements. I wanted a professional to get out the red pen and take a critical eye to my reporting, catch the errant comma and put it in its proper place.

The best newspapers actually have a wool — correction: whole — department within the newsroom set up just to make sure reporters are putting out clean copy. It’s called the copy desk, and it’s made of a special group of people called copy editors who know language, spelling and style guides better than anyone else in the newsroom. These gurus of grammar are the human dictionaries and thesauruses. And they wield a (often digital) red pen with no mercy.

So what does it really take to put out clean copy in a newspaper? It’s a team approach, of course. It’s the reporters who report and write the stories and self-edit; the copy editors who go through the articles letter by letter, word by word; and the editors who go through articles for readability, factuality, etc.

On that note, where’s my red pen? I think I sea a few mitakes in hear.

Leave them kids alone!

I’m not the voice of my generation, and I’ve never claimed to be.

I’m an anxious 40-something GenXer, and I certainly have no right to speak for anyone but myself. So I only speak for myself – not any other feminists, not my LGBQ+ friends and especially not my trans friends – when I bring up this little news nugget from the salty desert state of Utah: “Utah officials secretly investigated female athlete’s gender.”

Excuse me for a moment while I flash back to several really bad pre-pubescent “pixie” cuts that weren’t so pixie and more just a typical easy walk-in $8 boy’s cuts.

Give me another minute.

Nope, another minute please. I’m thinking about eight grade, where I tried to do an undercut with long asymmetrical bangs in “reverse bob” at the same time that I also tried to go natural with my hair but also maybe sometimes straighten it with a hot comb and it ended up something like a mushroom and a bowl cut had a baby.

Until I grew my hair long for high school, I was often misgendered. Granted, I was never that “girly girl” who loved sparkly things or dolls or frilly dresses, but every time someone thought I was a boy as a child, it made me more certain that I was a girl. Sure I preferred Tinker Toys to Barbie, but when I grew up, I wanted to wear a classy skirt suit or feminine pant suit as I investigated the future Spiro Agnews and Richard Nixons, not the boring basic brown suit of my male colleagues! I was far more Nina Totenberg than Walter Cronkite! But I digress.

Ok, I’m better.

What scares me of stories like this is how horribly invasive this is to young girls at their most vulnerable time – and when I say girls, I mean all girls, whether they are assigned female or male at birth. Girls in junior and high school are just trying to figure themselves out, who they are, what they are into, how to deal with puberty and all the feelings that come along with it.

In fact, isn’t that what we’re all doing in junior high and high school? We’re dealing with crushes, and pimples, and hormones, and hairs in really weird places. We’re learning to like music that our parents really hate. And maybe if we could stop a minute and remember that feeling that we all went through, then no one would file complaints that would then land others’ minor children in investigations that are questionably legal.

Moreover, I worry about states that have proposed checking the genitals of minor girls to assure that transgender children aren’t playing sports. In states like Ohio, where this has actually been discussed – even as the largest university still pays out settlements because of a former team doctor sexually assaulted young athletes – I am appalled that people are taking things this far.

These are children! For the most part, these are games that are intended to teach them teamwork and cooperation and the meaning of competition! Only a handful will earn college scholarships, and only a tiny percentage of those children will go on to a higher level of competition such as the Olympics or professional athletics. Get over it.

Here’s my advice, and it’s unsolicited and free: Stop. Just stop. Stop putting so much pressure on your kids that they accuse their teammates or competitors of cheating. Stop invading the privacy of girls – cis or trans. And that goes for boys too.

Here’s more advice: Let’s start being supportive of children. Let’s start talking about how we can best support our preteens and teens. Let’s start talking to our teens. Let’s give them a welcoming environment, especially at a time when teen suicide rates are on the rise (according to the CDC and other experts).

Stop worrying about who wins the damn race, and let’s make sure all the kids finish and finish well.

But like I said, I’m not the voice of my generation, nor do I speak for anyone else.

« Older Entries

Don’t sound so shocked

What I've been thinking about...