I was going to come rant about an article I read reporting that women pay higher health insurance premiums in the United States and how insurance company executives justify it by pointing out how it’s proven that ‘females’ use medical services more than ‘males’. And so their costs are higher.

I was then going to sarcastically point out that justifying making women pay more for health insurance based on statistical items that indicate societal differences rather than simple health differences makes about as much sense as saying that you should be able to charge racial minorities and people below a certain income level higher premiums because statistically, such people have poorer health.

It also irritates me when people use the word “females” to make a generalization about women. It’s like they’re trying to make themselves sound more scientific. Like, we’re just talking biological facts about the female of the species.

It’s such an objectifying word. Even worse is when someone uses it to refer to an individual. I’m pretty much only okay with ‘female’ as an adjective. It should only be used as a noun by actual biologists.

Anyhow, it turns out I wasn’t really in the mood to put together an entire rant, so instead you get the half (argh health insurance) and then the mini (feh, using the word ‘female’) ones up there.

I’m home with a sick nine-yr old today. Shouldn’t complain, it has allowed me to catch up on my sleep after a foolishly late night catching up on my writing.

Last Monday it was Rachel who was up in the middle of the night puking. So Ian stayed home with her.

Friday night, Ian and I had been going to go to his friend’s house to visit with his friend, friend’s wife and 1yr old daughter. But the daughter was sick, so instead we went to earl’s. But Hannah started grousing and complaining, pretty much as soon as we sat down. So we ordered our food to go and took it home. At home, put her in her high chair, handed her a cookie, and she promptly threw up.

We stripped her and cleaned her up. And she got suddenly really lethargic, so we put her to bed and she went right to sleep.

Only, she didn’t stop throwing up. She threw up probably every fifteen minutes for the next three hours. We’d settle her in, come downstairs, and then she’d squawk on the baby monitor, and we’d run back upstairs and walk her around until she threw up. Wipe her off and put her back down.

Finally we just took shifts walking her around, while the other one ate supper. She wasn’t projectile vomiting anymore, just heaving up some bile and not much else. So we’d pad our shoulder with towels and just let her throw up on the towel.

I wasn’t so, so worried about the throwing up. I’ve had Ethan and Rachel go through some serious “when will it end??” throwing up. What was really worrisome was how extremely lethargic Hannah was.

When we had her in bed, she’d squawk enough when she was throwing up that we knew to come running, but she’d barely stir. She wouldn’t wake up, really. Didn’t turn to the side. Sometimes she just lay there, choking on it, until we panicked and flipped her.

She passed out on the change table in the middle of a diaper change. And when we were walking her around, she just lay on our shoulder in a stupor, occasionally heaving up more stuff, or waking to cry for 30 seconds before passing out again.

So we decided to take her to the hospital. We buckled her into her carseat, and she woke up and looked placidly at us. And during the car ride, she stayed awake. And by the time we got to the ER, she was smiling at the triage nurse.

Since we were there, and she had only been acting better for about twenty minutes, we stuck around to have her looked at. But by the time the doctor got to us, she was so bright-eyed, we were like, “yeah, we’re just waiting for an official ‘go home’ now.”

Coincidentally, we ran into Ian’s friend, who had also, with his wife, brought their 1 year old into emergency for puking. They, because they were worried she was throwing up blood. So their stay was more awful than ours. The staff had decided they needed to take blood. And the baby, being young and pink and healthy, didn’t have many visible veins, and what she did have wouldn’t hold still under her pink healthy layers. So she got stuck 3 times before they successfully got any blood.

As we drove away, I was saying to Ian, how I had a number of teenage guy friends who used to make a Big Deal out of how they Hate hospitals. On which grand statement I tended to cast a jaundiced eye, thinking, “It’s just a place. Hate it however you want, but that doesn’t mean it is somehow anathema to your existence” and thinking it was just a dramatic excuse for being too selfish to visit someone in the hospital. Now, though, I ruminated, I had come to hate hospitals.

We had passed an accident that had hit a pedestrian on our drive there. And then the ambulance had overtaken us before we reached the hospital. I had asked Ian to drive slower because I wanted them to be quite done dealing with the pedestrian before we came in. On our way out we passed a woman sitting at an intake desk pressing a bloody compress to her head and saying, “It hit me hard enough to knock me down.” I don’t know, I just get so raw from trying to shield myself from feeling awful for the whole of humanity.

Mostly though, being in a hospital makes me weepy, thinking about the time Ethan spent a week there. Listening to the one-year-old’s distress over the needles, I remembered having to hold down my two year old while they put an IV in him. And how different he was when we finally got to take him home. An indefinable personality difference, just more apprehensive, hesitant, and untrusting about everything.

Anyhow, Hannah threw up one more time on Saturday, but then she was pretty much better. Ian threw up Saturday night. And then Ethan threw up last night. I’ve had nauseous moments this weekend where I think, “oh, now I’ve got it.” But it never comes to anything.

I think that’s for the best.

And, what else. During my holiday on Friday I had meant to do some writing. Instead, I took out my doumbek to practise my drumming. I have an aspiration to learn a drum solo. So I thought I would listen to the drum solo I want to learn and just write down what I heard. I can always go back and flesh out the extra beats and the decoration later when I know more, I figured. But it was a dispiriting venture because I’m at the ‘one or maybe two strikes per beat’ and a good drum solo is full of trills and tremolos and… just… flavour. And I was left going, “I don’t even KNOW what that is. And I’ll NEVER be that good.”

So I went looking for youtube videos of tabla masters so I could at least have a look at what their hands are doing when they’re spicing up their beats. And instead I found some tutorials. And thus I spent the whole day on drumming. But they were fantastic tutorials. I managed to aquire a double-left-hand stroke and use it to preface some of my right-hand Taks and thus can add a tiny little roll of a decoration to some of my basic rhythms.

I wonder now if I could talk anyone I know into learning to play Mizmar, because that would be just perfect wouldn’t it?