Happy Heart Day
Last Friday, a full four and a half months after my doctor wrote the order for me to get some routine blood tests, I finally schlepped the two blocks to Lutheran Hospital to get it done.
It wasn’t that I am cowardly about getting my blood drawn. After two pregnancies and the wide array of tests I endured when I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1993, a little cholesterol check is a cake walk.
And I also have plenty to motivate me to keep track of how things are going with my bloodstream. In 1987, my father died suddenly of a massive heart attack at the age of 56. He had a number of risk factors, many of which I don’t share. But the closer I get to 56 myself, the younger that age seems to me — and the more pressing the need to do what I can to make sure I’m not headed in the same direction.
So last Friday, I finally listened to my own internal nagging and spent the measly 40 minutes it required to walk to the hospital, register, visit the friendly phlebotomist, and walk home.
The nag-that-trumped-all-nags — the one that finally got me off my hinder and on the way to Lutheran — was this realization: “Neglecting my health is negligent parenting.”
Which it is. John and I have read and studied a lot about negligent parenting over the past year of our adoption prep, so I don’t use the term lightly. Discarding all the flippant uses of this term — as when we say parents are negligent when they feed their kids cheese or hamburger — negligent parents fail to provide their children with the basic essentials of a healthy life: food, safe shelter, social contact, education.
In that sense, what essential could be more basic than the parent herself? What does it mean when I take my children in for regular well-child visits to the pediatrician, but don’t get around to scheduling a checkup for myself even once every two or three years? Sounds like I’m saying my kids’ health is more precious and worth monitoring than my own.
Many parents I know are modest people, so it’s difficult for them to look at themselves — their corporal persons — as their children’s most valuable resource. If you are one of those self-sacrificing mamas or papas who always puts everyone else’s needs before your own, I’d like to send a special Valentine message to you: Get Over It.
Okay, enough flogging that issue. Schedule your check-up, get your mammogram and, for heaven’s sake, check your heart disease risk factors.
And now, a little fun:
One way we try to minimize empty calories and fat in our family’s diet is to link certain foods to healthier actions. Example: potato chips are (usually) only eaten after we’ve done an afternoon of yard work. No ice cream in the summer except after a bike ride. Our idea is that until we’re ready to totally give up some of these favorite foods, we will at least make them harder to get. Maybe the extra thought and planning required to get them will help us remember to make them only a very small part of our diet.
So for Valentine’s Day this morning, I hid the candy, and gave both of my kids and my husband, John, a page of number questions to solve in order to crack a code to reveal the candy’s secret location. Finding the answers required lots of math, plus some research skills involving history. The kids were still working on their puzzles as they got on the bus, so we avoided sending them to school already carbo-loaded. Maybe they’ll even learn something on one of the year’s most distracting school days.
Here’s a sample of some of their questions, drawn from all three puzzles. Find the letter that corresponds to your numerical answer. When read in order, the letters spell a message. Crack the code and do what it says.
- Phone number for a penguin, the Fonz, or a guy who drives an ice cream truck?
- A scientist who did invent an early mechanical calculator (but did not invent the programming language that bears his name) died when he was this old.
- If you start practicing your violin at 7:26AM and end at 8:05AM, how many minutes did you practice?
- 960 + (304 “squared”) – (872 x 361) + “five million” – GIGSIS. (Hint: for “gigsis,” think about the eleventh question, below.)
- After today (Valentine’s Day), how many days are left in 2006?
- The sum of all the interior angles in a triangle always equals this number.
- 3841?2756
- How many babies in a set of quintuplets?
- In what year did Cleveland, Ohio celebrate its sesquicentennial?
- When you make an “about face,” how many degrees do you turn?
- This number means “Hi there!” to a calculator.
- How many Japanese warriors does it take to make a sushi-western?
- Square root of the number of possible outcomes of a roll of six dice.
- Two days from now, without the punctuation.
- The slope of a line with coordinates (-5, -6) and (-2, 15). (Don’t just try to plot this and guess like John did, because he was too proud to look up the formula. More on the questionable superiority of “mental math” tomorrow…)
- MCXLVII times V plus 20K equals ?
- The year before Caracalla’s fatal bathroom break.
- (Discovery year, sort of) + (3-digit palindrome number whose digits add up to an unlucky number)
Letters corresponding to the numerical answers:
A = 0.7734; B = 334; C = 8; D = 47; E = 180; F = 199; G = 4,262,665; H = 1946; I = 0.6644; J = 24,382; K = -6; L = 320; M = 13; N = 41; O = 39; P = 32,001; Q = 3,861,058; R = 7; S = 5,381,214; T = 216; U = 25,735; V = 1897; W = 1951; X = 254; Y = 90; Z = 0.873; (blank space between words) = 9; “ (i.e. quotation marks) = 5