Sisterhood of Big-Footed Women & others forgotten by fashion

<snort> You said farting.

There's definitely something about the hobbling of women in fashion, hence the quite aptly named hobble skirt, for one thing.

Super-high heels, super-tight or short (or both) skirts, tight blouses, complicated (but it has to look carefree) hair and makeup, all expensive and with the continual push to change it all in 6 months, not to mention the dieting pressures. In a world where women are CEOs, single parents, main breadwinners, judges, senators, diplomats, artists and doctors and everything in between, why do we take it? And take it all gladly, offering up our charge cards at 18% or so interest??

Of course, no one is "forcing" us, any more than no one is forcing you to wear a suit to a job interview. But you do it in order to get the job, even though appearance issues are, let's face it, pretty Junior High and petty, assuming that it's an appearance issue that has nothing to do with health or true hygeine. Does it really matter, or should it matter, if a software coder wears a suit to an interview, or jeans and sneakers -- clothes she's going to wear 90% of the time on the job anyway, for a job where she doesn't meet clients and works at home part of the time?

I own a couple of interview suits. I feel the need, in particular, because I am a temporary employee and hence the rug may be pulled out from under me at any time. And I like the suits, I like how I look in them and they fit and they were good bargains and all of that stuff goes together anyway so I could/can mix and match if necessary. But they also take up space in my closet. They hold a place that could be held by something I wear more often than a few times per decade. This isn't just an issue with women, of course, it's a thing with men, too, and with our more casual society. 30 years ago, just about everyone who did not work with their hands wore a suit or women wore sensible dresses or skirts with sweater sets or maybe, just maybe, nice slacks, particularly if the weather was bad, and then your interview suit was one of the suits you wore all the time anyway. But now it just seems like a relic of a bygone age.

Fainting:

Since we've mentioned Periods and Fainting....


Awww...Been there, done that. Woke up one morning to having "started".

It was..."Change the bed sheets, mop the bathroom floor", awkward to some extent. But at the time, I was used to have unusual moments like that in my life.

Later that Evening: Husband come home to a woman that was extremely weak and having already passed out once, coming too and crawling on hands and knees to the bed..., soon passed out the second time in the bathroom floor.

By Midnight I was being admitted to the hospital for hemmoraging...which concluded with a 4 day stay, 1 unit of blood received (they wanted 2 )and stopping my menstrual cycle for 6 months.

WHAT FUN!

Yeh, my fibroid got hemorrhagey. Some of it was funny, as when I was looking desperately for a bathroom in Rome and was suddenly surrounded by a gypsy - a chiffon clad woman - and her children, she riffling my purse, while I had severe containment problems.

I didn't know then that you could go into a bar (small coffee/liquer cafe) and ask to use the facility, presumably also ordering coffee. Restaurants weren't open at that time of day... talk about panic. My husband was behind me and chased them away and we walked for several blocks, drip, drip, including going into a restaurant that looked open but wasn't and they waved us away... finally landed at Caffe Greco, a rather famous place open since the 1700's.
He ordered the cappuccini and cookies and I dashed to the restroom.

I finally went to the doctor after I got home, and had an easy surgery not long after. Sheesh.

Oof, lovely stuff to deal with. I can only imagine.

wow!

Yep Yep Yep..fun, fun, fun!

I had a rather unconventional friend who had a miscarriage at three months and subsequent hemorrhage in Hampton Court Maze. The fetus is buried there--not very deeply, but I'm sure the hedge at that point is more vibrant than elsewhere.

Now there's a story..

When I saw the title of this thread tonight, I thought about my youngest daughter. She inherited my feet, meaning, much too big. Her own daughters did too. He he. They may never find good shoes that fit. Now, having said that, I'm getting the hell out of this thread and not coming back. I don't belong here, I can tell.

edgar, if you like, send your daughter and granddaughters over, so we can commiserate.

<mails edgar a shoe, pays exhorbitant postage costs>

Hmm, I only fainted a few times, some probably dodn't even qualify. Twice when I had a sever middle ear infection - potentially dangerous - I blacked out in the shower, no clue for how long but I nearly broke a rib, it was badly bruised, and then five minutes later, this time hitting the toilet and plopping over it. i STILL didn't go to a doctor, dumbass. other times i just go lightheaded, everything goes white and sound goes shhhhhhh - but that's because of a low blood pressure. need to stay well hydrated.
lord blesseth me with problemless periods that work like a swiss clock though. thank good heavens. except for the time when i had a bad cold combined with infected ovaries... ouch, talk about excruciatin pain...couldn't move for a week.

Bold is by me: nothing in the text was changed.

Fat people don't have to read this, everyone else who knows the fat people are ruining medical insurance for the rest of us don't need to read it either. It's a free country!

================

January 16, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

First, Do More Harm

By PAUL KRUGMAN

It's widely expected that President Bush will talk a lot about health care in his State of the Union address. He probably won't boast about his prescription drug plan, whose debut has been a Katrina-like saga of confusion and incompetence. But he probably will tout proposals for so-called "consumer driven" health care.

So it's important to realize that the administration's idea of health care reform is to take what's wrong with our system and make it worse. Consider the harrowing series of articles The New York Times printed last week about the rising tide of diabetes.

Diabetes is a horrifying disease. It's also an important factor in soaring medical costs. The likely future impact of the disease on those costs terrifies health economists. And the problem of dealing with diabetes is a clear illustration of the real issues in health care.

Here's what we should be doing: since the rise in diabetes is closely linked to the rise in obesity, we should be getting Americans to lose weight and exercise more. We should also support disease management: people with diabetes have a much better quality of life and place much less burden on society if they can be induced to monitor their blood sugar carefully and control their diet.
But it turns out that the U.S. system of paying for health care doesn't let medical professionals do the right thing. There's hardly any money for prevention, partly because of the influence of food-industry lobbyists. And even disease management gets severely shortchanged. As the Times series pointed out, insurance companies "will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000."
As a result, diabetes management isn't a paying proposition. Centers that train diabetics to manage the disease have been medical successes but financial failures.

The point is that we can't deal with the diabetes epidemic in part because insurance companies don't pay for preventive medicine or disease management, focusing only on acute illness and extreme remedies. Which brings us to the Bush administration's notion of health care reform.

The administration's principles for reform were laid out in the 2004 Economic Report of the President. The first and most important of these principles is "to encourage contracts" - that is, insurance policies - "that focus on large expenditures that are truly the result of unforeseen circumstances," as opposed to small or predictable costs.

The report didn't give any specifics about what this principle might mean in practice. So let me help out by supplying a real example: the administration is saying that we need to make sure that insurance companies pay only for things like $30,000 amputations, that they don't pay for $150 visits to podiatrists that might have averted the need for amputation.
To encourage insurance companies not to pay for podiatrists, the administration has turned to its favorite tool: tax breaks. The 2003 Medicare bill, although mainly concerned with prescription drugs, also allowed people who buy high-deductible health insurance policies - policies that cover only extreme expenses - to deposit money, tax-free, into health savings accounts that can be used to pay medical bills. Since then the administration has floated proposals to make the tax breaks bigger and wider, and these proposals may resurface in the State of the Union.

Critics of health savings accounts have mostly focused on two features of the accounts Mr. Bush won't mention. First, such accounts mainly benefit people with high incomes. Second, they encourage wealthy corporate employees to opt out of company health plans, further undermining the already fraying system of employment-based health insurance.

But the case of diabetes and other evidence suggest that a third problem with health savings accounts may be even more important: in practice, people who are forced to pay for medical care out of pocket don't have the ability to make good decisions about what care to purchase. "Consumer driven" is a nice slogan, but it turns out that buying health care isn't at all like buying clothing.

The bottom line is that what the Bush administration calls reform is actually the opposite. Driven by an ideology at odds with reality, the administration wants to accentuate, not fix, what's wrong with America's health care system.

[QUOTE]"Consumer driven" is a nice slogan, but it turns out that buying health care isn't at all like buying clothing. [/QUOTE]

Ah, but that's exactly what it's like --- a man like the author of the article I just posted wouldn't know this, but any woman who needs to buy dresses which can double up as Afghanistan paratrooper tents CAN THINK about the consequences like amputations and blindness, not to mention cancer and cardiovascular disease PURSUANT to that monster size dress.

Have you no self-respect at all that you should start threads about difficulties finding paratrooper-tent dresses is one question that's been on my mind since I first saw this thread. Thanks to Mr. Krugman I now know the answer is NO, because anyone with self-respect --- let alone ANY consideration for fellow tax- premium- and rates-payers --- would NEVER get to BE that size to begin with. Fare well.

Helen?

Sounds remarkably that way.

Interesting...

I've been wondering for a while.

You know, when I read that I had the same thought, ehBeth.

Just to play devil's advocate, here's a great article written recently by my favorite writer, Garrison Keillor.


Shall we beef up the presidency?

Everything was said that could be said about Ariel Sharon last week as he lay in a coma except the one thing that crossed the mind of every viewer watching newsreel footage of the prime minister, which was, "How much does that man weigh?" (Answer: 255 pounds. And he's 5-foot-7.)

He looked like a bull walrus ruling a colony of baby seals. And it made you wonder, how does tiny Israel come up with this family-size guy while the world's only superpower struggles along with a wiry little fellow who works very hard on his abs? Is it time we think about getting someone weightier?

We haven't had a fat president since William Howard Taft and that was at the tail end of the Gilded Age, when politicians were expected to be portly.

We've had a few semi-beefy ones since (Harding, Hoover), and LBJ carried a potbelly, and Bill Clinton had his moments of bloat, but the American people, now that two-thirds of us are overweight, prefer that the Great White Father be lean, taut, angular, a runner or horseman or cutter of brush. Whereas a guy who looks like he'd be right at home in a Barcalounger with a can of Pabst in his mitt doesn't seem to fit the bill.

I suppose that a compact build indicates some sort of self-discipline, but discipline to do what? Look at Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot. None of them was a hearty eater, and for good reason: paranoia. When you're a megalomaniac, it takes away your appetite, thinking of all the folks who'd love to put rat poison in your ratatouille.

It is human to put butter on mashed potatoes and to choose the cheese plate instead of the lo-fat gelatin and to linger over the port wine and chocolates. The man who denies himself might satisfy his hungers elsewhere, promulgating reckless policies, such as a war against a nation that poses no threat to us and torturing those whom he deems enemies and detaining them at his pleasure and marching his troops into a quagmire. A fat man, someone who must heave himself to his feet in the morning and behold a great pile of flesh in the bathroom mirror, the matronly pectorals and the enormous haunches and spare tire, might be more circumspect. He already looks like an emperor, so he would try harder not to act like one.

The advance eulogies of Sharon spoke of his remarkable political shift, from right-wing warrior to moderate compromiser, and you thought, "This is the sort of man America needs right now. Maybe we've been looking at the wrong body type." Fat men spend more time in contemplation, if only because they get winded climbing stairs and need to sit down. Because they jiggle when they walk, they may be less prone to delusions of grandeur. The fat man doesn't expect his supporters to hoist him to their shoulders. Nor does he hope to sneak around undetected. He is able to face up to his own mistakes. (How can he not? They are hanging over his belt.) He has lived with derision and that gives him a sense of compassion that may be lacking in a medium or small.

And yet, like Churchill, he knows what it's like to rouse oneself to heroic effort. Neville Chamberlain was the elegant guy in the 36 Extra Long who kept backing down from the Nazis. It was the Old Fat Man who spoke of blood, sweat and tears. He knew about sweat.

The top-ranking fat man in government today is Speaker of the House J. Dennis ("Coach") Hastert of Plano, Ill., who for years has been two heartbeats away from the presidency, and one of those hearts has a pacemaker. A mild-mannered fellow who only seeks to do good for the western suburbs of Chicago and for American business, Hastert favors a strong national defense and the education of our children while opposing tax increases of any kind, large or small. He is also in favor of life.

Sitting on the dais behind President Bush at the annual State of the Union address, the speaker has never missed a single standing ovation. A fat man must get tired of jumping to his feet 20 times in a row, but the speaker has always been there, clapping his big meaty hands. He would be the first Dennis to become president. And he would look more like us, the American people. Think it over.


The Garrison Keillor column, is distributed by Tribune Media Services.

Clinton fought his weight......come to think of it, mebbe that was what he was doing when he....you know.....THE MAN WAS JUST ATTEMPTING, HEROICALLY, NOT TO BURDEN THE US HEALTH SYSTEM!!!!!
He was practicing oral distraction techniques....




DID I mention that I adore Keillor?

If you did, I didn't remember, deb.

He really is the best. And damned funny when he wants to be. (I loved the "rat poison in the ratatouille" line, didn't you?)

Rat poison in the ratatouille!!!
Indeed.....



And here's Helen bane:

"CAESAR.
Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.


ANTONY.
Fear him not, Caesar; he's not dangerous;
He is a noble Roman and well given.


CAESAR.
Would he were fatter! But I fear him not:
Yet, if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much;
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music:
Seldom he smiles; and smiles in such a sort
As if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spirit
That could be moved to smile at any thing.
Such men as he be never at heart's ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves;
And therefore are they very dangerous."