One a Day

Like many families, we have chosen to take a proactive approach to the numerous changes taking place in the American health care system.  Although it is still early in the game to make a historically acute judgment call, preliminary indicators of the President’s Affordable Care Act suggest that it is not cool.  Depending on what television network you are watching,  this legislation will either give some Americans access to health care after countless glitches are worked out,  or it will enslave us all in some kind of quasi-Marxist death-scape where an insurance premium cost three fingers and an ear lobe.  However, since it has been my observation that the future is very rarely as good or as bad as people promise, my family and I have chosen what we believe is the middle ground and have invested in a fancy new treadmill.

Why a treadmill, you may ask?  Well, why not?  A treadmill in your home says to the world, “Hey, world, it doesn’t really matter to me if the weather is too hot or too cold or too wet, I can run whenever I want.  I can run once a day or once a week, or, as recent history has suggested, once a month.  So watch it with your attitude, world! I own my health!”

            We also have in our basement a set of very extreme exercise DVD’s.  These are the DVDs where the very extreme instructor shouts out borderline-abusive comments while doing hundreds of weird-looking push-ups.  Despite having owned these DVDs well past the ninety-days needed to transform my life, I still look like an aged Peter Parker before his spider bite.

Besides thinking very seriously about exercising, we are also buying more nutritious food, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, many of which get eaten before they spoil.  We have even gone so far recently as to replace hamburger in our chili with quinoa.  Believe it or not, quinoa is a real word and a real thing; a so-called super food from South America full of protein.   Like many super foods, is it most appealing when eaten with non-super foods, like excessive amounts of melted cheese. We ended up freezing most of the chili, as is our habit, and will most likely add some other ingredients to it when it is thawed, such as hamburger and flavor.

Perhaps the most promising development to come out of our skyrocketing insurance premiums is that our children, too, have decided to take a greater interest in their own health.  Candy Maker, the game in which they whisper to each other the words, “Candy Maker” before sneaking into the pantry to snatch some suckers from their stash of old parade loot, has declined from a daily exercise to a few times a week.  The most inspirational member of the family, though, has to be our toddler son, who pounced on his own health destiny a few weeks ago by gobbling up seven adult gummy vitamins in less than a minute.

Now, by “inspirational” I mean terrifying, of course, because the bottle of adult gummy vitamins suggest that even adults, which he is not, should only consume two in a twenty-four hour period.  This intense health moment led to my very first phone call to poison control, where I was quickly put on hold due to, and I quote, “budget restraints.”  Now, I am not an economics expert, nor am I a health professional or even an elected official.  However, I do know what a budget is, and it seems to me that one place that really ought not be susceptible to “restraint” is the phone number people call when they need immediate advice about something that might kill them.  It’s kind of in the name:  POISON.  People who call 911 when that operator is too busy are often told to call poison control.  I was not told to hang up and call any alternative number, so instead I watched my very satisfied son run around the living room as if he had just won the sugar lottery.

Eventually I was the given the privilege of talking to a real human, who told me that gummy vitamins are not toxic and that my son did not need to be rushed to the hospital.  I was also told that if the vitamins contained iron, then he might suffer from some minor digestive issues, which meant nothing to me whatsoever because the boy has had minor digestive issues for the last twenty-six months of his life.

To conclude, never mind what the pundits and politicians on TV tell you about health care.  We are all going to die someday, anyway.  Prior to this, I predict we will pay more for health care than what it is worth, and I also assume that the care we receive will be less than what we deserve.  That is life, which, as mentioned, will someday cease.  If you like your doctor, he or she will probably not like you.  If you like your current health insurance plan, you probably do not understand all the words in that health insurance plan.  The best thing you can do today for your health is turn off the news, grab a bottle of water, and go for a walk. 

            And be sure to take your vitamins.