One Choice

Posted on September 22, 2009 by Andy

Last night I got to thinking about my days as a high school tennis player. I played JV freshman year and varsity for half of my sophomore year and all my junior year. Junior year brought out the best tennis of my life. Focusing on doubles, my good friend/doubles partner and I took second in district and got to compete (read: we showed up and got blown off the court) in the regional tournament down in Waco, where we saw a whole different league of players.

Despite our success and lots of fun, I decided not to play for the team my senior year. The main reason was wanting to write for the newspaper, a class which met during tennis practice, and wanting to have my other fourth period off for all the other stuff I did. I had a few other reasons as well, including being tired of the constant stress of calling shots in or out when I often couldn’t seen them clearly. Coach and my friends were a little disappointed, and my doubles partner was very disappointed, but I had to make a choice.

Last night I got to wondering: how would my life have been different had I played tennis my senior year instead? How big of an impact did that single choice make? Did it really matter at all? In the grand scheme of things it was probably a medium-significance decision, right? What I eat for lunch is low significance, I assume. Whom I marry is high significance. Yeah, medium sounds about right. Let’s see…

Obviously, I would have kept playing, probably gotten better, possibly won district and returned to regionals, and helped out with team tennis. I would have maintained a better relationship with a friend who didn’t know Jesus. I suppose my college resume would have been roughly the same after trading another year of a varsity sport for one extra activity. Due to time constraints, I probably would not have gotten involved in the spring one-act play, which means I probably would not have started my three-year relationship with Dawn, would not have gone to California the following summer for my first real mission trip, would never have gotten involved with a charismatic church, and probably would have avoided my little spiritual wilderness that resulted from my relationship with Dawn. Most likely I would have stayed at Baylor on the weekends instead of coming home to see her, getting to know my classmates better and possibly meeting a nice Baylor girl. Who knows, maybe I would have ended up marrying nice Baylor girl. If I’d already married nice Baylor girl, I probably wouldn’t have even met Jenny or had Brenden. I also might have pursued another career besides tech writing. Wow.

Only God knows what other changes would have resulted from that one decision back in high school. It had a much bigger impact than I’d realized, some negative, some positive. Would I go back and change it if I could? No. The road I took made me who I am today and brought me to my wife, son, job, friends, and everything else in my life. I am grateful for where I am. But I wonder how many decisions I’ve made somewhat flippantly that turned out to be much more important than expected.

Can any of you think of a choice you made that produced significant, unexpected results?

Baby Name Quest

Posted on September 11, 2009 by Andy

The quest has begun for a name for our new son. This is hard.

As with Brenden, we each have certain criteria to meet. For Jenny, Newbie’s first name can’t be extremely popular, can’t be the same as one of her exes’ names, and can’t remind her of any annoying people from her past. For me, his first name must have at least two syllables, can’t be “trendy”, can’t lend itself to easy shortening, and must be the name we actually call him. There are others, but you get the idea. It also has to sorta work with Brenden’s name since they’ll be said together often.

One interesting site we found is the Social Security Administration’s list of baby names for each year. You can break it down by state, year, or decade. I found that parents are much more creative today than they were in the late 70s when we were born. In 1976, for example, the most popular name was Jennifer with 3.78% of all female babies. In other words, on average every coed classroom of 25 kids had a roughly 50/50 chance of having a Jennifer. The top 10 girl names accounted for 16% of all female births. The top boy name was Michael, even more dominant at 4.1% of all male babies. The top 10 boy names accounted for an astounding 24% of all male births.

In 2008, new parents are much less likely to see another baby in the nursery with the same name as their own. The top girl name, Emma, only accounted for 0.9% of all female births. The top ten girl names only accounted for 7.7% of all little girls, compared to 16% in 1976. The top boy name, Jacob, was given to 1%. The top ten boy names accounted for 9.7% of all little boys, compared to 24% in 1976. I imagine part of this change comes from the increase in immigration. People from other countries who have babies here don’t necessarily gravitate toward the same names that 5th generation Americans prefer. Other reasons probably exist as well – a desire for their children to have a less common name, perhaps? Do you have any ideas?

Regardless of the causes, our children are less likely to have classmates who share the same name than we were. I remember having a Matt P. and a Matt W. in some of my classes. Jenny had three other classmates/friends who shared her name. My high school tennis team had two Andys. Even if we choose one of the more popular names for Newbie, he’ll still have a good chance of being the only one in his class.

Right now, my current favorite is Mel.

When Girls are Guys, Sorta

Posted on August 27, 2009 by Andy

Last week at the world track and field championships, an 18-year-old South African woman named Caster Semenya won the 800m title. Unless you follow women’s track closely, you’ve probably never heard of her. But now she’s in the center of a bizarre controversy – not over steroids, training methods, or false starts, but over her gender.

Although Semenya competes as a woman, some details suggest otherwise. Her muscular, slim build, somewhat masculine face, and large margin of victory in the 800m have led many to believe Semenya is not a normal woman. After routine hormone tests showed her testosterone levels to be three times higher than normal for a female athlete, the International Association of Athletics Federations began an investigation into her actual gender. The final results won’t be available for weeks.

Strange as this story is, the leading theory diagnoses Semenya with a recognized medical condition called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or AIS. People with AIS are genetically male but can appear to be female because their bodies do not respond normally to testosterone. All embyroes start developing as females. During the first trimester, a normal boy starts producing testosterone, which causes his boy parts to develop. A baby with AIS is coded to be a boy and starts producing testosterone normally, but his cells don’t detect it completely, if at all. The results can vary. Some people with AIS look like a combination of male and female. Many people with AIS look female externally but have internal testicles and none of the normal female sex organs. In these cases the boy is generally raised as a girl, develops breasts on time, and never knows of any problem until he reaches 15 or 16 and hasn’t started to menstruate. Once diagnosed, the boy must work through a difficult set of medical, emotional, physical, and spiritual questions. Although the medical buff in me finds this condition interesting, I ache for those who must deal with it. It’s hard enough to figure out your identity when you’re certain of your gender.

Looking back, I suspect that a good friend of mine had AIS. She looked and acted like a normal girl but never started her period. Around age 16 or 17 she finally went to the doctor, who told her she “didn’t develop right” and would never be able to have children. In a college neuroscience class I first heard about AIS and made the connection. At first I thought her doctor had withheld the whole truth from her. Imagine what it would feel like to spend 16 years thinking you were a girl and suddenly being told you were actually a boy, even though you still looked like a girl. How confusing and disturbing such news would be. But now I wonder whether her doctor didn’t tell her the truth, and my friend simply withheld the most shocking part from me. I understand if that’s how she chose to handle it. I still think of her as a woman, regardless of what the genetic tests might say.

Back to Caster Semenya…I feel terribly for her. If she has AIS, she could be banned from competing in track as a woman since she could have an unfair advantage over the normal women. Since she’s not fully male, either, she isn’t quite fast enough to compete with the men. Her countless hours of hard work would become almost worthless, her career over, due to a medical anomaly over which he had zero control. Even if she doesn’t have AIS, she’s been humilated by the gender testing and speculation, which will probably haunt her throughout her career.

Here are some links in case you’d like to read more:

AIS – University of Indiana

Time.com article on Semenya

Memory

Posted on August 26, 2009 by Andy

Over the weekend Jenny and I watched the 2004 film The Notebook, based on the book by Nicholas Sparks. Of all the books I read as a youth, The Notebook was one of the most moving, mainly because it explored a tragic situation that I hadn’t really considered by age 13 or 14: an aging couple in which one partner has Alzheimer’s Disease and has all but forgotten the other. The movie changed a few details from the book but kept a similar structure along with the emotional punch, largely due to excellent performances by the actors playing the young and old versions of the couple.

As a teenager, I remember being horrified by the idea of someone’s losing their recognition and memory of his or her spouse, especially after spending most of their lives together. To share so much with a person and then turn into just another stranger seemed so unfair. Alzheimer’s is a terrible robbery not of one’s possessions or even one’s life, but of the very things that make life so wonderful: your relationships. A few years later, I had to watch couples I knew walk down that lonely but irreversible road, matching real faces and names to the imaginary ones from the book.

Seeing the movie made both Jenny and me face the very real possibility that our own future could end in that dark, tangled forest. A day could come when I wake up and don’t remember who Jenny is, or when I come home from work and she thinks I’m a burglar. I hate that thought. The idea of forgetting Jenny, or Brenden, or anyone else in my family breaks my heart. I would rather die than live thinking that they are strangers.

One thing that consoles me about Alzheimer’s patients is my belief that if they know Jesus, they will one day receive a new body at the Resurrection. Although I don’t have any solid Biblical backing, I assume that with the new body should come a restored mind that can remember all the wonder, beauty, pain, people, and adventures gathered during their brief walk on earth.

May it be so, Lord.

Misconceptions about Foreign Health Care and Our Own

Posted on August 24, 2009 by Andy

A friend shared a fascinating article from the Washington Post about many of the misconceptions that Americans believe about health care in other countries. Due to the huge amount of incorrect information being thrown around in this country during Congress’s attempt at fixing our broken system, you’ve probably heard some of these already.

I don’t claim to be any sort of expert on health care, but I have no doubt that our system is broken. You’ve seen and experienced it yourself. We have some of the best doctors, nurses, and facilities in the world. Yet tens of millions of people inexcusably lack health insurance, the costs of health care continues to rise much quicker than inflation, and the entire system is a jumbled, confusing mess of paperwork and bureacracy.

For one example, consider Jenny’s recent gallbladder surgery. The hospital sent our insurance company a bill for over $11,000 for the surgery itself and a separate bill for $700 for the ultrasound that revealed the stones that got things rolling. (heh heh) The surgeon sent the insurance company a bill for maybe $3000. In each case, the provider was billing MORE than the actual cost of the procedure knowing that the insurance company would only cover a lower amount, which is related to whatever government-run Medicare decides is a fair price for that procedure. The provider writes off the difference, which provides them some tax benefits. Then we have to pay 10 percent of whatever amount the insurance company decides is fair. So out of a total “bill” of over $15,000 for a surgery that took less than an hour and an ultrasound that took 5 minutes, we are paying about $500. Only God and perhaps the providers know that actual cost of the care Jenny received, but it has very little to do with what we paid or what the insurance company paid.

At the same hospital, and hospitals around the country, pregnant women show up every day in labor with no insurance at all. The hospital is legally obligated to help them, so they deliver their babies and provide the same high level of care that we received when Brenden was born. The mothers’ out-of-pocket cost? $0. Reimbursement to the hospital and doctor? I assume they get something from Medicaid, but less than they got from us and our insurance company. But they probably got NO prenatal care because they didn’t have insurance, adding risk to both baby and mother.

I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for the wealthiest, most powerful, and most advanced country in the world to provide a cost-effective, efficient, and innovative health care system that makes coverage available for everyone in a fair way. As you can read in the Washington Post article, countries around the world have added great ideas to their own systems. I hope that our leaders can learn from the many examples out there and hammer out a plan that works for us.