Stress is Bad at the Bottom of the Hierarchy...Luckily Your Attitude Counts for Something

I just read this amazing article in Wired about the connection between stress, your physical health, and your emotional state. This article describes how anthropologist Robert Sapolsky proved that baboons at the bottom of the social hierarchy were more stressed out and had more health problems than baboons at the top of the hierarchy. This article cites studies of stress in baboons, Oscar nominees/winners, and British civil servants, showing that there is a direct connection between stress and your health:

Stress hollows out our bones and atrophies our muscles. It triggers adult-onset diabetes and is a leading cause of male impotence. In fact, numerous studies of human longevity in developed countries have found that psychosocial factors such as stress are the single most important variable in determining the length of a life. It’s not that genes and risk factors like smoking don’t matter. It’s that our levels of stress matter more.

The shocking part of the article for me was the finding that it’s not necessarily a stressful, demanding job that is so “deadly,” but rather the feeling like you have no control or that your work is meaningless…sound familiar to anyone?!

While doctors speculated for years that increasing rates of cardiovascular disease in women might be linked to the increasing number of females employed outside the home, that correlation turned out to be nonexistent. Working women didn’t have more heart attacks. There were, however, two glaring statistical exceptions to the rule: Women developed significantly more heart disease if they performed menial clerical work or when they had an unsupportive boss. The work, in other words, wasn’t the problem. It was the subordination.

This passage also points to the fact that some groups are more vulnerable than others. In this case, women. That got me thinking about our campus hierarchy and our limited term employees, roughly 75 percent of which are women. It is even more troubling to think that many of these women, probably the most vulnerable in our campus community to stress-related health problems, have no health insurance, paid time off, and don’t make a living wage.

I was floored by the description of the following study by Michael Marmot about British Civil Servants. For the past 25 years the study has tracked 28,000 British men and women working in Civil Servant positions who all have access to the same health care system, who “don’t have to worry about getting laid off,” and “spend most of their workdays shuffling papers.” Here is a description of the findings:

The differences are dramatic. After tracking thousands of civil servants for decades, Marmot was able to demonstrate that between the ages of 40 and 64, workers at the bottom of the hierarchy had a mortality rate four times higher than that of people at the top. Even after accounting for genetic risks and behaviors like smoking and binge drinking, civil servants at the bottom of the pecking order still had nearly double the mortality rate of those at the top.

This study is haunting to me because our campus has the same type of hierarchical Civil Servant system. If the people at the bottom of the hierarchy have “double the mortality rate” in a situation where they have the same benefits as people at the top of the hierarchy, what about the people at the bottom of the hierarchy who DON’T have benefits? What would a study of stress reveal about this population?

In light of these thoughts, the following quote really stuck with me, and I’ll be thinking about how I can be more aware of my own emotional state and my attitude and how these affect my health.

The moral is that the most dangerous kinds of stress don’t feel that stressful. It’s not the late night at the office that’s going to kill us; it’s the feeling that nothing can be done. The person most at risk for heart disease isn’t the high-powered executive anxious about their endless to-do list — it’s the frustrated janitor stuck with existential despair.

Best Cookies Ever: Doubletree Hotel Chocolate Chip Cookies

Doubletree Hotel Chocolate Chip Cookies

I stayed at a Doubletree Hotel in Minneapolis once and I was amazed to receive, upon check-in, the most delicious cookie I'd ever eaten. I am pleased to announce that I googled "Doubletree Hotel Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe" and the following is what I found. They are truly the most delicious cookies EVER.

(Side note: This was a holiday indulgence and I have since begun the Couch to 5K Running program! I have been inspired by two amazing friends who have completed this program. But first I had to indulge myself!)

Doubletree Hotel Chocolate Chip Cookies, from http://www.foodgeeks.com/recipes/18302

20 servings

INGREDIENTS

1/2 cup rolled oats
2-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1-1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1-1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. lemon juice
2 eggs
3 cups semi-sweet, chocolate chips
1-1/2 cups chopped walnuts


INSTRUCTIONS

Grind oats in a food processor or blender until fine. Combine the ground oats with the flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon in a medium bowl.

Cream together the butter, sugars, vanilla, and lemon juice in another medium bowl with an electric mixer. Add the eggs and mix until smooth. Stir the dry mixture into the wet mixture and blend well. Add the chocolate chips and nuts to the dough and mix by hand until ingredients are well blended.

For the best results, chill the dough overnight in the refrigerator before baking the cookies.

Spoon rounded 1/4 cup portions onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Place the scoops about 2 inches apart. Bake in a 350°F oven for 16-18 minutes or until cookies are light brown and soft in the middle. Store in a sealed container when cool to keep soft.

The Italian Gourmet

On October 23rd we had an Italian cooking class with Antonio Cecconi, owner of The Italian Gourmet and author of the Betty Crocker Italian cookbook.

Coordinating this event was a challenging and sometimes frustrating process…we needed to set a date, send out invites, recruit a minimum number of people, gather money, finalize the menu, secure a kitchen in the Minneapolis area, and finalize travel and lodging plans and more. With all the travel and lodging and the fact that we wanted it to be a gift to our friend C, who got married the following weekend, it got to be a bit expensive but IT WAS SO WORTH IT….


My heart sank when Antonio did not show up on time, but fear not, he was only momentarily trapped in the traffic jam surrounding the presidential motorcade that weekend in the Minneapolis area.

When Antonio arrived, we were immediately mesmerized by his warm and friendly personality. In between teaching us how to make our Italian meal (see menu below), he gave us a lesson about capers, showed us pictures from his recent trip to Italy, and graciously answered some rather personal questions from one of us (not me) who had a few too many glasses of wine! AND he signed my Betty Crocker Italian cookbook! He is a fabulous chef and teacher and was a pleasure to work with before and during the class.

As soon as we began making that pasta, mixing the semolina flour with water, kneading the dough into small round yellow balls, and flattening the dough into long thin yellow sheets using the hand-crank pasta machines, I literally felt all the challenges and tensions melt away and everyone was laughing and getting their hands dirty. I hope you can see in the pictures how everyone enjoyed the class.

Our menu:

• Basil Cheese Truffles & Spices

• Crusty Bread with Tomato Basil Topping

• Homemade Lasagna with Asparagus and Tomato Sauce

• Fresh Pasta with Creamy Four Cheese Sauce

• Pork Tenderloin with Lemon Prosciutto Sage Sauce

• Sautéed Field Fennel Salad with Fresh Herb Dressing

• Seasoned Homemade Buns

• Cream Puffs with Amaretto Chocolate Sauce

All of the recipes are in Antonio's cookbook.

Once again I was reminded how therapeutic cooking and good company can be. For those four hours, I was completely in the present moment, totally focused on the task at hand and on taking in every detail and savoring every wonderful taste. I feel so privileged to be able to do things that are so uplifting.

Learn Something New



Pre- Outlook or Google Calendars!

I was talking to someone at work the other day about changes with technology and he made the comment that you get to a point in your life where you stop learning anything new because a) you can’t and b) you don’t want to. I understand what he meant. My predecessor in this job never moved beyond VHS and transparencies. He kept everything in paper format, including his work calendar, which was hand-drawn on an artist’s sketch book in one hour increments.

I have worked with men and women of various generations and I do agree that learning happens much differently as you age. We all tend to find the things that work for us at a certain point in time, and then just stick with what works. This even happens to people working in IT fields, especially if you’re in a reactionary mode. You go with what you know has worked in the past especially when you don't have time to research future directions. But regardless of age or circumstance, isn’t it always our responsibility to keep pushing ourselves to learn more?

One thing I’ve enjoyed about moving to a new position is I’ve had more time to expand my skills. Here are some of the new things I’ve been working on:

• Learned how to use an internet fax program, GotFreeFax.com. This is one of those things that is so easy I’m ashamed to admit I never tried it sooner. Here is an article about 5 Free Resources for Internet Faxing.
• Bought a used Dell GX 620 and flat-screen monitor and installed Windows 7. In the process, I learned the difference between 64-bit and 32-bit processors (which you should know in order to buy the correct operating system for your computer).
• Researched Windows 7 and related topics through the wonderful guides available at www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads
• Created Adobe Acrobat PDF forms and web-based forms to transition paper-based department processes to a digital format.
• Learned that if you use PowerPoint 98 or earlier on a Mac, your graphics will not show up on a later version of PowerPoint and here is the fix:
  http://aricsblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/quicktime-and-decompressor-are-needed.html
  I made a faculty member very happy when I figured this out just in time for his lecture to begin!
• How to draw customized curved arrows in PowerPoint for a large poster and how to make large format posters in PowerPoint for faculty research.

I hope that I continue to evolve and fight that complacency that creeps up on us a times, telling us we either can’t or won’t learn something new. For now, I’m going to try and learn something new every day.

Five Years Later: Part 8

Fourteen weeks after the stroke she comes home, walking with a hemi-cane and an ankle brace, her lifeless left arm in a sling.

Winter is on its way out, leaving an oozy, muddy, rutted-up earth. We sit at the kitchen table, in front of the window. I am in the same chair where she sat on that night almost five months earlier. Framed by the squares of the window pane, the birds outside visit the feeder.

“Dad said I should make sure you know that when I cry, it’s not because I’m sad. It’s because I’m happy,” she says.

I stop chewing for a moment. I look at the bird feeder to see my first Robin of the season.

“You know that, don’t you?” she adds.

It seems like a good place to start. I’ve stopped measuring the future in terms of the past, waiting for myself—and my mother—to re-emerge the same as we had been, as if we’d just returned from vacation or woken up from a dream. We have only just begun to re-define ourselves and our family, one moment at a time. I’ve said goodbye to the familiarity of the past, and accepted the uncertainty of the future.

She starts reading her daily devotions, using a pink index card to help her follow the line. Her hair has grown in around her incision. I glance at her gratitude journal, lying open on the table.

“Our homes are our sanctuary from the world,” she has written. “Our lives are made up of all the little traditions and experiences we share with people. Cherish every moment.”

“Did I sign up for this?” Dad jokes, as he helps her walk to the bathroom. “I’m not sure this was in the contract. It must have been in the fine print.”

“You better make sure you have it in the fine print,” she laughs, turning to look at me.

And I think to myself that we are all in each other’s fine print, neatly inscribed onto lines containing our greatest liabilities. With every patient comes a family, sustained by their community and their faith in the medical professionals to whom they entrust the most precious pieces of their fine print. This is the year I am getting married, and all around me, I see love in fine print.

Five Years Later: Part 7

I am lying on a bed in a hospital gown, a Doppler ultrasound machine next to me, waiting to have a trans-thoracic echocardiogram with a bubble study. This test will reveal whether I have a hole in my heart--that patent foramen ovale that threads through the family lines.

“Have you had an IV before?” the nurse asks me.

“No. But I’ve given blood,” I reply.

“Oh, well this needle is about a third of the size. Don’t worry—I’ve done this a couple times before,” she jokes, as she sticks me.

“At the end of the echo, we’ll be injecting agitated saline into your IV, and then we’ll watch it move through your heart,” she tells me.

Jason, the echocardiographer, attaches cords to my chest. “This is a Doppler ultrasound,” he says, applying a jelly-like substance to my chest and placing a flat, rectangular object there.

Suddenly my heart is on the monitor. It is stunning. A big oblong ball of pulsing light surrounded by darkness. It is heaving and thrusting and appears to be divided in two.

“See this smaller side?” Jason asks. “This is your pulmonary side. It goes right to the lungs. All your veins feed back to this side. The other side is your systemic side.”

He starts capturing pictures of my heart on the machine.

“Did you know the aortic valve is the point of highest blood pressure in the body? Look, the mitral valve looks like a fish mouth! Do you want to see your lung? Take a deep breath.”

I inhale. My heart disappears. I exhale and my heart appears again. I can’t help laughing.

“Our heart valves are actually like one-way doors,” Jason says. “Two of the valves contract at once and the other two relax. So it’s not really a pump. If your heart was really a pump, you’d only live five years and your heart would have to be three times as big.”

“My Mom has a hole in her heart,” I tell him.

“Ah, patent foramen ovale,” he says. “It means ‘the Window’ in Latin. It’s there so we can breathe without our lungs when we’re still inside our mothers. That explains why you’re having the bubble study.”

The nurse injects the agitated saline into my IV.

Instantly I see the right side of my heart fill with bubbles.

“See all the bubbles in the pulmonary side?” the nurse asks me.

Jason is suddenly quiet for the first time. “Wait, let’s do it again,” he tells the nurse.

“Why?” I ask, watching the bubbles on the monitor.

“I don’t leave any room for doubt,” he says.

He takes a series of digital pictures on the monitor. The muffled sound of my beating heart comes out through the machine as he captures the sound files for the cardiologist to listen to.

“So when do I find out?” I ask him when it’s all over.

“Next week,” he says.

But I don’t have to wait. I saw the bubbles move. I know I have my mother’s heart.

Five Years Later: Part 6

Five weeks after the stroke, the neurosurgeon says it’s time to put Mom’s head back together. He tells us that he will re-attach her skull using 4 millimeter screws and some metal plates.

“Will you be using a power drill on my head?” Mom jokes to the neurosurgeon, her voice soft and raspy. “I’m not entering any beauty pageants anytime soon so it should be fine.”

She alternates between humor and bouts of deep sadness that escalate as she becomes more aware of her physical limitations. At first, she could not even open her eyes or speak, so we held her eyes open while she used markers and a dry erase board to communicate. But with occupational, speech, and physical therapy, she went from bedridden to walking with a four-footed hemi-cane in a matter of weeks.

After her first brain surgery, Mom began taking blood thinner medication, which helps prevent blood clots, but also increases the risk of bleeding. As a result, her blood thinner medication is reversed before her second brain surgery, restoring her blood’s natural ability to clot. As a pre-caution, a radiologist places a small umbrella-like device called an inferior vena cava (IVC) filter in her abdomen to catch blood clots until she heals from surgery and resumes her blood thinner medication.

“The filter is in her abdomen, in the major highway known as the vena cava,” the radiologist explains. “We come up through the femoral veins, the major veins in the legs, which make a fork in the road and bifurcate from the vena cava, the main vein that empties up to the heart.”

Leaving only a minuscule incision, the radiologist positions the filter via tiny cameras and small catheters, all so Mom won’t pass another clot while they are screwing her skull back on. Doctors can now thread tiny catheters and devices through veins and arteries, transforming open heart surgery into minimally invasive procedures like angiograms, angioplasty, and stent placement, yet cerebral edema can only be treated by cracking open Mom’s skull and cutting out part of her brain. Modern medicine contains surprising juxtapositions of old and new, invasive and non-invasive.

After the surgery, she is awake, but groggy. Iodine is lightly smeared on her right cheek, mixed with blood. She wears a turban of gauze. She says she can’t find her thinking brain.

“This brain says bad things,” she tells us.

“Like what?” I ask.

“That maybe it should be like ‘Million Dollar Baby.’”

I think for a moment and then explain the allusion to Dad. “It’s a movie about a boxer who asks her coach to euthanize her after she becomes paralyzed.”

We are quiet.

Despite tremendous physical healing, I can’t help but think that another type of healing—much more elusive, hard to treat, and slow to heal—has hardly begun. With physical rehabilitation has come a devastating awareness of her physical limitations. We have been well trained in the use of wheelchairs, hemi-canes, and leg braces, but we are unable to deal with our own grief. I fear random, unpredictable things, like the brain not having enough room to swell, or a clot smaller than the tip of a pencil causing a stroke. When it comes to mortality, we have a natural suspension of disbelief, and mine had been forever shattered.

As we try to chase her bad brain away, on the other side of the curtain dividing Mom’s room, an oncologist is telling Mom’s elderly roommate, the primary caregiver for her diabetic daughter with kidney failure, that she has terminal liver cancer.