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In Response To Robin Williams' Death, The Most Powerful Description Of Depression I’ve Ever Heard
I am so, so thankful this video was made. It's probably the most intimate, real description of depression I've ever heard.
08.13.14
The portraits, taken by acclaimed photographer Nigel Barker, are part of CARE's "She Leads the World" campaign.
Women are breaking down barriers every day. They are transforming the world into a more equitable place with every scientific discovery, athletic feat, social justice reform, artistic endeavor, leadership role, and community outreach project.
And while these breakthroughs are happening all the time, International Women’s Day (Mar 8) is when we can all take time to acknowledge the collective progress, and celebrate how “She Leads the World.”
This year, CARE, a leading global humanitarian organization dedicated to empowering women and girls, is celebrating International Women’s Day through the power of portraiture. CARE partnered with high-profile photographer Nigel Barker, best known for his work on “America’s Next Top Model,” to capture breathtaking images of seven remarkable women who have prevailed over countless obstacles to become leaders within their communities.
“Mabinty, Isatu, Adama, and Kadiatu represent so many women around the world overcoming incredible obstacles to lead their communities,” said Michelle Nunn, President and CEO of CARE USA.
Barker’s bold portraits, as part of CARE’s “She Leads The World” campaign, not only elevate each woman’s story, but also shine a spotlight on how CARE programs helped them get to where they are today.
About the women:
Mabinty
Mabinty is a businesswoman and a member of a CARE savings circle along with a group of other women. She buys and sells groundnuts, rice, and fuel. She and her husband have created such a successful enterprise that Mabinty volunteers her time as a teacher in the local school. She was the first woman to teach there, prompting a second woman to do so. Her fellow teachers and students look up to Mabinty as the leader and educator she is.
Kadiatu
Kadiatu supports herself through a small business selling food. She also volunteers at a health clinic in the neighboring village where she is a nursing student. She tests for malaria, works with infants, and joins her fellow staff in dancing and singing with the women who visit the clinic. She aspires to become a full-time nurse so she can treat and cure people. Today, she leads by example and with ambition.
Isatu
When Isatu was three months pregnant, her husband left her, seeking his fortune in the gold mines. Now Isatu makes her own way, buying and selling food to support her four children. It is a struggle, but Isatu is determined to be a part of her community and a provider for her kids. A single mother of four is nothing if not a leader.
Zainab
Zainab is the Nurse in Charge at the Maternal Child Health Outpost in her community. She is the only nurse in the surrounding area, and so she is responsible for the pre-natal health of the community’s mothers-to-be and for the safe delivery of their babies. In a country with one of the world’s worst maternal death rates, Zainab has not lost a single mother. The community rallies around Zainab and the work she does. She describes the women who visit the clinic as sisters. That feeling is clearly mutual.
Adama
Adama is something few women are - a kehkeh driver. A kehkeh is a three-wheeled motorcycle taxi, known elsewhere as a tuktuk. Working in the Kissy neighborhood of Freetown, Adama is the primary breadwinner for her family, including her son. She keeps her riders safe in other ways, too, by selling condoms. With HIV threatening to increase its spread, this is a vital service to the community.
Ya Yaebo
“Ya” is a term of respect for older, accomplished women. Ya Yaebo has earned that title as head of her local farmers group. But there is much more than that. She started as a Village Savings and Loan Association member and began putting money into her business. There is the groundnut farm, her team buys and sells rice, and own their own oil processing machine. They even supply seeds to the Ministry of Agriculture. She has used her success to the benefit of people in need in her community and is a vocal advocate for educating girls, not having gone beyond grade seven herself.
On Monday, March 4, CARE will host an exhibition of photography in New York City featuring these portraits, kicking off the multi-day “She Leads the World Campaign.
Learn more, view the portraits, and join CARE’s International Women's Day "She Leads the World" celebration at CARE.org/sheleads.
Let's settle this silly-but-surprisingly-heated debate once and for all.
Humans have debated things large and small over the millennia, from the democracy to breastfeeding in public to how often people ought to wash their sheets.
But perhaps the most silly-yet-surprisingly-heated household debate is the one in which we argue over which way to hang the toilet paper roll.
The "over or under" question has plagued marriages and casual acquaintances alike for over 100 years, with both sides convinced they have the soundest reasoning for putting their toilet paper loose end out or loose end under. Some people feel so strongly about right vs. wrong TP hanging that they will even flip the roll over when they go to the bathroom in the homes of strangers.
Contrary to popular belief, it's not merely an inconsequential preference. There is actually a "correct" way to hang toilet paper, according to health experts as well as the man who invented the toilet paper roll in the first place.
First, let's be clear about what we're even talking about here with a visual. In the image below, left is "over" and right is "under."
Toilet paper hung "over" (left) and "under" (right)
Elya/Wikimedia Commons
So which one is the right way? According to health experts, "over" is the way to go.
"One key to maintaining a hygienic washroom is minimising contact between people and surfaces," Dr. Christian Moro, associate professor of health sciences and medicine at Bond University on Australia's Gold Coast, told Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "Depending on the type of roll holder, [hanging the toilet paper "over"] often lowers the chance that a user will touch the wall behind when fishing for paper, leaving germs behind on that surface which can be spread to the next user."
Picture it: Grabbing the end of the toilet paper when it's hung "over" means you only touch the part of the toilet paper you're going to use. When it's "under," you sometimes have to fish for it or scrape your fingers on the wall in order to grab the loose end. In addition to whatever might be on people's hands already, think about all the people who wipe twice, potentially transferring fresh fecal matter or other bacteria to the wall on the second pass, which then get picked up by other people who inadvertently touch that wall when trying to grab their TP.
Theoretically, we all should have become better hand washers during the pandemic, scrubbing with soap for the full 20 seconds it takes to remove bacteria. But I wouldn't be willing to bet on it.
And touching any surface in a bathroom is pretty nasty, according to a study from the University of Colorado. As Inc. reported: "Using a high-tech genetic sequencing tool, researchers identified 19 groups of bacteria on the doors, floors, faucet handles, soap dispensers, and toilets of 12 public restrooms in Colorado — six men’s restrooms and six women’s restrooms. Many of the bacteria strains identified could be transmitted by touching contaminated surfaces."
Bacteria means things like e.coli, which is a common source of food poisoning and one of the most common bacteria found on bathroom surfaces in the study. If you've ever had a bout of food poisoning, I'm sure you'll agree that a toilet paper roll hanging preference isn't worth risking it.
But sanitary health concerns aren't the only argument for the "over" camp. After all, the original patent for the toilet paper roll, issued in 1891, clearly shows the TP in the "over" position. Thank you for the clarity right from the get go, Mr. Wheeler.
The toilet paper roll was patented by Seth Wheeler in 1891.
Now, before the "under" folks come running with their pitchforks, there are some understandable exceptions to the "over" rule. Namely: cats and kids.
If you have a furry friend or a tiny toddler who likes to unroll the toilet paper roll, "over" makes it super fun for them, while "under" stops them in their tracks. For many people, cats and kids are the primary motivator of their TP hanging habits.
That doesn't change the fact that "over" is actually the "correct" way to hang toilet paper according to health science and the inventor's intention, of course, but "under" is certainly preferable to having a pile of TP on the floor.
Now go forth, do that with information as you will, and try to make peace with your over vs. under rivals.
"How imminent must death be?"
When the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022, experts warned that there would be medical consequences. Politicians have made abortion a black-and-white issue when it's a vast ocean of gray, and doctors are now stuck in dilemma after dilemma in states like Tennessee, which enacted some of the strictest abortion laws in the nation in the wake of Dobbs.
In Tennessee, it is now a Class C felony to perform an abortion. Exceptions are made for rape and incest, ectopic pregnancy, molar pregnancy, and if "the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman."
But as OB-GYN Sarah Osmundson explained on Radio Atlantic, that last exception is "very gray." Working as a maternal-fetal specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Osmundson serves on the abortion committee that decides whether a doctor has the green light to perform an abortion to save a mother's life or bodily function. In an interview with Hanna Rosin, Dr. Osmundson shared how making those calls can feel like an impossible task as providers walk the line between ethical care and the threat of legal action.
Osmundson explained that it's unclear what the exceptions to the law even mean because there's no predictable line for when a patient will cross over into imminent death or permanent injury. "It is a continuum of risk," she said. "Where is the cut point that we have to decide some aspect of risk is too high?"
Some cases are cut-and-dried, she said, but others present a conundrum for those who are tasked with assessing whether the risk to a mother's life or health is high enough to warrant an abortion. There are no clear thresholds, especially since risk assessment isn't an exact science.
She offered an example of a patient who has diabetes combined with an autoimmune condition, but they're both currently well managed, on top of kidney disease.
"You know, these are the kind of cases where we’re really trying to guess at: What is their risk of death or serious morbidity?" she said. "And even when I see these patients in the office, like, I can’t sit down with them and say, Your risk is X percent. I don’t have data to drive that individual case. Maybe their risk of serious problems in pregnancy is like 5 percent."
Osmundson pointed out that some patients choose not to screen for chromosomal abnormalities with an amniocentesis because there's a 0.1% risk of complication and they decide it's not worth the risk. "So we don’t do certain things because of very low risk. How am I to say that a risk of 5 percent is too low of a risk?" she asked.
Dr. Lisa Harris, an OB-GYN and professor at the University of Michigan, posed a similar questions to NPR shortly after the Dobbs decision was announced.
"How imminent must death be?" Harris asked. "There are many conditions that people have that when they become pregnant, they're OK in early pregnancy, but as pregnancy progresses, it puts enormous stress on all of the body's organ systems – the heart, the lungs, the kidneys. So they may be fine right now – there's no life-threatening emergency now – but three or four or five months from now, they may have life-threatening consequences."
Osmundson gave a specific example along those lines that posed a problem for some doctors on her committee. A woman was 14 weeks pregnant with a fetus that had no skull, which meant it had no chance of survival but an increased risk of excessive amniotic fluid, which could threaten the mother's life. Osmundson thought the case warranted an abortion, but others on the committee wouldn't commit, with one saying they weren't "brave enough."
The doctors were concerned about the way the decision would be scrutinized and the potential legal consequences if someone brought the case to court. Dr. Louise King, an OB-GYN at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, had warned of this scenario when Roe v. Wade was overturned.
"Laws will exist that ask [physicians] to deprioritize the person in front of them and to act in a way that is medically harmful," King told NPR. "And the penalty for not doing so will be loss of license, money loss, potentially even criminal sanctions."
The reality Osmundson described in the Radio Atlantic interview demonstrates how prescient that warning truly was.
"I feel like I’m making a decision thinking about: How would our attorney general interpret this? How would the optics appear? And it makes me feel really uncomfortable, as a physician, that I’m considering care for the optics, rather than for what is right and best for the patient," she said.
Legal abortion ban exceptions like "to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman" may sound straightforward to the average person, in the reality of medicine, it's not. Doctors aren't magicians or oracles, they don't have a crystal ball that tells them if a patient is going to live or die or be irreparably harmed—they make their best guesses based on their deep well of knowledge and experience, which lawyers and politicians deciding on legal boundaries don't have. Abortion restrictions and exceptions like Tennessee's force doctors to think as lawyers and lawyers to think as doctors when they don't have the training for it, all while people's lives hang in the balance.
The ambiguity in risk thresholds also makes these legal questions impossible to navigate. As Osmundson pointed out, a 5% risk is actually quite high, especially when it's your own life on the line. That's a hard enough choice for a person to make for themselves, much less a choice we should expect a doctor to make for someone based on political decisions and legal judgments made by people with no experience in the intricacies of medicine.
The challenges are even causing some doctors to leave states where they feel they can't care for patients properly. Kylie Cooper, MD was a maternal-fetal specialist who moved from Idaho to Minnesota in the wake of the Dobbs decision.
“My husband and I would talk about this every day. It was consuming us,” she told the AAMC. “What if I lost my license? What would happen to our kids if I went to jail? What about my guilt if I didn’t help a sick patient to my fullest ability? It was a nightmare. I didn’t feel I could remain a health care provider in a place where I couldn’t help a patient sitting right in front of me. It was unbearable.”
And for many, it doesn't seem to be a matter of making the law clearer. There are simply too many factors on an individual patient basis for more clarity in the law to even be possible, much less helpful, while also preserving a doctor's ethical standards of care.
So what's the answer?
The simplest answer is medical privacy—the protection that was provided by Roe. v. Wade—which was argued for and passed by the majority of Republican-nominated Supreme Court Justices, by the way—for doctors and patients together to decide on healthcare decisions without government interference. We were warned by doctors of what would happen when abortion laws were left fully up to each state, and now we're seeing those consequences play out in state after state.
After going through various challenging scenarios, Osmundson summed up the crux of the issue with two questions that every person ought to consider: "Do you want your cancer doctor to be considering the opinion of an attorney general when they’re making recommendations about your cancer care? Why would you want those kind of external things involved in your care during pregnancy?"
Listen to Dr. Osmundson's enlightening Radio Atlantic interview here.
Woman's intuition is right again.
A recent story posted on Reddit shows how sometimes trusting your gut can be the best thing you can do, even if following it will seriously impact your friendships. It all started when a 24-year-old woman with the username Yslbabycat went to a bachelorette party with 5 other friends in Italy.
For brevity’s sake, we’ll call our main character YBC.
One night, the six girls went bar and club hopping and met some new friends. “We met some young people, and they invited us to a party. We went and danced and met more people. The night kept going on longer, and we were very far from our lodgings. These young men with 2 women in their group told us to stay with them for the night,” she wrote.
That’s when she had the first strong gut feeling.
“I wasn’t feeling this situation. It felt unsafe, but the group voted and I was in the minority,” she continued.”I didn’t trust these men. Something seemed wrong. But I was at a loss as I could not split from my group and didn’t feel safe separating from them in the middle of the night.”
Even though the girls locked their doors that night, the men could enter their rooms. But the girls, besides YBC, all wanted to stay another day because the men promised to show them around Italy.
“I didn’t want to get into a car with them because I found them creepy. There were women in their group but it didn’t matter. They seemed even more suspicious to me, being overly friendly,” She continued. “The whole morning, I found the men staring at me a lot and also making some comments about my ethnicity—I am Korean and they could tell and it seemed that they were interested in me because of my ethnicity, asking me strange questions …including if I’m a virgin or not.. so in my head I could only think of perverted reasons for these questions because I thought these guys were sketchy and sizing us all up for some reason I couldn’t figure out yet.”
YBC's friends tried to tell her that it was just cultural differences and that the men weren’t being creepy, but she decided that she wanted to leave. So, she called her boyfriend in France, a few hours’ drive away, to come get her. She met him at a local store, where YBC called the bride-to-be and informed her she was leaving.
The bride-to-be screamed at her on the phone and chastised her for spoiling the “mood of the trip” and told YBC to essentially “f*** off.”
After YBC left, the other 5 girls went on a boat with the men who all tried to get them “extremely” intoxicated. They then began to aggressively pressure the girls into having sex. At the night's end, the girls got away from the men and found another hotel.
Even though YBC’s suspicions were confirmed, the bride-to-be was still upset with her, and YBC did not attend her friend’s wedding.
In the end, Reddit commenters overwhelmingly thought that YBC did the right thing by trusting her gut.
“So all the other girls but the bachelorette confirmed that you were right and the guys were super creepy and yet the bachelorette is still pissed at you for getting yourself out of there?” YouSayWotNow wrote. “All of them are very lucky nothing really bad happened, and frankly, they should be embarrassed they didn't take you seriously at the time.”
“You may have saved the entire group by leaving early, as the men realized that you knew where they lived and could ID them,” RobinC1967 added. “Please don't ever feel bad for getting yourself out of a sketchy situation. Stay Smart!”
Most would agree that YBC did the right thing by trusting her gut and trying to lead her friends out of a potentially dangerous situation. Psychology Today supports her decision to trust her feelings. In an article entitled, “3 Reasons Why You Have to Trust Your Gut,” Susanna Newsonen says that your intuition is encoded in your brain like “a web of fact and feeling” and is helpful because it’s “shaped by your past experiences and the existing knowledge that you gained from them.”
"I truly believe changing your perception & just being grateful can turn around any situation in life."
Kids can seem pretty unappreciative at times. Parents often sacrifice a lot to give their child the best, just to have it thrown in their face, or in the bin. This is something that Haley Hassell recently discovered when she went to three different stores to get her daughter the latest trendy pencil case.
When Hassell gave her daughter the pencil case, she threw it in the bin complaining that everyone already had it. That's when Hassell decided to teach her daughter the perfect lesson.
In a Facebook post, Hassell explained:
"[Daughter] learned a tough love lesson today... I went to 3 different stores to get that LOL pencil box you see in the trash there. When I surprised her with it this afternoon (just knowing she would be ecstatic) she stared at it and threw it in the trash and slammed the bedroom door. She yelled 'that's stupid, everyone in my class has that..I don't want it anymore!'"
"OK So by this time there was probably smoke coming out of my ears and I'm trying real hard not to completely lose it on this kid that I have worked so hard to completely take care of financially on my own & make sure she always gets what she needs and then some. BUT I thought I had always taught her to be grateful & know how lucky she was but apparently sis needed a small wake up call!"
"SO before completely going Madea mad on my child I check myself and say, 'okay that's fine, let me go get the one you're going to use.' Came back with her new pencil box, which is the Ziploc bag. She lost her mind! Suddenly the LOL Box she just trashed was good enough and the Ziploc bag was horrible...but it's too late for all that."
Yes, Hassell gave her daughter a Ziplock bag as a pencil case since she didn't appreciate the LOL one.
"I told her to get the LOL out of the trash and we would be finding a child to give it to tomorrow..one whose mommy and daddies don't have money for any school supplies or someone who may not even have a mommy or daddy."
"I explained to her she's not entitled to anything special and she is taking for granted how lucky she is. So for now she will be using a Ziploc bag & will personally be delivering the nice box to a child that could benefit from it. Maybe I overreact sometimes but I would've done anything to have all the things she does as a child. I truly believe changing your perception & just being grateful can turn around any situation in life.”
Commenters seemed to love the punishment, with one user writing: "I'm down for this. Yes it'd be easier to give in, but sometimes you gotta teach them the principle of the matter."
While another added: "I think you responded appropriately. Maybe she can earn the one she decides she wants at some point."
Others were less receptive of the idea, with a commenter writing: "I guess I pretty much interact with my child on a regular basis, you know, take them with me when buying stuff for THEM so I know what they want. I talk to my child and care about their feelings. I don't fear monger them. But hey, good job being a monster mom!"
Personally, I fully support mom on this one and think it's important to teach kids to appreciate what they have. If you don't, they'll most likely turn into terrible adults.
This article originally appeared on 8.24.19
It's not just the well-known circumstances of his life — orphaned at a young age, father of the mystery novel, master of cryptology, maestro of the macabre. Nor am I referring to the head-scratching details of the days leading up to his death: how he was found on the street near a voting poll wearing someone else's clothes, and during his subsequent hospitalization, he was alleged to babble incoherently about an unidentified person named “Reynolds."
And I won't even get into the confounding reports of a nameless figure who, for seven decades, would show up to Poe's gravesite in the early hours of his birthday with a glass of cognac and three roses.
Tragic and curious, yes, but hardly evidence that the acclaimed horror writer could transcend the limits of space and time. No, my time travel theory concerns the author's creative output, which you'll soon see is so flukishly prophetic as to make my outlandish claim seem plausible — nay, probable!
The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is a loosely linked map of flesh-eating floaters, crunched skull survivors, and primordial particles. OK, here we go…
Photo by Albert Sterner/Wikimedia Commons.
Exhibit A: "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket"
Published in 1838, Poe's only completed novel details a mutiny on a whaling ship lost at sea. Out of supplies, the men revert to cannibalism, drawing straws to elect a sacrifice. A boy named Richard Parker draws the shortest straw and is subsequently eaten.
Now here's where it gets weird(er): In 1884, 46 years after the novel's publication, four men would be set adrift following the sinking of their yacht. Shipwrecked and without food, they too would go the survival cannibalism route, electing to kill and eat a 17-year-old cabin boy. The boy's name: Richard Parker.
The extraordinary parallel went unnoticed for nearly a century, until a widely-circulated letter from a descendant of the real Parker outlined the similarities between the novel's scene and the actual event. The letter was selected for publication in The Sunday Times after journalist Arthur Koestler put out a call for tales of “striking coincidence." Striking indeed.
Image from the collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus/Wikimedia Commons/Wikimedia Commons.
Exhibit B: "The Businessman"
In 1848, a railroad worker named Phineas Gage suffered a traumatic brain injury after taking an iron spike through the skull. Somehow he survived, though his personality would change drastically. These behavioral changes were closely studied, allowing the medical community to develop the first understanding of the role played by the frontal lobe on social cognition.
Except for Poe, who'd inexplicably understood the profound personality changes caused by frontal lobe syndrome nearly a decade earlier. In 1840, he penned a characteristically gruesome story called “The Businessman" about an unnamed narrator who suffers a traumatic head injury as a young boy, leading to a life of obsessive regularity and violent, sociopathic outbursts.
Poe's grasp of frontal lobe syndrome is so precise that neurologist Eric Altshuler wrote, “There's a dozen symptoms and he knows every single one… There's everything in that story, we've hardly learned anything more." Altshuler, who, to reiterate, is a medically-licensed neurologist and not at all a crackpot, went on to say, “It's so exact that it's just weird, it's like he had a time machine."
Photo via NASA/Wikimedia Commons.
Exhibit C: "Eureka"
Still unconvinced? What if I told you that Poe predicted the origins of the universe 80 years before modern science would begin to formulate the Big Bang theory? Surely, an amateur stargazer with no formal training in cosmology could not accurately describe the machinery of the universe, rejecting widely-held inaccuracies while solving a theoretical paradox that had bewildered astronomers since Kepler. Except that's exactly what happened.
The prophetic vision came in the form of "Eureka," a 150-page prose poem critically panned for its complexity and regarded by many as the work of a madman. Written in the final year of Poe's life, "Eureka" describes an expanding universe that began in “one instantaneous flash" derived from a single “primordial particle."
Poe goes on to put forth the first legitimate solution to Olbers' paradox — the question of why, given the vast number of stars in the universe, the night sky is dark — by explaining that light from the expanding universe had not yet reached our solar system. When Edward Robert Harrison published "Darkness at Night" in 1987, he credited "Eureka" as having anticipated his findings.
In an interview with Nautilus, Italian astronomer Alberto Cappi speaks of Poe's prescience, admitting, “It's surprising that Poe arrived at his dynamically evolving universe because there was no observational or theoretical evidence suggesting such a possibility. No astronomer in Poe's day could imagine a non-static universe."
Photo from Dodd, Mead and Company/Wikimedia Commons.
But what if Poe wasn't of a day at all, but of all the days?
What if his written prophecies — on the cannibalistic demise of Richard Parker, the symptoms of frontal lobe syndrome, and the Big Bang theory — were merely reportage from his journey through the extratemporal continuum?
Surely I sound like a tinfoil-capped loon, but maybe, maybe, there are many more prophecies scattered throughout the author's work, a possibility made all the more likely by the fact that, as The New York Times notes, “Poe was so undervalued for so long, there is not a lot of Poe-related material around."
I'll leave you with this quote, taken from a letter that Poe wrote to James Russell Lowell in 1844, in which he apologizes for his absence and slothfulness:
"I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass… You speak of “an estimate of my life" — and, from what I have already said, you will see that I have none to give. I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things, to give any continuous effort to anything — to be consistent in anything. My life has been whim — impulse — passion — a longing for solitude — a scorn of all things present, in an earnest desire for the future."
This story was originally published on HistoryBuff and first appeared on 8.16.16
Her crowdfunding alternative is so obvious, it's shocking America hasn't taken advantage of it.
Photo via iStock.
Freddie was doing tricks down the stairs of his front porch when he fell off his bike — and his bike fell on him.
"[He was] just crying, wouldn't let us touch his leg, couldn't put any weight on his leg. We knew," mom Ashley says.
Ashley rushed Freddie to the emergency room, where an X-ray confirmed the bones in his left shin were broken in half. He needed to be sedated, his bones set and put in a cast. It was an agonizing day for the Teers. But it's what happened next that was truly inspiring.
There was the Kentucky mom with stage 4 cancer whose family collected over $1 million. The New Orleans police officer whose unit banked thousands for her chemotherapy. The Colorado man who lost his legs and whose friends crowdfunded his recovery.
Photo byMonam/Pixabay
No one from their town took up a collection or held a bake sale.
No GoFundMe page was started to help cover his bills.
"You just leave," Ashley says. "You don't pay anything."
Incredible.
Under Canada's health care system, people like the Teers can see their doctors and go to the hospital when they're hurt or sick, and they don't get charged.
So heartwarming.
Ashley was born and raised in St. Louis in the U.S. where health care is expensive and complicated. Twelve years ago, she fell in love with a Canadian man and moved with him to Abbotsford, British Columbia, where they and their five children will enjoy heavily subsidized, affordable health care coverage at a low premium for the remainder of their natural lives.
"We're able to go when we need help and we get help," Ashley says.
Just amazing.
Instead, Ashley and her family were "supported through meals and just that kind of care" — meals they were able to enjoy without having to decide between enduring the shame of hitting up their friends for money or facing the prospect of sliding into bankruptcy.
Freddie (right) and his brother Ollie. Photo by Ashley Teer.
The most uplifting part? Middle-income Canadians like the Teers pay taxes at roughly the same rates as Americans and still get their bones fixed for free at hospitals.
The first night, Freddie tossed and turned in severe pain, unable to sleep. Ashley, however, was able to call her family doctor — who she never has to pay since he is compensated by a public system that continues to have overwhelming public support to this day — to get her son a codeine prescription. Miraculous!
Canada's public health care plan doesn't cover drugs. But, inspiringly, because of price controls, medicine is way cheaper there.
"We were kind of just asking people to pray," she explains — primarily to lift her son's spirits, and not, thankfully, to ask God to provide sufficient funds to cover basic medical care that every human living in a fair and prosperous society should have access to.
Even though he wasn't able to move around, friends and relatives eagerly invited Freddie to hang out during his recovery instead avoiding him out of guilt for not pledging enough to his GoFundMe campaign.
Just. Wow.
Healthy once more, Freddie went right back to enjoying extreme sports like BMX biking, skateboarding, and snowboarding, and Ashley is free to let him enjoy them without worrying about one fall wiping out their entire life savings and leaving her family destitute.
"Where we live, we're not stressful when things happen to our kids," Ashley says. "It's not a stressful time financially, so the whole family is not anxious."
It's peace of mind that she — and the residents of virtually every other rational, wealthy, industrialized country in the world — share.
"I feel safe, and I feel like my voice is heard," she says. "I can't imagine living in a place that I didn't feel that way."
Inspiring.
This article originally appeared on 03.27.17