About elbie

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  Can someone recommend a good gynecologist?

  0 0 I LOVVVVE Dr Anna Daniel at Seattle OBGYN http://www.seaobgyn.com/daniel.html Everything I (a neuro nerd) want in a doc: exceptional expertise, amazing bedside manner, GENTLE (for this field in particular!), and funny... she has it all. I have a hunch if she isn't available, the others there would be a-ok. That said, before finding them, I went to Seattle Women's Clinic right down the road (1229 Madison) and while for regular stuff they were totally fine, when problems eventually arose, they showed their squeamishmess in dealing with anything but traditional birth control-pregnancy-healthy babies, so I swapped out, despite ALL my records/my PCP who is the best.doc.ever being in their practice (that would be Dr. Hodges at Minor and James; Swedish is definitely the largest/most accessible system in town, though I'd argue Virginia Mason by far has the best HOSPITAL for overnight stays, in part because they can actually cater to dietary needs without starving folks on jell-o and decaf folgers!)... Good thing about OBGYNs=until you get pregnant, they're a bit like psychiatry--they handle that stuff and unless you have VERY special circumstances (in which case the specialisty handling your condition--neurology, rheumatology, etc--would be most critical), they do their thing while others do their own. It's like a separate little part of our worlds except for systemic issues or pregnancy risks. I feel TOTALLY okay with her managing my "doctors are the worst patients because they want to control everrything" care and truly being half of every decision in this regard, and if I were able to be pregnant (got that nipped in the bud but still use barrier protection of course for STDs!), I would cry if she went out of town and couldn't deliver because I would fret about the one who was in part helping raise my fetal wunderkin being absent for the birthday party. Hope that helps. There probably *are* great gyn's at M&J, and if you want a quicker appt, I'd seriously say make whatever's FASTER for the meds and see Dr Daniel whenever she can get you! THAT SAID, ANY primary can do that here--they can give narcs, birth control, even advanced biologics while you're in transition--that's why I heart Hodges, too. He is a god amongst wannabes, and remember, I'm that "worst patient for bad doctors, best patient for rockstars" and he likes me just fine, cause he kicks bootayyyy and has SUPERB humor! M+J have 2 total rock stars, him and Davies, should you ever need an endo. I admittedly don't know too many too well and have a policy "don't go to a colleague for care" as that=awkward!! Welcome to Seatown :) elbie answered in Doctors & Providers 11 months ago Answer, comment & read 2 more answers »

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  Folding bicycle?

  1 0 Dahons are wonderful... be sure, as they are smaller, that it is comfortable to ride. For some, they are simply too small. Very long legs are tricky. While you "can" take them on a plane, both the case for them and the cost for their oversized, overweight cargo space would really make it a waste unless you love it enough to literally spend a couple hundred MORE bringing it back (domestic flights=an extra $85 for my roommie's Dahon each way then you have to get its case, which is a lot like a musical instrument type--rugged textured heavy plastic with metal closures)! For trains, though, they are fantastic. Same with OFFICE jobs--they just tuck under a normal (US normal at least) size desk and are out of sight for the most part. Here, they get a lot of positive attention; there it may be far more everyday with the density of the urban dwellings. Taking them into work with you also means they are far less likely to get stolen--some people steal bike seats, some cut the whole thing loose. With folding ones, that's not so easy to manage. The market would be the only place you'd probably have to lock it down outside and take your seat inside with you (and at least in Hsinchu, it's still common to steal bikes or even just the seats--no idea why unless they rebuild and resell from stolen parts--just the seat here, just the seatless bike elsewhere? Maybe where you shop they're okay with bringing the bike inside; have a pack for the seat or leave it at home to hit the market in case). I can't say much for other brands, but Dahon would likely be there--you may need to search to find out how to acquire it or the equivalent there (it may be sold under another name in parts of Asia). elbie answered in Bicycles 11 months ago Answer, comment & read 4 more answers »

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  where is there good ceviche?

  0 0 Damn you, work schedule--someone beat me to it. That stuff seriously had me happy at happy hour, which face it is where food goes to die a tiny-portioned death most spots around town... Seeing this post has me totally craving it now. Will add this, though: you will have a RIDICULOUS selection of tequilas should you TRULY want the Mexican experience! The little fritters they were served on (mind you it has been a long time) were omg-yum. elbie answered in Eating Out 11 months ago Answer, comment & read 7 more answers »

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  Chicken Autopsy?

  0 1 OBVIOUSLY we have a coop intruder in Seward Park. He's climbin in yo' hen house, snatchin' yo' chickies up, tryin' to shake n bake em... so yall need to hide ya hens, hide ya eggs, and hide ya bird house cause they're pluckin' e'ry clucker out here. (BTW, I just started reading Alice Walker's The Chicken Chronicles at lunch today--only on p33 but already highly recommend it; super easy to read and you'll certainly be able to relate and appreciate now that you're a "mama"bird too!) elbie answered in Chickens & Animals 11 months ago Answer, comment & read 3 more answers »

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  What can you do if your loved one is a high-functioning but terribly severe addict but refuses treatment?

  1 0 What Basil said is right, but before you walk out the door, get info on the Schick Shadel clinic and have a calm last talk and say you'll be here when he comes back, but you miss your clean, drug-free friend, and if this is really "my" problem and not yours, then I'm getting rid of this problem... find your words, the ones that match what you'd say to the straight him before he started all this. Get the resources and arm him with the options... if that one isn't an option--if no one can or will help in case it's too costly, have other options. Be sure to check sliding scales for everywhere, though, along with figuring out through a bit of snoopery what sort of general help his insurance, if he has any, could provide. The 2 differences at SS is they use pretty hardcore aversion therapy alongside intensive treatment, a bit of a "Gestalt" idea where they treat the whole person because the drugs are just a symptom of something WAY bigger than drugs... the other difference from the rest is that they have a huge success rate though only half on the first round[the first "failed" coming clean at least gives perspective... it's a process, a long one for some, and they don't give up and they are tough and do NOT give in and let the junkies use the same bullshit answers they give everyone else... why? because they were there--most of their counselors cleaned up there and found their calling, went back to school, and get others out of their personal hells, make them face why they do it, and give them hope, all while not backing down or taking excuses. NOTHING is bad enough to abuse drugs or ourselves, and the only ones who can really truly make that clear are people who've been on the other side.] Make peace with yourself and realize that wiping your hands clean of the beast, of his disregard for everyone else, is only refusing to give in to his problem and forcing him to either go without the drugs or go without you. In all reality, going without you is the most efficient means to getting him to go without the drugs. When people push away help, genuine help, he's pushing YOU away, not the other way around. He can whine that you aren't accepting him for who he is or whatever, and in a way, that is true. I don't accept people who hit their kids. I don't accept people who bully classmates. I don't accept people who manipulate others with selfish intent and become clingy dependent slobs in the process. I don't accept people who don't love back the people they spend time with and who love them. As long as the drug comes before you/family, it's him that did the rejecting a long time ago. If you're not worth giving up some syrup or pills or any other form of substance, there's not much substance to his love for you, not in this form. You have to take care of you to take care of him. It sucks, and a lot of us--me included--have had to walk away after playing rescue with people who aren't ready to face their issues. Yeah, people will worry he could die etc, but that's not a worry to honor--we'll all die, but whether you're dying doing something that you can actually help the world by doing or killing hours chasing someone who is shoving you away whenever you're inconvenient, that's not worth your time, stress, or compassion. That's why you give the open invitation to help him once he checks himself in, to fight with him but not against him, which is how it is now--you're just fighting and he won't make peace the only way (and you won't go sniffing, chugging, etc with him either). Even the drugs will lose their sweet escape eventually. Isolation, solitude, and fear are all extremely powerful, more powerful than your presence can be since that truly DOES enable. The only friends I've been able to help get off drugs are the ones I said "them or me" and meant it... some who knew I would bolt instantly got help; others had to see me take a hike and not come back. Just don't do it in anger or spite. Do it in compassionate care. You miss your friend. You hate these drugs for stealing him and making him a total jackass. You can't be around those drugs because to you, they've as good as killed someone you love. It is never easy. I hope he wakes up and it really does matter. If it doesn't, then he doesn't WANT you around now, not yet. You just have to wait and let HIM take the helping hand. Stop forcing it in fights--you can't win against drugs unless he fights against them, too--him plus drugs are bigger than any army until you stop being on the other side of the enemy line. elbie answered in Mental Health/Addiction 11 months ago Answer, comment & read 6 more answers »

• Comment on elbie's answer…

  0 0 whoops, lee endo=(206) 453-3496 slip of the hand :) elbie commented 11 months ago

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  Dentist for uninsured folks?

  1 0 While Neighborcare is alright for an emergency temp filling, one thing to note is that if it is one of your back teeth having an ache, they'll use amalgam... and they don't do root canals, should that be needed, on molars, only on "easy to access" front ones. If it's a filling you need, not a root canal, regardless of tooth, I've had INCREDIBLE work done, all composite fillings, at Community Health Snohomish--it's a bit of a journey, but it's SO worth it. I've been to the one at 21st and Yesler, and the wait was 7 hours of me in agony--eating a 21 Rabbits bar cracked a molar from a rather massive hard as a rock seed (maybe a rock)-- after showing up before they even opened the doors. For the emergency thing, Neighborcare might fill it on the spot (if it's needing a filling, that is), but it'll be silver if it's not a front tooth. UW has a bit of a wait, and they don't do "complicated" services, so it's a little iffy if you're looking at root canals. Lee Endodontics (this is for root canal stuff on back teeth since the community clinics don't do anything tricky), btw, has a low fee schedule regardless of the person--designed for the mass of uninsured folks in the dental department... their root canals on the far back teeth--the most expensive--are $1065 or were at the end of last year, at least. That is obviously a better deal than the $2500 most spots. If it's a front tooth, most spots can handle them. Lee is up in Shoreline... 13344 1st Ave NE #202, Seattle - (206) 453-349 Community Health of Snohomish is in Lynnwood: 4111 194th St SW # 101, Lynnwood, WA (425) 835-5204 Having been to both Neighborcare and Comm.Health Snoho, I would never go back to the Georgetown clinic. The dentist didn't even pay attention to the huge print for both a latex AND nickel allergy--I could've wound up in the ER because he was a-ok with proceeding and only after my mouth was full and numb and he was about to start did I ask--wary--if he did composites, which they don't (no clue why unless it's just harder to handle--I HAD insurance then, too! I just needed emergency care and wasn't established with any regular provider yet so I had to hit a community center)... Oh, and the other warning: if you need a root canal and can't pay, the option is unpleasant (extraction ie yank it out!) Hopefully, even if you have to give up some luxury for a while as I did/do, you can figure out what to skimp on, whether it's a gym membership, beer, cable TV, or artisan bread and cheese (I finally saved up the $1k for the root canal, so I can only say Dr Lee is affordable and Dr Liu recommended him--no review one way or the other--but I'm certainly glad I got the cash figured out since the temporary filling is breaking down bit by bit!) elbie answered in Doctors & Providers 11 months ago Answer, comment & read 2 more answers »

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  Does Gelato really have half the fat?

  0 0 I'm just adding this as a side note, since Colin's answer was pretty thorough: If you're trying to prevent yourself from GETTING fat, ice cream is a better option for two reasons: Bite for (Full Tilt Quality) bite, ice cream is more filling: when you take out the delicious fat, you have more sugar per bite bound to not much but a tiny bit of protein and fat. Sugar is not as satiating, and not just because of the calorie count--calorie for calorie, fat fills you up faster while not making your blood sugar spike the way sugar does. More critically, FAT isn't what makes us fat. SUGAR is. A slab of meat will very efficiently convert to glycogen and store until we need it as glucose. Sugar, though, only has a portion of it stored as glycogen, and the rest the liver processes and stores as fat (fruit juice is even worse than plain table sugar: high fructose contents=high obesity, hence breast fed babies and milk fed being generally alright while soy fed babies--because they have to add corn syrup solids to formula to make it even partly digest--tend to become obese unless they fail to thrive at all). Sugar's real evil in making us fat is in making us insulin resistant (again, fructose is that real culprit). The higher the fructose proportion of a sweetener--agave is actually worse than HFCS!--the more it will make you insulin resistant, first (which is why it takes a long time to detect) in your MUSCLE tissue... then in all the ways that make us DIAGNOSED as being diabetic. When your muscle tissue is insulin resistant, which happens when sugars, fructose in particular, is consumed regularly, you get fatty stores in your arms, thighs, all those places that are extremely hard to work off the extra... and while fructose doesn't make your blood sugar spike (so it's low on a glycemic index but turns out that was faulty science, whoops), it makes you store fat, which in humans is not as delicious as in ice cream. Because the pancreas only responds to the GLUCOSE, we don't recognize that we're developing diabetes when sitting on our tushes drinking juice. The more sugar is BOUND to fiber (whole fruits!) and even to fat, the better the food IS, the slower it is to be converted to fat, the fuller you feel, and the more time you have to run it off before it's a permanent fixture on your rump. My reason for mentioning? Gelato, as much as I love a good scoop of it, is trying to demonize ice cream for the fat in it which is actually far more healthy than the higher sugar content in gelato. No matter what you're eating, half the fat doesn't--as they'd love to infect your brain with the idea of--mean you get to consume it twice as much. Stop hating on fat (especially milkfat, which has been shown to LOWER bad cholesterol pffth on them). Next they'll go telling us our salmon should be replaced with tilapia and our olive oil with broth to boil everything in... Enjoy either one, in moderation, but I'd blow a raspberry at the less fat notion. It's called the "SnackWell Phenomena," (phenomena, theory, etc) where quite reliably you end up eating more, more calories and more sugar in particular, because the sugary, low-fat treats don't fill you up; you get hungry faster. elbie answered in Just Desserts 11 months ago Answer, comment & read 3 more answers »

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  how can doctors endorse marijuana if smoking it i allegedly more harmful than tobacco?

  1 0 "After having been told for years..." Therein lies the problem: You listened to people that had a stake in YOU continuing to smoke. Go back to the foundations of the claim, and Phillip Morris is signing off mega-dollar checks to make sure cigarettes are not, not til the $20M lawsuit that made the HQ a ghost town then turned urban culture hub (with no smoking indoors, even). It's no different from someone in the tourism industry touting why THEIR experience trumps another, except in that the psychology is reversed... "Sure, cigs are harmful, but at least you're not one of those stoners." Mix a little money from that industry with religious puritanical notions that place Catholics right beside the devil for drinking wine at communion and happen to also be the political backing to most politicians in the last hundred years, and you get a lot of misinformation. I'm most certainly against the casual prescribing of -any- drug, but if it took marijuana to get someone on chemo to have an appetite (ironically, they still need zofran, so it's not a perfect solution, just the best we have and one with hundreds of years of use documented) or even, as a friend asked me for real-life-advice on, to be able to stop smoking cigarettes without relapse, to lessen the anxiety associated with withdrawal from all of the 500+ toxic compounds in cigarettes, by all means, for people who have tried and tried again, somehow marijuana helps some totally quit (be aware it's not like I sold it to them or they'd stop smoking it if I said go cold/just use a patch etc; for many, they have to use something to wean off the far more addictive substances and far more toxic and deadly compounds added to cigarettes with the very purpose of making them as addictive as possible--caffeine, cocoa to smooth the bitter flavor, and a lot of 30-letter words that equal an angry heart and angrier liver). They smoke the pot to stay CALM while they get the nicotine out of their system and stop fidgeting etc and from there, if ultimately it is for anxiety or depression, transitioning to "grown up, responsible" therapies and/or medications ie Cymbalta... that's how some are able to quit smoking for good... so my friends at the lung centers aren't quite as wealthy, but they're all the more content to give up those clients and focus on the mass of work/environment caused lung diseases. Cardiologists aren't going anywhere, either, even without the new generation of smokers to stent up, down, left, and right. I've yet to see any case study of a marijuana user needing the extensive vascular repair that smokers all too often require. Sure, extensive or heavy use is a neurological tragedy--it does need extensive safety warnings for the jobs it makes unsuitable as it slows response time (driving, too, should be avoided), and I personally am not a huge fan of it and won't go near that OR cigarette smoke, but if I had to curse my body with the effects of either a decade (or three) of marijuana use or the same time (or even half as much) cigarette use, I'd take the marijuana impact--I might not be as sharp-minded, but with cigarettes, that's a guarantee, too, as is a plethora of diseases and lack of control with mood/behavioral reactions to stress. elbie answered in Whatever 11 months ago Answer, comment & read 4 more answers »

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  Easy Vegan recipes?

  0 0 Don't underestimate MUSHROOMS!! Hard to be a vegan without that amazing food... stick to crimini if you want the best value (they're young portabellas--smaller, cheaper) or when ports or oysters go on sale, etc. you have variety--the flavor palette is quite complex. Mushrooms make great broth bases that are meatier and with the right herbs are a great substitute for beef broth--sage, simply organic being fabulous, goes a lonnng way towards savory, as does tarragon, which I use Whole Paycheck's store brand of since they're as good as penzey's but not as $$$. Go to either Whole Foods, Ballard/Greenwood/Central (town and country) Markets, or PCC and find the DIVINA (sp?) products: the roasted red tomatoes are OMGGGGG amazing and already come with herbs and crushed garlic they have marinated in. Their olive blend that has herbs but NOT wine is also awesome--some green, some paler/purpler black ones in that mix (the french kinds are pretty weird to me)... Nutritional yeast has an interesting ability to substitute here and there for a dry cheese... taste it and see what you think--sprinkle a little on a bite of pasta etc. So yeah, those divina roasted tomatoes, CAPERS (meditteranean organic ones are solid--I use them a LOT), mushrooms... I tend to steer towards those flavor centers when veganizing for friends. Oh, and this is silly seeming, but so simple: Find (they are crazy cheap at Trader Joes) Petite Peas, which are a PNW crop, in frozen 1lb bags... they cook in just 4-5 mins and are really snappy--not mushy, as declared by a pea-disliker in general, sugar snaps aside... (barely boil 1/4c water in a pan, toss them around, cover is the BASIC part)... but here's the thing: They are SO versatile, and one super easy thing? FRESH MINT... grab a big bunch of it, a literal handful if you're crunching it tight... you wad the leaves up tight and coarsely, jaggedly chop them, 1/16-1/8" stripes then toss that in the peas just a minute or two in--I literally dump the peas and cover then chop the mint and toss in, then drain the tiny bit of water and sprinkle sea salt. If I don't mint them up, I use butter if I go somewhat plain, and they also--with loads of red (green if you like, too) peppers and mushrooms, a touch of chili paste or cayenne, onions and a bit of crushed garlic, TINY bit of aged soy (kimlan is my fave brand)... shrooms are superb vegan stir fry is what I'm saying, and all that on top of thick wide rice noodles=vegan drunken noodles. TAMARIND paste will go a long way, too! Don't forget fresh ginger root... That reminds me! I haven't tried the recipe, but you may also find inspiration on a youtube channel that I believe is "VeganBlackMetalChef" who makes vegan phad thai with not much effort and has a second "easy vegan recipes of the ages" video. I do know I wouldn't use garlic powder, but it's funny whether it works or not, you tell me! If he wants to go super eco-sensitive, could always eat the gourmet insects (we always are eating bugs in every grain and veggie anyway :P) assuming those aren't off limits for emotional connections to le grub? ;) elbie answered in Feeding the Family 11 months ago Answer, comment & read 6 more answers »

• See all of my 0 Questions , 16 Answers and 3 Comments