Boogers

As I guess I've already mentioned, I have a new job teaching elementary school science (a job of such specificity that I didn't know it existed before I interviewed for it). It's a big change moving from middle to elementary school, but the biggest issue is a surprising one:

Nose picking.

Seriously. I cannot even handle it. The little kids hardly know better, of course, but still, it's ongoing and it's making me think a lot about the public health badge.

Also prompting some public health thoughts was my trip this weekend to the Chinatown flu clinic's swine flu vaccination event. Despite a long, long line, things were remarkably well-organized. We arrived by ten, signed in, and received a noon appointment, though we waited and got seen by 11. There were color-coded lines, tidily organized time charts, and I was, in general, totally, totally impressed by the efficiency of the whole shebang. (Heck, the clinic even had escorts to bring small groups of vaccinatees up the elevators.)

Incidentally, the vaccine I got was the nasal spray version, which had a back-of-throat numbing effect and a weirdly dental hygiene taste, but was so much better than the shot. Oh man. I want all my shots to be administered via nose from now on.

This was not my first use of one of the city's free clinics, either. This summer, when I was between insurances, I went to the Bed-Stuy Lung Center for a TB test. Once again, a long wait time, but this time it wasn't evened out by excellent service -- though, of course, given the cost of the appointment, I hardly have grounds for complaint. Really, though, I waited there for nearly three hours for a five-minute blood test. Since summer, for a teacher, isn't exactly the busy season, this wasn't a big deal. There aren't many free lung clinics in the city, and they're pretty high on demand and low on funds. If that means they can only employ so many doctors, can only have so much in the way of office staff, so be it. That's far from the fault of the fine people there. But let me tell you, using the free clinic there kind of sucked.

Please, please, please don't you dare take this as a statement that publicly funded health care is a bad thing. Not hardly Underfunded and overused health care is a less than ideal thing. The situation of uninsured folks who have to wait all day for a single appointment is a bad thing. I have the utmost gratitude to the city's health system. (Hey, free swine flu vaccine! Free TB test!) But there's such a gap between the health care haves and the health care haven'ts, and sitting in the Bed-Stuy clinic with lots and lots of poor kids . . . . There are few words.

There's more here to consider, and more I'd love to go into. But now may not be the time. Not in a blog post entitled "boogers."