Happiness does not come from having or not having. It comes from appreciating what we do have, and we all have some things. A note posted on an email list to which I subscribe:

This is why I love my kid so much! It is things like this that make me realize just what a wonderfully amazing character he is.

I was just looking through his folder and mounds of paperwork and I came across an “I am thankful for” list. You know what topped that list?

1. My health

Can you believe a kid that has gone through so much medically, sometimes on a daily basis and in light of all of the “new” medical issues that have reared their ugly head, he is thankful in spite of all of this.

I love my baby boy.

Proud mama bear,

[name withheld]

Related reading: Stumbling on Happiness

Reported today on MedPage:

“The morbidly obese may be missing out on essential diagnostic imaging.

“Consider that a heart attack patient weighing 350 pounds is too fat to undergo angiography because the standard table cannot support that much weight.

“Consider that 475-pound patients with severe abdominal pain are too big for CT to diagnose the cause, necessitating exploratory surgery as the most likely alternative.”

I have heard of cases of this before, but anecdotally, not formally. People weighed on veterinary equipment, because the hospital’s could not accommodate them. I’m not sure that the humiliation isn’t worse than the treatment limitations. Isn’t that reason enough to justify manufacturing appropriate equipment?

To add to the weight of the argument (sorry), with one in three Americans obese, don’t the statistics demand a wider range of weight specifications for the imaging products, even granting that “obese” does not equal “morbidly obese”?

The Talmud says that shaming a person (literally, causing the blood to drain from his face) publicly is like killing him.

A peek under my doctor’s desk reveals two computers: two power-hungry, heavy metal-bearing, non-intuitive-to-swap-between goliaths. Why? Because the HMOs whose patients he services each demand that he run a dedicated computer with their proprietary (and impossible to use — but don’t get me started) software. Have they never heard of partitioning a hard drive?

We have had more than our fair share of medicines in our home (and with nine people, even our fair share is substantial). In all these years, this is the first time I’ve seen a box include a Braille label.

I know, from my years in publishing, that embossing adds substantially to the cost of printing, so I can understand that adding Braille is not an obvious decision for a manufacturer. Nonetheless, in the quantities that pharmaceutical companies must be printing, the embossing should amortize nicely.

I assume that accessibility laws do not demand Braille labeling of drugs… but it sure seems to me that they should. Kudos to Merck for providing equal-access safety to their product, and here’s hoping it’s the beginning of a long-overdue trend.

Also recommended: Deborah Adler’s ClearRx design, implemented by the far-sighted management of Target.

Everyone talks about Blackberry Thumb. I get Blackberry Shoulder, holding it up so I can write in bed…