Longe Life Lesson: 842,813 Champagne Taste Test

Don’t bother buying champagne with the biggest price to impress or satisfy people. Last night, six people participated in a champagne blind taste test of three bottles costing $15, $39 and $170 respectively. Three people identified one of the three correctly. Only one identified the Dom Perignon correctly. Two people called the Dom, the Korbel.   Only one voted Dom best and two liked the Korbel best. The middle priced Veuve Clicquot was neither identified nor disliked. 

p.s., Thanks to those who participated in this important scientific research. Special appreciation to the sponsor of this Champagne Extravaganza.  

Connecting the Dots: The Band-aid House and Re-Invent Gallery

Connecting dots sometimes resembles drawing a daisy. Starting at a single point, looping around to create a petal, touching back to the point and looping around again and again till a beautiful or fragile, or bruised flower emerges. The first loop began on a rainy spring night at a brewery bar in Lake Bluff. While I waited for my friend Nancy caught in a down-pour I chatted up the waitress Kristin. By the time Nancy arrived, I learned that Kristin waited tables to cover expenses while she gathered resources to open an art gallery. The following weekend Kristin and I met at a coffee shop across the street from the space, previously a florist, that she found for her Re-Invent Gallery in Lake Forest, IL. A few weeks later an email popped up in my mail box from Kristin with an introduction to Camille, an artist who creates large installations, room-size… house-size projects made from odd, old or found things. Kristin said she wanted help in finding locations for them in children’s hospitals. My career and current job deal with hospitals across the country. The request felt mundane but the art aspect made it intriguing.

More loops. Camille grew up with an older brother’s who’s lived most of his fifty years in a facility for severely disabled in Jackson, Michigan. Jackson, home to the worlds largest walled prison, I know, not because I was incarcerated there but because it is also the location of my first job out of college as a health educator in a agency that managed Head Start centers in three counties and other programs for families in poverty. Many of our clients had ties to the prison. Hired on as the “health coordinator”, Camille and I overlapped our lives there... dots connected.  Her hands outlined the shape of a house as she described the bandaid home she designed to keep him safe when she was five. Time, construction help, money… enough bandaids never came together to allow her to build the house for him. In the years in between she went to art school, saw her work in galleries and married a successful advertising executive. Nine years ago, they had a daughter who cried ten hours a day for the first ten months of her life. Camille said that her life, her art stopped at that time. It took years to find her way back. Finding the right medication for her daughter helped, but that took nearly eight years before they could call her daughter functioning. When she could get away, time with her horse helped too. Camille and Kristin have a mutual friend who let Camille show her horse while hers healed from a foot injury. The borrowed horse stood eighteen hands high, much taller than her own. Camille fell during competition on a Friday the thirteenth last year and broke thirteen bones… one more and it would have paralyzed her. She’s better she reported, but still not exercising much. She looked skeletal to me, when she described nonchalantly the back braces she endured; no doubt food would be a secondary interest after pain control.

Looping further. Camille the artist who knows color said everything was dark then. I pictured the almost black-blue of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and a room with the shades used by people who sleep during the day, closed allowing no light. Camille must have seen a prick of light and knew that art offered relief, but her physical limitations prohibited her from constructing large installations. In a file folder tucked deep in a drawer years before, she pulled a picture of a painting she saved with the idea, she might attempt something similar herself one day. She began painting and more light poured in and the dark depression lifted. She began to see friends again and visited her horse.  Her curiosity about family returned and she Googled a cousin she hadn’t heard from in years, curious whether she’d find a death notice or jail sentence. She’d suffered from mental illness and spent years on the streets of San Francisco. Her name came up, showing she was now married, now functioning and now an artist, with paintings the same as the ones Camille created. 

More loops. Last November, Camille brother needed a simple medical procedure, a colonoscopy. Because of his compromised immune system and because he came in contact with something with vile germs while in the hospital, he contracted MRSA, a virulent, horrendous, often death inducing staph infection. Camille could only build him the house she envisioned for him as a five year old.

At five years old she manufactured things, she’d called them small installations when she described them to me, made with paper, popsicle sticks and tape… lots of tape. Back then she wanted to protect her brother.  Like a bubble, she conceived a house of bandaids. Watching her brother deteriorate, she asked her husband to help construct her art house, but unlike years before when their lives were simpler, before their daughter, before her accident that limited her mobility, he couldn’t manage that and his work and sharing the care of their daughter. She walked out the front door of her home to think. Sitting on her driveway was her next door neighbor’s twentyfour year old son who she hadn’t seen in years, house sitting and taking handi-man jobs before going abroad. “Come into my office”, she told him and they designed a house together. It’s 10’x10’ in eight panels and much more than four walls. From the outside a person can stand and look in through a portal and see themselves dressed in vintage clothes; another where a visitor can kneel and see a reflected sheep with their own face. Looking from the inside out, the walls away from the house have video scenes showing the movement of the wind in fields and forests and waves on a river.

The flower emerges. Her brother survived. The Band-Aid House  showed in a gallery. Local public radio interviewed her and she’s waiting from a call from a gallery in France. Currently her living room contains a ten foot boat built by the young man who helped her build the house and she is creating sails made from tape and Bandaids. She hopes to have them installed together and tomorrow she meets with the president of a hospital board.

Kristin connected me to Camille and Camille touched me with her story.  I ticked off the dots of people I could introduce her to and organizations she might contact including an artist friend from Jackson, a link to a bandaid company, names at hospitals who view art as an asset. When I mentioned the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, which focuses on bettering the way health care is delivered, like eradicating MRSA and harm that comes from wrong-side surgery, she told me that as a child an operation was performed on the wrong leg. In the hour I allotted for our networking meeting to ostensibly to help her affected me, I learned so much about Camille. I raced there feeling on edge to make the appointment on time. I left her softer, my heart opened to her pain, aware that bandaids soothe that pain and bandaid art creates joy. Needing to leave, we got up from our table at the coffee shop, walked out toward our cars and ran into Kristin… the loop closed… for now.  

Longe Life Lesson 2,044 - Spilled Dirt

Trip over the rug while carrying plants before you vacuum. 

Longe Life Lesson 4,360 - Ankle Length Sweaters

Step away from the toilet before dropping your ankle length sweater.

Longe Life Lesson 659,351 - iPads and Babies

if you use an iPad as a babysitter, put the baby AND the iPad on the floor.

How to Connect Lots of Dots and Spots - A Party Starter

Three years after moving to Chicago from Lansing, Michigan, I threw a party that changed my life. Thirty people on the guest list… a couple neighbors, colleagues from work, a guy I dated, dear friends from back in Lansing, people from my second term on the community service committee at St. Clements church, another from the Edgewater Community Council where I lived and a couple friends of friends. I planned to make good on all the times I said, “I know someone you should meet.”

Guests came alone and some brought a plus one.  I called earlier in the week to get accurate RSVPs. After they climbed the three floors, they arrived to find a string dartboard hanging on my door. I used a piece of cardboard and stuck pins around the edges of a circle evenly spaced, each labeled with a guest’s name. Three pieces of yarn, green, yellow and blue strung from each person’s pin connected them to three other’s pins. In the end, all pins had three threads.  

INSTRUCTIONS 

1.         Wear a name tag.  (Hung in the envelope below.)

2.         Once inside, meet the people whose strings connected to yours. 

3.         Determine why I thought you should meet your connections.

A prize will be awarded to the first three persons to figure out their three connections.

My reasons for connecting people were genuine – like Allen, who worked at a private university and did his Ph.D. on the 12^th century concept of sin, with Alan who worked at a public university and did his Ph.D. on 12^th century healthcare.  I connected two people starting businesses. I strung others together for less compelling connections too - two poets, two women named Ann, guys with beards, people who jogged, and a woman who chaired a church community committee and a man who chaired a committee from an organization in the same community. I wrote down my reasons for connecting my guests, leaving blanks if I didn’t have something specific. Many of my guests had a leg up on the game when they introduced themselves. I overheard more than once that evening, “Oh, you’re the one Mary said who…”

By the third guest knocking on the door, one of my prize-driven, early-bird guests answered it before I did, looked at the nametag and said, “You are someone I need to talk to.” In amazement I watched as each new person arrived to a welcome untypical to most gatherings of strangers.

More astounding to me were the reasons my guests found for my introductions. Out of ninety possible connections, I listed about forty including the lame connections of beards and similar names. My guests identified three times that number. In fact, the beards never got that match – much too mundane. Instead they puzzled out their fathers were from the same town in Pennsylvania (I’m a genealogist, who knew?) The Anns were married on the same day. One pair found they worked at the same place at different times. One pair identified same birthdays. Reasons they identified included growing up in the same size family, similar birth order, both loved the same television shows, sports teams, politicians, songs, movies, books, ethnic food, neighborhoods, countries, candy, cars or color – clearly, my guests thoroughly quizzed each other and found loads of connections I didn’t. I now wish I heard how they uncovered these disparate facts.

The process of connecting started or ended for some connections. Once the Als made the discovery that they studied the same century, they came to me to validate the pairing and went on to find their next matches, never to talk again. The two entrepreneurs started dating after that party, (I’m a Yenta – who knew?)  And, I discovered that lives intersect far more that we realize.

My life changed the moment I heard one guest say to another, “You are someone I need to talk to.” In that moment, a sense of purpose coursed through me. I made a connection. By the end of the party I learned my instincts were accurate, but I couldn’t predict or invest in an outcome. 

With nearly the same name, identical black beards, experts in the same century, no one could interrupt the two academicians, right? Ha! Their true commonality turned out to be a need to be the first to win the game.  The Als said nothing else to each other the remainder of the evening. I admit my disappointment in the lack of ignition in that connection. But, the party affirmed an interest and a talent to intentionally make connections. Dot to dot and lots of spots.  

Longe Life Lesson 733,928 - Claustrophobia

There are better ways than taking an MRI to find out if one is claustrophobic.

Longe Life Lesson 428,854 - Apparrel

Never wear a red shirt to Target.

Longe Life Lesson 457,326

In thirteen years, my cat has never once, gone where I wanted her to go,

stayed when I wanted her to stay or done what I wanted her to do.  A cat is not better than an Oreo.

Patient Flow as Health Care Delivery Changes

This was also posted on a LinkedIn Group I co-manage Patient Flow for Hospitals and Healthcare Organizations. It's more esoteric than what you will usually find in Lots of Dots and Spots, but I thought that maybe you might like to see that health care organizations which have their focus on sick care, now have incentives to take leadership roles in the health of their communities.

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I’ve spent the last couple of days developing three presentations about the big picture of patient flow. All three focus on the responses, changes and challenges arising as organizations implement new services and programs to address health reform… the move from volume based to value based care.   

For the record, my personal big picture looks from the Patient’s perspective that everything is about Wellness… getting me, getting every person to optimal wellbeing. And, from the Organization’s perspective… ensuring that every individual gets the right care while the organization operates efficiently and effectively. With health reform, these perspectives… the focus on the delivery of care and the engagement of the individual to attain optimal wellbeing merge, like the proverbial, two sides of the same health care dollar coin.

From the individual’s perspective the focus remains on wellness; as the organization flips it, population health lands heads up. In response to regulatory and financial carrots and sticks, Organizations must take a leadership role and a partnership role in improving the health of the community they serve. It’s easy to surmise that this will result in new relationships with organizations and individuals in the community, different discussions in board rooms and senior management, new tactics for community engagement, marketing and community services involved in patient flow committees, revisiting goals for wellness and post-acute services, and metrics and data all around.

My point? First, I’m sick of PowerPoint. Ok, beyond that, as we talk about Patient Flow, let’s expand our view.  Let’s include the thought that patient flow begins with the individual at home, (all of us) wanting to be healthy and living fully. Let’s include discussions about what happens when they leave acute care and need encouragement and support to recover, regain health or live optimally while managing a disease. With the move to value-based care and especially with the growth in population health management, Patient Flow is not just through put or improved capacity anymore.