I spent a good part of my childhood in a cozy little housing development in a college town. I guess it doesn’t quite qualify as a planned community, but it had a lot of the benefits of one. We had plenty of parks and green spaces nearby. In fact, I spent every day in summer down in the ravine, cooling my feet in the creek and drinking in the sunshine. We’d leave after breakfast with a thermos of KoolAid and a couple of sandwiches in a backpack, and some days we wouldn’t come home until it was near dark.

Our school was so close that you could see the baseball diamond and the soccer field from my bedroom window. Right before school was a little mini-mall. The doctor’s office was there, and the Becker’s. We were proud when Mom started to let us take the milk jugs back to the store, and maybe pick up a loaf of bread for her. Mostly, we just went so we could get a popsicle from the change. When we started getting an allowance we would buy those packs of bubble gum that had the trading cards in them. I had a whole collection of Happy Days and Charlie’s Angels cards….

Our Brownie Pack met at the school, as did our church. The congregation was raising funds to buy a property and pay for the building of the church. We used the school gym to hold services in the meantime. Classrooms & the library were used for Sunday school, and the kindergarten room doubled as a nursery each week. My Mom volunteered in the nursery regularly, and since we were so close to the school I believe she had nursery at our house one summer when the church hosted a vacation Bible school.

We look back fondly on those years. My parents always say it was a good place to raise a family. There were so many activities for kids, so many places to visit and things to do. We had recreational weekend classes at the local high school, the parks department ran drop-in summer day camps. The library came around weekly with a bookmobile. There were beautiful forested areas to visit, and a river running through the middle of town. We didn’t lack for movies or museums, either. There were several historic sites to tour, and a pioneer village as well. And I can still remember going to the drive-in with Mom & Dad, dressed in my pyjamas and tucked in the back seat with a blanket and my little sister, when we got too tired to stay up for the second feature.

Every now and again I think about going back, bringing my family to live in the place that was home for me as a child.

And sometimes I think about a planned community too. We’ve been hearing about these places quite a bit over the past few years. They’re towns or cities that have been carefully planned so that homes and services are placed exactly where they best fit. Unlike other towns that have grown up over time, a planned city is conceived first and built around the plan. Sometimes we associate planned communities with retirees, as a sort of retirement village where active seniors can enjoy recreation, beautiful scenery and pleasant weather.

Did you know that planned communities have been around since the 1800’s, though? They’ve been called “planned cities” and “new towns,” and some that followed the town-country design are also known as “garden cities.” Many of Canada’s western towns were planned communities. Under the leadership of Sir John A. Macdonald, the Canadian government gave every second square mile of land along the proposed route to the CPR, who chose its preferred sites for stations and planned the layouts of a good many western Canadian towns in the process.

Medicine Hat and Moose Jaw were two of the towns planned by the CPR in the west of Canada. Some towns, located on land not owned by the railway, were actually re-located. That is, the people of the town moved onto land selected by the CPR and the town they settled in was built to the company’s specifications. Later towns, like Corner Brook and Grand Falls in Newfoundland, Témiscaming and Fermont in Quebec, were also company towns.

Planned communities weren’t just about the needs of a company to do business, however. Sometimes they were developed by utopian societies. Some planned communities in France go back to the 12th - 14th century. The bastides as they were called, were intended to replace towns destroyed by the Hundred Years War. They were also a force of social change, for the farmers who moved to these new cities went from being vassals of a feudal lord to being free men. They were encouraged to work the land around the bastides because it attracted trade, but instead of being taxed on their production they paid their taxes on trade.

The city of Beijing, founded in the 1st millennium BCE, is another example of a planned community. Like other Chinese cities it is planned along the principles of Feng Shui, which use a rectangular grid and a rectilinear road grid, and emphasize balance above all else. The man who runs our local dépanneur is Chinese, and he often comments on how the homes here seem to be built helter skelter, while in the city where he grew up everything is planned. People don’t suffer in their homes in the heat of summer where he comes from, because the houses are built so a breeze blows through them and helps to cool the building.

So planned communities aren’t a new innovation, but they are still attracting people all over the world. Eagle Mountain Reserve boasts beautiful Texas lake real estate for seasonal vacationers, permanent residents and retirees. A wonderful example of a planned community, it offers gorgeous lakefront scenery, recreation and nearby cultural attractions. There are hydroelectric plants on the lakes, providing a clean power source. And for those who appreciate wine, there are a number of vineyards nearby too.

The master plan gives an idea of how a planned community might be laid out. Like many planned communities it is not so far from the city as to be out of reach - it’s just remote enough to be a peaceful refuge from the workaday world. Only 70 miles outside of Austin, the community is close enough to the “big city” to allow for day trips or overnights.

Planned communities can be found as well in Europe, South America, the United States and Pakistan, among other places. A study of some of these towns could be an introduction to the subject of urban planning (as well as a bit of a trip down memory lane for me!) Besides being interesting from a more or less geographical point of view, they have often been places for visionaries or sites for social change.

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Well, the mystery of my “foot binding” visitor(s) remains. I have no idea why I consistently have a half dozen visitors or more landing on my blog using that search. I’d love to hear from the folks who are here looking for foot binding information. Has there all of a sudden been a boom? Is this some sort of weird fetish? Or perhaps there’s some new grassroots movement I’m not aware of? Or maybe….. You wouldn’t be repeating this search multiple times daily just to drive me crazy wanting to know what it’s about - would you?

On a more frustrating note, a splog that goes by the name linkezotera is sampling literally every post I write. They do link back, which almost makes it right. But it’s terribly annoying to see whatever generic alias they are using at the moment tacked onto to my writing - even if they’re only quoting a sentence. I’m used to splogs in general by now, but you know most of them rip off a couple of entries and then they seem to move on or get closed down. This one is particularly persistent. Maybe they’ll figure out that their links aren’t getting posted because they are flagged as spam, and they’ll give up.

May spammers and sploggers suffer the same fate as those who have released computer viruses on us!

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I don’t know what rock I was under, but I hadn’t heard about Savanna Redding until a few days ago. I think I’ve mentioned recently that I try to look at my blog stats page, and sometimes I’m surprised by the search terms people have used to find my blog. When I saw “13 year old girl” it didn’t really make sense to me why that particular string would bring someone to the Freehold. So, I tried it out. That’s how I found the first blog entry telling how the 13 year old honour student was strip searched because another student had said she was distributing prescription strength ibuprofen at school.Wow! That’s another reason to homeschool! What’s up with that?

Here are some of the things I managed to glean after reading a couple of reports:

1. Apparently it is now fairly routine for schools to have policies forbidding students to carry prescription or over the counter medications at school;
2. School staff - even the nurse - cannot administer medication to students;
3. Whether the medication given to a fellow student is for a headache or for recreational purposes, the school’s policy would have been violated;
4. Whether the medication supplied was prescription strength (400mg) ibuprofen or over the counter pills (200mg, e.g. Advil™) it would have been a breech of the school policy

Well I tell you, had I been a student at Safford I could easily have been in Ms Redding’s shoes! As a teenager I always had a bottle of Midol® or Atasol® in my purse, and I can remember on a few occasions giving pills to another student who was feeling under the weather.

I’m sorry, it’s difficult to write. I’m still shaking my head at the extremes some school administrators think they can get away with. Strip searching a young girl over a pill that was no stronger than a couple of Advil™?

Here’s the thing, students in North America don’t have a choice about being in school. Once they get there, all kinds of rules imposed on them about what they can wear and what they can read, where they have to be and when, even what they can eat for goodness sake!

Schools will tell kids they can’t miss more than so many days in a term. They can fail a student for missing too many days, even if that student has done his assignments and is maintaining excellent marks. Heck, they can cause trouble for the parents if a kid misses too much school.

Schools will also complain if a student makes too many visits to the nurse’s office. The automatic assumption is that either the student is trying to get out of class, or the parents are sending their child to school when they aren’t well. Neither of these is a good thing.

About 50% of students in any given secondary school will be girls, and these girls generally begin to menstruate sometime during their five years as a high school student. It’s common knowledge that menstruation is frequently accompanied by abdominal cramps, headaches and other unpleasantness. This is not a virus that we can prevent by hand washing or a bacterial infection for which there is a vaccine. It’s a recurring condition, and a girl’s first few cycles can be especially painful.

So it’s common for teenage girls to take an over the counter medication - often ibuprofen - during “that time of the month.” Most pain relievers are of the “repeat every the 4-6 hours” type. So a girl takes a dose when she’s getting ready for school in the morning, and she’ll need a second dose by lunch time or mid-afternoon.

But wait! She can’t. She can’t bring a couple of Midol® with her to school in her purse & take them at lunch with her milk. She’s not allowed to carry over the counter drugs in her purse.

Maybe the nurse can help? She could go and ask for some acetaminophen at lunch time. Oops! No, the nurse can’t give her any medication.

So maybe she should just stay home when she has cramps - or go home at lunch time and stay there? The problem is that could be a matter of 3-5 school days every month. No, she’ll fall behind and the school may even fail her or report her for truancy.

North American girls are stuck between a rock and a hard place, aren’t they? This same scenario could play itself out if you had a student who catches several colds in a school year, and wants to take cough medicine at school. Or maybe a student has hay fever, and wants to carry an over the counter allergy medicine in case he needs it.

One wonders too, where the schools draw the line when it comes to their definition of medicine. Is a medicated lip balm considered over the counter medicine? What about sun screen? Or one of these hand creams that claims to be “prescription strength”? How about cough drops? Are those forbidden because they are medicine - or maybe they would be considered candy?

I’m glad to be homeschooling my girls. If they don’t feel well, they can rest. They can take whatever medication we as their parents feel is appropriate, when it’s appropriate. They can wear whatever clothes we feel are appropriate and eat the food we feel is best for them. No one is going to deprive them of medication they need or ask them to tough it out and “come to school” when they are in a great deal of pain.

By the same token, though, we’ve discovered that our girls can manage to do their studies despite being under the weather. Usually they’ll just want to stay in bed and read or listen to audio books. But I’ve had requests to do math in bed. I’ve also seen both of them sleep through the whole morning with a temperature, only to wake up after the fever broke wanting to come sit at the table and take part in a geography lesson. This is not possible in a public school.

They’ve been much healthier this year, too. As have we all. Now that may be due to the flu shots we all got in December, but I suspect it’s also the result of not being exposed to the germs of 300 other kids on a daily basis.

OK, that’s more than one reason to homeschool. It’s a couple. And they’re not even the ones at the top of my list…..

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The latest news from the web site of the Commission Scolaire de Montréal indicates that all but two of the SGIE locations are reopened, and these two are currently under study. With the three last facilities scheduled to reopen on the 25th, it looks as though everything will be reopened by the end of the Easter break. See the sidebar for links to the list of facilities and the school board’s contact information.

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I spent countless hours over the last ten years trying to track down the results of a CAT scan I had done. I changed doctors not long after, and when I tried to have my records transferred I was told there was nothing in my dossier to transfer.

It wouldn’t have been a big deal, except at the time I first tried to get the records I was pregnant and couldn’t safely repeat the test. And every time afterwards that it would have been helpful, I was either pregnant or breastfeeding. So no possibility of doing a new test.

Not long ago I went hunting for it again. A new test was being done, and the hospital needed the earlier results to compare it to. I even contacted the archives of the hospital where the test was done, and they claim not to have a dossier for me at all.

How frustrating!

We’ve debated the question of computerized medical records for some time, in my household. It feels a little like Big Brother is taking over when you think that your most intimate details are going to be entrusted to a computer - but then again, we’ve heard all sorts of horror stories about cleaning staff in hospitals sneaking a peak at patient charts. And aren’t there staff in danger of being fired because they snooped into Britney Spears’ chart when they had no business reading it?

Maybe we’d be safer with computerized charts? It would reduce a lot of things we don’t like about doctor and hospital visits: waiting for requisitions and paperwork to be completed, shuffling around to find a patient’s file, the doctor getting the wrong file or missing an important paper from the file…..

A couple years ago my son’s disability paperwork for the government went missing mysteriously. I kept getting notices from the government to say that his dossier was incomplete, but I knew all the papers had been sent to all the right people. I talked to the hospital twice to see if they had sent on the doctor’s section of the claim. Both times I was told in no uncertain terms that the doctor had signed the forms, and she had sent them on weeks before.

I insisted a little harder the second time, and the resident I was talking to went to check for me. First, my son’s file was actually missing. It wasn’t filed, and it wasn’t on the doctor’s desk. I still don’t know where it was located, but the resident finally found it. And when she checked inside, she discovered that the doctor’s forms had been signed and completed but some other papers had been added on top of them. As a result the secretary didn’t see them, and they never got mailed. A month after the date the doctor filled them out, they were finally recovered and taken to the secretary for posting.

I’m thinking, with a computerized chart that sort of thing just couldn’t happen. No, I’m not naive. I know computers can go wonky, data can be lost too. But software that allows doctors to keep an electronic chart is obviously going to have a backup cycle, and this protects charts from any number of things including fires and natural disasters - especially if there is off-site storage for the backup.

Ever been the victim of a medical mistake? There was a story just today about women whose tests had been botched. Some who were the victims of false positives had been subjected, among other things, to unnecessary mastectomies. Some, who I’m going to assume had false negatives, have died and won’t be able to benefit from the review of all the affected dossiers.

I think my worst medical mistake (at least I hope!) was when the OB’s nurse miscounted the weeks of my pregnancy, and the doctor ended up revising my due date because of her mistake. My daughter was born almost two weeks late, which the delivering doctor at the hospital attested to. My OB insisted she was a tad early, despite my asking him to recount & reminding him that the ultrasound had put the due date earlier as well. This is the type of mistake an electronic health chart would minimize.

VirMedice produces what is called practice management software. I’d love to see such a software adopted by doctors, much as all our pharmacists in Quebec now have a program that allows them to keep medication records electronically. All the directions and warnings that we need are quickly made available when the receipts and bottle labels are printed. Imagine having a similar print-out at the doctor’s office, to remind of upcoming appointments or to explain a condition or procedure and help the patient to review the options outlined by the doctor. Or perhaps reminders for the doctor or the hospital nurse, on their computer! Having worked in a hospital myself, I know sometimes things get hectic and it’s easy to forget that a patient has a medication at an unusual time, or that someone has requested assistance for a bath or transfer to bed at a specified hour. Notepads are great for such things - but unfortunately they don’t jump out of our pockets to remind us that now is the time to read them!

I’m sure there are a good many more reasons for us to be looking into electronic health records, and not just those of us who work in health care. As patients, this is a decision that we should have some say in as well. It wouldn’t hurt us to look into the possibilities, so we can offer an informed opinion when the question comes up. Computers are already very much a part of health care in so many other areas. Surely our records will become electronic sooner or later, so we might as well learn a little something about the different options and help guide the decisions of our doctors and hospitals if we can.

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