I feel okay and maybe I am just a slug

Today has actually gone pretty well. No bone pain - still low energy. I mainly stayed in bed reading, and listening to NPR and CSPAN2 - a little sad when I decided it was okay to listen to the sunday morning shows on the radio rather than watching it on TV - somehow the 20 feet to the living room was too far. Now listening to a show about the White House - they just announced CSPAN is financed through payments from the cable companies? Who knew? So maybe the day wasn't a total bust - I got to learn some random information and to hear who did what in which rooms in the White House.

Anyway - my plan is to head into work tomorrow - but we'll see how that goes. The other thing I think about a lot is how, well I seem to be handling the treatment and wonder how much of it has to do with access to the drugs and what it means for people with less good health insurance. Partly this is due to living in Washington which has the highest mortality rate of the country. This is largely due to lateness in diagnosis and the socioeconomic characteristics of the city. That is much of the overall mortality rate is due to the black/white distribution in the city. The people who are dying don't really look like me and in part it is the tale of two DC's.

Looking up the statistics from the Kaiser site - (http://www.statehealthfacts.org/) the overall US mortality rate is 24 per 100,000 women in the country and that is up to 27.7 in DC - but for white woment the rate is 20.7 compared to the US average of 23.8 and DC is ranked 47th from the highest mortality. For black women the comparison is 32.8 for the US as a whole and 31.5 in DC, or 18th highest. So the break downs don't look as bad for DC. The numbers are worse for each racial group in states that are more rural and I'm guessing there is less health care available especially for the uninsured. When I think about this - it seems critical to fix health care access, but maybe more importantly it illustrates the need for knowledge and to try and get people to seek advice sooner. So maybe I can't be too hostile to the whole pink ribbon thing if it helps give people the courage to see their doctors.