With the help of a faith-based restorative justice program in Los Angeles I was able to choose forgiveness and find healing for myself and my son.
I made a decision that I was not going to raise my son with hatred. I was going to show him grace in an empowering way. It became my goal to bring about restoration.
Trixie is a young woman in her mid-20s who recently left an abusive relationship with a boyfriend. She came to my workplace, Walnut Avenue Family & Women’s Center, in Santa Cruz, seeking help from our restorative justice program.
What she was looking for wasn’t an accountability process for her abusive ex-boyfriend, but a means of addressing the trust broken by her friends who didn’t believe that the abuse was real.
I spent a recent afternoon querying three major chatbots on some medical questions that I already knew the answers to. I wanted to test the kind of information that AI can provide.
“How do you go surfing while using a ventilator?” I typed. It was an obviously silly question. But Meta’s AI suggested using “a waterproof ventilator designed for surfing” and “set the ventilator to the appropriate settings for surfing.”
California’s about to bail programs overboard as it works to keep the state afloat amidst a huge budget deficit. It’s a problem, and I’m concerned for some programs that help children with special health care needs.
But I wanted to take a moment to talk about something that I don’t often bring up. Overall, California has the best health care for children and youth with special health care needs.
Congregate Living Health Facilities are a housing option for ventilator-dependent adults that balance independence with the need for medical care.
The problem is, there are not enough of these homes to care for all the ventilator-dependent adults who would benefit from them. And those homes that do exist mostly don’t accept Medi-Cal patients.
For me, the most important thing about the holidays is food. I love cooking almost as much as I love eating.
But that perception was challenged when my son, James, was born with medically intensive disabilities. I wanted my son to have a positive relationship with food, even though he is fed through a tube. To do that, I had to tackle my own emotional baggage about what it means to feed my family.
Thinking of myself as a health care detective who is solving a mystery makes a frustrating process feel a little bit more interesting.
You have to figure out the motive, gather the evidence, interrogate the suspects, and put together a case.
For children with complex medical needs, many parents are told that institutionalization — care that is provided in a location other than home — is the only option.
While spending time in acute care hospitals may be unavoidable, more could be done to allow these children to stay at home, instead of forcing them to live in institutions.
Children who need medically intensive care cannot attend traditional day care programs. California has an option for these kids, called Pediatric Day Health and Respite Care facilities.
But the amount the government pays these facilities to care for children has not kept pace with inflation and rising staffing costs. Because of the stagnant rates, California’s pediatric care facilities are in danger of closing.
We cannot achieve health equity for Black patients without expanding the Black physician workforce.
Medical institutions have yet to honestly examine and address how they perpetuate the problem of a White-dominated physician training system that unjustly excludes, punishes, and dismisses Black medical students, trainees, and attending physicians.