KQED Perspectives

(December 8, 2003) Hear the audio version

My 13-year-old daughter nearly died of malnutrition before she was two. She looked like a starving baby on the Nightly News: bloated tummy, stick legs, blank facial expression. After watching our child waste away even after 54 doctor visits, three hospitalizations and 17 blood tests, we heard from a friend down in Southern California about gluten intolerance. I mentioned it to our doctor-of-the day, and for the first time a physician stepped back and looked at our child instead of her chart. “You know what?” he said. “She does look like a sprue kid.” Bingo! Five days later she was diagnosed with celiac disease, sometimes called celiac sprue. All she needed was a diet free of the gluten in wheat, barley and rye. 

I wish I could say that delayed diagnoses such as my daughter’s went out with the 20th century. Sadly, that’s not so. Most physicians still believe celiac disease is rare, when in fact research confirms an incidence in this country of one out of every 133 people. It is a chronic, genetic autoimmune disease that can show up at any age. Doctors have been taught it’s difficult to diagnose because not all celiacs have obvious gastrointestinal symptoms. Some are just horribly fatigued, or short in stature. But a simple blood test for celiac antibodies is a safe and accurate screening device, and should always be considered for patients with a bloated stomach and signs of malnutrition. Last week I met a newly diagnosed teenage celiac who looked like a concentration camp victim. It had taken her more than six weeks to be referred to a gastroenterologist, who tested her immediately.

Of course there are physicians who diagnose celiac disease even before their patients become seriously ill. But when doctors don’t consider it, then we as patients and parents need to insist on the screening test if we suspect gluten intolerance. Untreated celiac disease not only makes a person feel crummy, it can also lead to diabetes and other autoimmune diseases, as well as cancer. People deserve to know if their food is poisoning them.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

(November 18, 2002) Hear the audio version

This month Stanford and Yale took a bold step forward in the college admissions game by abandoning their Early Decision programs, which require students who apply in November and are accepted in December to attend those universities. Beginning next year, students applying early to Stanford and Yale will still find out in December if they’ve been admitted, but they’ll be allowed to apply to other colleges, and won’t have to decide which school they will attend until May.

Any parent of a college-bound high school senior knows all too well the tremendous pressures these kids are facing. Early Decision offers students who know – or who think they know – precisely which college is right for them the chance to apply early, find out early, and coast the rest of senior year – if they get in. Savvy students and their parents, as well as college counselors at privileged high schools also figured out a few years ago that applying Early Decision gave a student better odds, sometimes much better odds, of admission. So what’s wrong with that? Not everyone has in-the-know parents or counselors, and many, perhaps even most applicants need to compare financial aid offers. The policy is, in a word, unfair.

Early Decision helps colleges increase their yield rates, or percentage of admitted students who enroll. That makes them look better in those all-important rankings. But it also has increased the panic rates among students, some as young as 16 who feel compelled to make decisions they should not be asked to make yet. Junior year is stressful enough without having it be the last year of grades that count for college admissions. Students denied admission in Early Decision are understandably devastated, then must turn around and scurry to meet other application deadlines. And why are elite colleges encouraging senior slump to start before Christmas? Let these kids grow up – learn a little more in school and about themselves and what their goals are for the next four years. They’ll make better choices, and make better college students wherever they decide to go.

So I applaud the decision by Stanford and Yale, and hope other schools soon follow their lead. And this Stanford grad thanks the University of California for never bowing to Early Decision in the first place.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

P.S. Nevertheless, my daughter Jennifer applied Early Decision to New York University last week. She is sure that’s where she wants to go to college, and she, uh, has in-the-know parents. As I said, it’s unfair, but she’d be stupid not to go for it knowing what she knows.

(October 9, 2002) Hear the audio version

This Saturday my daughter will be one of thousands of Bay Area high school seniors sitting down to take a three-hour test that may very well determine where they will go to college. The SAT is alive and well and influential as ever, even after the University of California threatened to drop it. That probably won’t happen, because the College Board, which owns, operates, and promotes the SAT, not wanting to lose the largest single recipient of SAT scores, listened to UC System President Atkinson’s criticisms and will be eliminating analogies and adding a writing sample for students beginning with the high school class of 2006 – plenty of time, the Princeton Review boasts, to develop a test-prep curriculum.

The SAT is like socialism – fine in theory, not so good in practice. I can understand why college admissions officers would like to know how well their applicants perform on a standard test taken by all students. Fair enough. But the reality is that the SAT is not fair, and I’m not just talking about the test questions themselves, which have been criticized as biased. I’m referring to access-access to pricey test-prep classes that teach the “secrets” of the SAT, or to the wide variety of “services” offered by the College Board. Want to see your scores a week early? That’ll be $13 – have a major credit card handy. Need to rush your scores to colleges and scholarship programs in time to meet fall deadlines? That’ll be $20, plus $6.50 for each report. Think the computer made a mistake scoring your test? (You mean that’s a possibility???) Fork over $25 for to have it hand-scored. You can also pay $12 to see a copy of the test you took – helpful before taking another $26 SAT.

But you’d better sign up early, or risk being assigned to a test center 20 or 30 miles from home. While you’re at it, hope you don’t get a proctor like my daughter had last spring, who didn’t explain the instructions and told one girl to take the test while perched on a stool. That is not fair.

I applaud the growing list of colleges and universities that have made the SAT optional. I hope the University of California continues to consider it, or at least give more weight to fairer measures of aptitude and potential.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

(July 17, 2002)

As a parent of a 17-year-old who attends a viciously competitive Peninsula public high school, I know all too well how high the college admissions bar has been raised. The stat’s are scary. Take UCLA, where the average high school GPA for students admitted to this fall’s freshman class was 4.23, when honors and AP classes are graded on a five-point scale. At Berkeley it’s 4.18. Stanford could have filled its freshman class five times over with students who had GPAs of 4.0 and higher. When top-tier schools are this picky, the bubble of applicants gets pushed down and other, formerly less selective colleges become much more difficult to get into as well.

An article in the New York Times more than a year ago noted that some colleges are realizing they’ve inherited a generation of burned-out young people. Still, their admissions offices continue to tell students to take as rigorous a high school curriculum as possible, which means loading up on honors and AP classes. (That is, of course, how students get above a 4.0.) They are also expected to excel outside the classroom – sports, music, community service – which takes time, and get good scores on SATs, which requires preparation. No wonder these teenagers suffer from sleep deprivation, caffeine overload, and stress-related illnesses during the school year.

And are they getting a break this summer? Not likely. Some are off on expensive “save the world” resume-building programs. Others have signed up for almost-as-pricey SAT prep classes. My daughter and many of her friends are taking a required senior course, Economics, in summer school so they’ll have more time to tackle those honors classes and college applications come fall. She is also taking an evening photography class at the community college. The school she’s most interested in specifically recommends enrolling in a college course the summer between junior and senior years. But more than that, this class allows her to pursue her passion for photography. Passion doesn’t show up on those University of California GPA and SAT charts, but for me, it’s what I want most to see in my daughter, and what I hope will survive through this crazy college application year.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

(December 10, 2001)

I’m having a really hard time getting into the Christmas spirit. Usually I haul out the Christmas CDs and decorations the day after Thanksgiving, but this year I just couldn’t. I wasn’t ready. I especially wasn’t ready for Christmas shopping. The ads, the catalogs, the displays in stores I could not avoid were from a different world, a pre-September 11th world. Hadn’t anyone been paying attention? Thousands of people died that day merely because they went to work in a certain building, or boarded a certain airplane, or tried to rescue others. Landmarks collapsed that Tuesday along with the sacrosanct notion that we here in America were safe from foreign attack. As much as I look back on last summer with wistfulness and nostalgia, there’s no going back to that time. I can’t. I won’t. I shouldn’t.

Our lives must change, or we will fail to honor those who died on September 11th. Rampant consumerism isn’t patriotic, it’s irrelevant. What better time than these December holidays to think about what’s really important – life, family, friends, love. Safe journeys. A song. A touch. A new year beginning January 1st, and with it prayers for an end to fear at home and war abroad.

I’m not proposing abandoning gift-giving entirely this year, but I am suggesting we think seriously how to make it appropriate to the world we’re living in today. The immediate impulse of millions after September 11th was to give to those in need, and we all know that giving is good for the giver as well as the receiver. Let’s marry gift-giving to the great American traditions of philanthropy and voluntarism. Yesterday my 16-year-old daughter brought home two cards from the Giving Tree at her high school. She’ll be buying a jacket for a five-year-old and a toy car for a six-year-old – Bay Area children who want and need those items more than I need a new sweater. That’s the spirit.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

(October 9, 2001)

One night soon after my kids went back to school, I peeked into the darkened room of my high school freshman. It was 10:30 p.m. “I can’t go to sleep, Mom,” she said from her bed. “It’s too early.” Her older sister, a junior, was in the kitchen studying for a math test. She knew she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep before 11.

My daughters don’t function on Hawaiian Standard Time in order to be obstinate: research shows that the sleep hormone, melatonin, doesn’t kick in in teenagers’ brains until at least 11 p.m., and won’t shut off till 8 a.m., when their bodies have supposedly had enough rest. By 8:00 in the morning my daughters have been up for an hour and a half, my 16-year-old having driven them both to school for a 7:55 start time. They’re lucky if they get seven hours of sleep, not the nine they need, and sometimes struggle to stay awake in school.

It’s enough to make this Bay Area family want to move to Minneapolis. Yes, Minneapolis, where high schools have been starting at the more reasonable hour of 8:40 for the last four years, resulting in significant improvements in mood and attendance, and a slight upswing in grades. Students get about five more hours of sleep during the week than they used to, and are happier and healthier because of it. Teenagers like it, parents like it, teachers like it.

But the school superintendent in my district told me last year he wouldn’t consider a later start time. Why? Because of athletics. “Some students already have to miss afternoon classes on game days,” he said. But what’s more important, I ask now that the data is in, extra-curricular sports programs, or education? Even coaches in Minneapolis decided that the benefits of well-rested athletes outweighed any scheduling drawbacks.

South Bay congresswoman Zoe Lofgren agrees that teenagers need more sleep for optimum learning. She’s introduced a bill that would make it easier for high schools to start after 9 a.m. – 9 a.m.! – by providing federal grants to cover the costs of changing the hours. Wake up, Bay Area educators: it’s time for teens to sleep.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

(December 14, 2000)

At an art-supply store sale one recent morning, a woman called out, “Hi, Debbie.” I looked at her, smiled, and thought, I know you, but I have absolutely no idea who you are.

“Hello,” I replied.

“How are the girls?” she went on. Uh-oh. She not only knows my name, she knows I have daughters. Is she a mom from one of their schools? I had an image of her at a play-doh table.

“Fine, thanks,” I replied. “Isn’t this a great sale?”

What was I saying? Why didn’t I just ask for her name and how we knew each other? Of course it’s what I should have done right away. But I didn’t, and the more she talked (“I hear your husband is retiring!”), the more embarrassing it became for me to admit I’d forgotten who she was. I moved on to the calligraphy aisle.

I stared at pens and racked my brain: Who is she??? I’ve always been proud of my memory. My high school friends are amazed when I recall their birthdays. But after living in the same town for 26 years and knowing people from work, school, soccer, theater, volunteering, what-have-you, I sometimes feel as if the file folder in my brain for Bay Area names and faces is crammed full and jumbled up. I only make matters worse by adding new people all the time — and by getting older.

We met again in picture frames. “Are you still writing?” she said.

“Oh, yes.” Looking for clues I asked, “And how about your work?”

“Now that Nathaniel is in eighth grade, I have more time for my art.”

Eureka! Well, I didn’t have her name yet, but if she has an eighth grader and I have an eighth grader, then I bet her son and my daughter were in school together. The file folder in my brain may be a mess, but I’ve kept rosters and directories from all my kids’ classes and schools.

When I got home I checked in my file cabinet, and sure enough there she was: Nathaniel and Allison were in a toddler class together in 1989.

Those awkward 15 minutes convinced me always to ask if I don’t remember someone’s name — and to keep saving those rosters. And when I see her at the sale next year I’ll remember to say, “Hi, Karen.”

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

(September 8, 2000)

Back in the summer of ’62, the Giants and Dodgers were battling for first place in the National League. I was a nine-year-old (ahem) Dodger fan visiting my grandparents the weekend of a critical three-game series between the two rivals. “Can I bring my transistor radio to dinner?” I asked on Friday night.

Grandma looked up from a bubbling pan of chicken and dumplings. “Yes, I suppose so.”

An hour later I was licking gravy off my fork and listening to Vin Scully describe the mud between first and second base at Candlestick. “Why would Maury Wills want to steal second?” Grandma asked. “Isn’t that illegal?”

I laughed. “No, but the Giants are trying to make it hard for him to break the stolen base record. That’s why they’ve watered down the field.”

After dinner I answered more of her questions while we watched the game on TV. Grandma was a quick study, and a converted fan by Sunday afternoon. Unlike my mother, who was too busy raising my three brothers and me to follow baseball, Grandma had time, and patience. Baseball gave her something to look forward to each day. She’d also experienced many disappointments in her 66 years, which is why she was the first to console me after the Dodgers lost to the Giants in a tie-breaking playoff series. “Wait till next year, Debbie.” She knew there would be a next year. I wasn’t so sure.

Grandma lived to enjoy 33 more seasons of baseball, and, like me, switched her loyalties to the Giants when we moved to the Bay Area. She was the one to carry a transistor radio with her on summer days.

I have three daughters, but only my youngest likes baseball. I managed to get two tickets to a game at Pac Bell Park for Molly’s tenth birthday in June. She got to run the bases. A few weeks later the phone rang after one of the Giants’ comeback victories. It was my mother. “Did you see J. T. Snow’s home run?” she said. “He’s my favorite player, you know.”

So it seems another generation of females in my family has been pulled in by premium players and pennant possibilities. And Mom didn’t even have to start out by liking the Dodgers.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

Note: I wrote this in August while crossing my fingers that the Giants would still be in the pennant race (they were about three games out of first). The day this Perspective was first broadcast, the team was coasting after a nine-game winning streak and sitting 8 1/2 games on top of the National League West. And on the day of the Sunday rebroadcast, my friend Rick gave me his tickets so my dad and I could enjoy a perfect afternoon of Giants baseball in the Arcade (right field) of Pacific Bell Park. I also saw them win Game 1 of the playoffs, but oh, that was all there was to be, as the Mets won the next three games. As Grandma said, “Wait till next year.” Since then I saw Barry Bonds break the single-season home run record (numbers 71 and 72, September 28, 2001) and hit quite a few other homers, including 660, which tied his godfather, Willie Mays. I’ve also been able to entice Giants right-fielders Reggie Sanders and Jose Cruz J. to throw warm-up balls up to me in the Arcade. And Molly is about as big a fan as I am!

(June 21, 2000)

One Sunday morning in May my husband read an item out loud from the newspaper. “A Palo Alto music teacher was murdered in her home.”

“Who?” I asked. Our nine-year-old looked up from her toast.”Kristine Fitzhugh.”

“Oh, my gosh,” Molly cried. “That’s my music teacher!”

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” I said, holding a sobbing Molly in my arms. Only two days earlier Molly had told us her favorite music teacher had chosen her as one of the soloists for the spring concert. Molly and I recalled meeting Mrs. Fitzhugh at Kinko’s one day last fall, where she and I talked about our children and how important music is in our lives.

And now her life was gone. It’s amazing, but she was the first person in Molly’s tiny universe to die. I shall never forget my first encounter with death. A sixth-grader was run over by the bus in front of our school one Friday morning. I saw the pool of blood. And I didn’t sleep at all that night. But on Monday none of the teachers even talked about Leslie Duff. I couldn’t stop thinking about her and I never got over her death.

I didn’t want Molly to be that traumatized, so I called the school psychologist. She invited me to come to school on Monday. While it was a long and tear-filled day, it was a day that was done right. Molly’s teacher explained to the children what we knew about Mrs. Fitzhugh’s death. She and the psychologist and the principal listened to the students’ questions and concerns. STAR testing was cancelled for the day so the children could write lovely remembrances. Their substitute music teacher led a recorder rehearsal. I read a book aloud to the class. And by the end of the day there was a letter ready to go home explaining the tragedy and how parents could help their children.

Molly and her classmates will never forget their music teacher. Yet I also believe they will remember the adults at their school who cared enough about their emotional well-being to get them through those difficult days after her death. And for that I will always be grateful to the staff at Nixon Elementary School and the Palo Alto Unified School District.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

(May 22, 2000)

Several Sunday nights ago my husband, Bill, developed some worrisome symptoms. I took him to see our doctor at 8:30 Monday morning, and by 2 he was in the hospital, on IV’s and preparing for the first of two blood transfusions. On Tuesday a gastroenterologist told me Bill had a bleeding ulcer — or stomach cancer. The odds were 50/50. Bill came home on Wednesday, and on Thursday afternoon we saw our family doctor. “We don’t know yet if it’s cancer,” he told us. “We may have to wait another week.”

A week??? I couldn’t believe it. Here we are at the beginning of the 21st century. I can send e-mail to the other side of the country and hear back in ten minutes. One-hour photos have been standard for years. So why does it take up to nine days for a pathology report? Nine days that seem like ninety because they are spent in limbo? “It’s a process with results that require careful interpretation,” the doctor explained.

Bill and I tried not to alarm our three children about his health. It was late at night when he was awake figuring out if there would be enough money for me and the girls if he died. So many of their friends’ parents are divorced, and we’ve always assured them Bill and I would never split up. We have control over that. But suddenly I couldn’t be certain I wouldn’t be a single parent after all. I felt like crying every hour at the thought of my daughters becoming young women without their father’s gentle, yet strong male influence. I knew I’d be devastated without him. My daily walks with our dog, instead of being a time of inspiration and rejuvenation, were when I imagined the worst.

And if Bill did have cancer, I wanted to know so we could schedule surgery and any other possible life-saving treatments. But we had to wait. And wait.

The GI doctor called one week after the biopsy. “It’s not cancer,” he said. I cried then, too — tears of joy.

I’ll be listening to NPR even more closely for news that faster tests for cancer have been developed. I just know it can be done. Dante may have described limbo as the place between heaven and hell, but I spent seven days in limbo: It’s hell.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.