preglets to the left of me! preglets to the right of me!

heavens to betsy this cycle is taking a long time, isn't it? for some reason i harbored a secret hope that somehow my body would know that i wasn't trying to make it get/keep a pregnancy this cycle so it could appease me by ovulating a little early. i'm not even peeing on any sticks! how's that for taking a cycle off? well, not so much. i'm on track for a CD19 o date, which will still sort of work with all of the not sonograms i've scheduled which will be right around, but not on, the days that would work well for next cycle in terms of monitoring. cl of course has a conference in texas and then a big old work thing in savannah for the beginning of august, which i think will coincide perfectly with his need to be up here for an iui. don't you?

this week i'm going to see my sister and my friend melissa, both quite knocked up. my sister is in her 16th week (i think?) with twins, and my friend melissa is in her 7th month. now, i spend a good part of every week dopplering pregnant ladies, measuring their funduses, and counseling them to avoid marijuana as it WILL show up in their urine, like it or not. however, it is a little different to be near my sis and a good friend, both of whom are clearly showing. i was also hoping to have a cycle underway already, at this point. oh well. i think all those other preglets might be good de-sensitization training for the preglets i hold near and dear.

and i swear, almost daily i'm like: my life is not so bad after all. what do i want babies for? mel at stirrup-queens wrote a review of a book this week on her blog, the premise of which is that people eventually return to their baseline level of happiness anyway, in most cases. the author of the book further argues that the net effect of children is overall less happiness (tho marginal) and that most people don't have a good idea of what makes them happy anyway. interesting premise, methinks. i read something else where someone wrote that it isn't having children or not having them that makes you happy, it's having what you want (ie--having kids if you want that, not having them if you dont). its interesting to want kids, what with all the work and the money and the no-free-time and to realize that some argue the overall net effect is negative. yet to not have them when you want them is a negative too. definitly a damned if you do, damned if you dont type scenario.

lazy as a two bit snake

i have no idea how much i could get done if the time i spent thinking about work/avoiding work were actually spent DOING work. seriously! i think my avoiding work/doing work ratio is up around 1:1 right now, if not, it's worse. and the internets, bless it's little soul, is not helping. like, at all. why work when i could shop? or read? or blog a little?

as an aside, is cheney the devil? thats a guy who could use a little bit of lazy, since he seems bent on using all his power to do evil.

prognostication=not my forte

so, if i count right and my cycle this month is like the last normal cycle i had...way back in march, so many moons ago, but i digress...then i should be gearing up for an IUI aug 1. or so. i haven't ovulated this month yet, so its more or less like casting runes or interpreting clouds.

i gave mr grumpy--that's cl to me and you--a heads up on the possible date and he proceeded to grump for 1 solid hour about how the timing was sucky. was not in the least comforted by the fact that it probably wasn't the right time anyway. his work is really intense right now and they might not even let him come home for 24 hrs (tho i think, in the end, they will).

but he's not the only person guilty of grumping at clouds. i scheduled my monitoring sono appt today because the military system fills up fast and i have to get my appt in. well, they can't see me until july 30th, whereas i was hoping to get in there fri july 27th. so now i'm all trying to work it to see whether i can get in that day or not, when in truth it only really matter if everything goes exactly as i've calculated it. and when does that happen?

le sigh.
at least i ate alot of soft cheese today and it was *really* good.

nuff said

damn freud

i had the weirdest dream last night right before my alarm woke me up. in the dream, the janitor from scrubs (in uniform mind you) and i were in an office type room, flirting heavily. i think he told me something like he wished he weren't so big, looked more like zach braff's character. then i told him i was attracted to bigger men, and that his physique reminded me of my husband. we were sitting on the floor of the office, and i was leaning into him as i told him this. i was trying to figure out if he was going to kiss me when the alarm woke me up.

AUGH! what is wrong with my brain? seriously though. not normal.

not as simple as all that

today in clinic we had a 4yo little boy who had been through a disaster. from what history i'd gotten, he had meningitis with focal spots and required a below knee amputation on the left, and the surgical excision of focal spots on the right leg. he was at clinic because sometimes the amputated bone can grow from the wrong spot and cause pain and problems with the prosthesis. they had already cut back the bones once, but they were going to have to do it again. understandably, the parents were very upset, and the father was worried about him losing more leg below the knee. he started crying, and then the mother started crying and the 4yo kid was getting upset too.

anyway, all that is a long way of saying that after crying the father apologized for it by saying that it just hurt him to see how much his kid hurt, and asked me if i was a parent. i said i wasn't and he said i'd see; when i was a parent i'd understand what it meant to love someone like that. i demured, which was the only appropriate thing to do at the time, but the question sort of rattled around my head the rest of the day. 'are you a parent?' well, i'm not a parent. but i don't think its such a simple yes/no you-are-or-you-aren't question as all that. i am not a parent, but i would have been had i not miscarried. what about the parents that lose their child to disease or accident or stillbirth? if asked 'are you a parent' in the present tense, the correct answer is probably no. but on the other hand, they WERE a parent. the question itself sets up a false dichotomy; it seems much more like a continuum to me.

its an odd segueway, but i lost my cutie patootie cat esther last year. i had 3 cats, but after she died i only had 2 cats. when people would ask me how many cats i had, i didn't know how to answer. to say 3 was factually incorrect. but to say 2 sort of erased the fact that she had been there until only very recently. a cat is not the same thing as a kid, but it does show that sometimes simple questions are not simple at all.

how i know that fertility god has a sense of humor

today at my women's health clinical i was talking to a 36yo patient who was a mother of eight. she said she got her tubes tied after her seventh, and then preceeded to concieve and miscarry twins, then concieve and deliver her 8th child and seventh son, now two years old. after he was born, she had her tubes cauterized. this, to me, is proof that the gods of fertility are either a) huge fans of irony or b) possessed of an entirely evil sense of humor.

i've also been doing cervical exams for a little bit now and getting better at them. today was my first attempt at a spec exam on a non-paid model (ie--an actual patient). i couldn't find the damn cervix at all, and eventually turned the reigns over to my preceptor, god love her. she could find a cervix blindfolded with one hand tied behind her back.

cl is going to be seen tomorrow at 8am. initially he was told there was nothing available for several weeks, but someone somewhere took pity on him and tomrrow's spot materialized. i've got my fingers crossed that it will be helpful.

men and grief

i just talked to the husband and he is really in a bad way. i am worried about him a little bit. today he left work *at noon* and went home for the day. just didn't have it in him to finish the day. not to mention that we've been arguing, and also he didn't call me today, which is really very unlike him. he's typically known for his WASPY even-keeledness, as well as for calling me 10 times a day.

he says he just feels disconnected, and that he's doing things without really considering the consequences--thus the half day today i suppose. it is tough for him because he really doesn't talk to anyone at work or at home about things that are upsetting him (besides me). the m/c affected him deeply for one, and he hadn't told anyone in his family about it or anyone he works with, or any of his friends from home. i also know he's also worried about what he's going to do when he's released from active duty in november (god willing). november is a tough time for a teacher in need of a job.

i told him he should take a bath (this usually relaxes him) and he said he didn't want to 'because it might kill the sperm.' seriously, how sad is that?

anyway, i twisted his arm to call his primary care contact at the clinic tomorrow to get an appt ASAP. i know it will be very hard for him to get a counseling appt because the resources are scarce, and generally reserved for soldiers coming off deployment overseas. still, he is in a bad way. i hope, at the very least, the primary care person is willing to perscribe an anti-depressant of some kind while we wait to get the counseling ball rolling. we all know how long it takes anti-depressants to work, the sooner he starts those the better. i think we also need a short term plan to take us from now to whenever his appt is. leaving work, not doing anything, staying at home is really a bad option. it's also, for him, probably illegal.

if anyone reading this has any suggestions for how i can help him (besides vacation, he can't take any, and i can't either) i am eager to hear about it.

on a different and positive note, i had the opportunity to meet 9 lovely and beautiful women for dinner at cheesecake factory. as they say: l'chaim! next year in jerusalem...though i'd settle for next month back at cheesecake factory if that's more convenient for everyone.

are uteri vengeful?

this is us at nola jazzfest a month or so ago. a good trip, though having miscarried so soon after, i sometimes wonder if it was because it was so freaking hot there. heat in early pregnancy is associated with m/c. but then i realize that makes no sense...there are certainly babies born routinely in hotter places than nola in may, as hard as that is to believe.

cl is having a tough time of it, and he really suffers physically when he has a tough time. right now his IBS is acting up, and he is getting cold sores on his lips. i was down this weekend and he was grumpy and we ended up arguing a good part of the weekend. it sucks because since we don't live together there's more pressure to make the time we spend together 'quality time.' so it seems like an extra waste when we argue and i know we won't see each other for another 2 wks. he is really going to try and shelve all pregnancy/adoption thoughts for a month and i think it's a good idea because we are at least a month away from being able to do anything anyway. if he keeps dwelling on it, he is just going to be even more sick and miserable than he is now. i know he can't help it. but we can't go away, he can't stay drunk for a month and there just isn't any way to make the time go faster but to go through it.

i joke alot (and am at least half serious when i do) about having the old uterus taken out once i've done all i can with it. i don't think it's a bad idea, but then i wonder if somehow it KNOWS i feel that way, and so is trying less hard for me now. can bad thoughts about a uterus contribute towards IF and m/c? big brother uterus is watching YOU.

happy father's day?

i do love me some charleston...but i go home tomorrow to continue with my regularly scheduled life. i come back here in two weeks and four weeks. it's nice because by the trip 4 wks from now i should be (fingers crossed) having a period-type thing and then roughly two weeks after that we can get our ART on.

the wait is really hard on us both. what helps cl keep going is actively doing something or planning something. we are at an ART standstill, the clinic sort of demands we take this month off as a final uterine house cleaning from may's m/c. i sorta felt like my ute was clean enough already after this current cycle, but since i wield not the drugs, nor the dildo cam, nor do i have any flexi-catheters to my name, the decision was not mine to make and the damn NP would not budge. so, nothing going on on that front. the adoption plan is at a standstill too, for at least the next 6 mos, because we need to be in the same place for the pre-and-post placement visits. and where might that place be? we have no idea. so, as cl told me yesterday, his plan for the next month is not to think about it, or to think about it as little as possible.

i almost got him a little card for father's day (because he will be a father eventually, by god), but i'm glad i didn't since right now anything on that front just makes him sad.

if only we could spend the next month drunk, or if not that, in hawaii, or if not that, at least not 12 hrs apart by car. on the other hand, at least he's not in iraq, so i can't really complain. much.

where it at?

i completed my first week of women's health clinicals in bmore. most of my patients have been pregnant more times in their short lives than i ever will be or ever hope to be. fertile people, those teenagers. my preceptor told me about a patient she had who had sex in the 10day window between getting the first depo shot and having it take effect...yup, she got pregnant. carried that baby through 2 additional depo shots too, until, at 24 wks, she realized she was pregnant. well, not exactly that. my preceptor said she came in and said 'there's something moving in my stomach.' there sure as shit was, too.

my other clinical is pediatric orthopedics. its a tough rotation to have in the summer. basically, if you break your limb badly enough, you have to pin it in place and then cast it. and if you are casted in the summer, you can't do anything. and with pins in there, you really can't do anything; can't risk it getting wet, can't risk the limb swelling, nothing. so, most of our patients are not too happy with us.

my sister just sent me this newsweek 'my turn' article about a woman who formula feeds her babe because bf didn't work for her. i thought it interesting, because she talked about all the implicit and explicit judgement she got for her choice.

my poor hubby is feeling SO SAD. he is really depressed about the wait, and the m/c, and our lack of progress on the fertility/child having front. we are definitly at a stand still. our situation prevents us from moving forward in an adoption plan, and we have to take next month off from ttc. so he is really bumming. i am not bumming too bad yet, because i have a healthy dose of fear as i wait for my period this month. the longer it takes, the worse it will be, and i'm good and scared now. i don't even want a bfp right now because i'm afraid it will be a chemical. i'm too scared to be depressed right now, so i guess that's a good thing?

something i never thought i'd say...

where the HELL is my damn period. i've got two neg hpt's now, so where is it? sooner it comes, sooner i can get this next cycle over with. le sigh.

the well and the light house

i'm sure everyone knows this by now but possibly the greatest song of the year is 'the well and the light house' by arcade fire. i've been listening to it on repeat for the last 2 hrs and i'm doing just great...though i think maybe that banging sound is my upstairs neighbor trying to stomp through their floor to crush my speakers. whatever. i'm sure they'll thank me later. if not initially, it'll grow on you a la 'co-stanza!'

if ugly AF doesn't rear her ugly head tomorrow i'm going to be hella pissed. the neg hpt at 12dpo pretty much means that even a positive later on isn't a great sign. i won't get through another chemical pregnancy without some more significant chemicals for myself. plus, i need to get this cycle started so i can get the next one started, so i can enact the GREAT MECHANICS of MODERN MEDICINE the following cycle. so lets get going already. i spent the entire day poking at coochies and maneuvering (sp?) pregnant women's bellies and dopplering fetal heart tones which i think is scientifically proven to start my menses a-flowin. i hope so anyway.

i actually had a great time at my women's health rotation today. my preceptor is one of the best i've had this program so far. while i can locate a cervix, i can't do much with it once i find it. the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak.

speaking of weak flesh, my exercise has reached a new nadir: abysmal. i'm ashamed.
le sigh.

soooo negative

took a frer this morning at 12dpo which was astoundingly negative. i actually like that about the better quality preg pee sticks. there's no guessing about whether you see a second line, because it clearly isn't there. (sing along now: just cause you don't see it...LOL)

anyway, i am really ok with it, because i'd rather not be preg than have another m/c. i wasn't really 'supposed' to be pg this month anyway, but, you know, we're addicted to opk sex and we thought we'd try.

off to (ahh the irony) my women't health clinical today.

it's absolutely amazing the things i can do OTHER than go grocery shopping, do hw, study, or exercise.

i can, for instance, blog. i can download music. i can read everyone else's blog. i can watch many many episodes of scrubs all in a row til my brain bleeds.

hang on a minute...i think i have to go sort my socks by color and degree of wear...

ever have that 'not so fresh' feeling?

i'm a regular contributor to a child and parenting section of a hippie music board. at least, that is how the board started, as followers of a "hippie" band. hippies procreated, as hippies do (except, obviously, for this one) and thus the child and pregnancy offshoot of that board was started.

except now i'm feeling like i may have lost my place there. c&p doesn't have a charter, like mothering.com does, so i'm not violating the charter when i'm pro-immunization, or not ecstatically (sp?) a lactivist. i don't like finding myself on the "right" of any board. and i don't want the other members of the board to put up with me, if they would really rather just deal with like minded folks. it's not a bad thing. most people use their internet groups to escape. i provide a forum for debate, but the thing is, i'm just trying to relax too. i don't want to debate. maybe i need to find another parenting forum, but i feel sad about it. i like the people, i just don't like where i find myself.

work today was ok. lots of sickies, as per norm. no one too especially sick. i violated about 10,000 HIPPA rules today looking up a patient that i had treated last time i was on shift. sometimes, i leave a shift and never find out what happened to a patient, and rarely, i get really attached to the family or the child in a short time and i want to find out what happened. this poor kid (8yo girl) came in with pallor and abd pain. how many 8yo girls have abd pain? like, most of them. but this was the 1 in 1 million kid who (it turns out) has metastatic cancer. according to the notes i found, the tumor was inoperable, so they are doing chemo. the prognosis for a kid with an inoperable tumor? not great. my heart really goes out to that family...i'm not a praying sort, but they are definitly in my thoughts.

an office space cat. tomorrow i have 8 solid hours of class, and i'm going to spend the 5 min breaks we have shooting nails into my head with a nailgun to break up the monotony. unless any one of YOU have a better idea, nu?

because i love you all, check out this link from the best show on TV. yes, of course,
scrubs!

i was very productive today what with the laundry and the grocery shopping and the what not, but i seem to have just hit an energy black hole. stinky, because i still need to do the studying, and the exercising. my energy juice quit about an hour ago it seems. pity that. help! i need to put the internets DOWN and go do something productive. oooh the sweet siren song of the internets. it calls to me 'keep your little a$$ parked right in that chair and wallow in my forbidden, time sucking fruits.' right into my ear it sings that. hard to resist.

2ww continues. nothing to report. my plan for bfn includes amusement parks and lots of soft cheese, eaten with a listeria spoon. delicious.

ugh

well, my appt today was not what i wanted to hear. everyone i talked to--civilian and military--said i could try again after my next normal cycle. i thought that meant this cycle coming up. but evidently, this cycle does not count as a normal cycle, even though i will have normal menstrual blood when it does come. apparently i have to let this cycle go and the next one before i can resume any kind of treatment. so, the plan is still the same: clomid, hcg, iui, but now we're looking at mid july, instead of, like, 3 wks from now which is what i thought it was.

:(

le sigh.

tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow (again)

meeting with REI tomorrow at 1030, and i hope to know more about the plan for next month after that.

warm thoughts to LJ.

work was ok today. nothing too crazy. very very busy though.

i got into an interesting discussion today on a message board i belong to. basically, someone wrote that a mom told her she wasn't breastfeeding because her baby was lactose intolerant. a bunch of other people wrote in to say how stupid that was. i wrote that maybe she just said that because she didn't want other people to judge her feeding choices. it was interesting because the strongest lactivist on the board feels that not feeding breastmilk is really subpar care. in her mind, there is no reason really not to breastfeed. but her 5mos old son is circumcised. i can't tell you how many posts i've read that say that circ'ing is essentially child abuse. i don't feel that way, but many people do. to them, to circ "without knowing better" is horrific ignorance. to be educated and circ anyway is criminal. also, the lactivist's son has also recieved no vaxes to date. if you ask me, that is the craziest thing of all. how can an educated person make that decision? but i love and respect the lactivist, among other people that have made vastly different choices for their family than i would make for mine. i guess what i'm saying is, i think the family has to figure out what works best for them. and then when they get judged for it--which they will, by someone--they need to say 'thanks for your opinion, but what we are doing is what works best for our family.' and be sure to have a thick skin.

responding to anger with kindness

today i wrote my advisor an email about tweaking my classes for the fall. she responded that big changes were coming down the pike that would definitly affect me and my fall schedule. i panicked at that, because i'd been planning on taking an extra peds class in the fall as a clinical elective, and had heard from another student that i wouldn't be able to do it. i sent her what can only generously be described as an angry email, saying that she and i knew this was my plan, and essentially i was mislead. she responded to my angry email with kindness, writing back that the changes that were coming did not affect my placement in that class.

how nice that she responded to my email with kindness, instead of returning the anger. she could have easily done that, but didn't. if i can learn to respond to anger with kindness, in most situations, i think it would take me a long way. it is something i'd like to work on. it's hard because in this culture you have to be aggressive to get what you want. but if everyone is aggressive, there is no kindness and it just creates friction where there need not be. give it a little bit of love, it goes a long way.

the orthopedics clinic was interesting. lots of developmental hip dysplasia, elbow fractures, club feet and football injuries. we must have seen 10million patients.

home, home again

oh dear, what can i say? those folks over at lolcat are still cracking my a$$ up. tee hee.

i am back from 3wks in charleston and 3 days in la visiting my lovely sister and her husband. all told, i had a fabulous time. the only down parts about the LA trip were the OB's office on thursday (though i did get to see the babies on sono) and her not letting me take many pictures (though i did get some). my pecs actually hurt from swinging on the bars and rings they have on the beach at santa monica. and the santa monica pier was hoppin. jt schooled my a$$ in foozball, but i took her back to school in air hockey. i rode the pirate ship ride, and while i was on it i remembered why i don't ride that ride. it is because of all the falling. i actually have a weird memory associated with that ride. i remember me and my sister being on a pirate ship ride at an amusement park when we were both very little, and i remember us
sliding out underneath the lap bar. i remember us huddled together on the floor of the ride between the bottom of the bench of the seat that had held us and the back of the seat in front of us while the ride was still in motion. i had thought of it since then, and in the way that time makes things murky, had assumed it was a dream. but i was talking to jt about it and she assured me it very much happened. she vividly remembers us huddling together on the floor of that ride too. crazy! we are lucky we didn't fall out.

we went to a delicious italian restaurant on sat night, and just before we entered jt went to the "bushes" (actually one very sad, very scraggly weed poking out between the concrete slabs behind the restaurant) to puke. people were going by giving her and me the double stink eye, i guess thinking she was wasted. at one point between retches, her nose running and her eyes streaming with tears, my poor sis calls out to the judgy mcjudgertons 'it's ok, i'm just pregnant!' it was kinda funny actually.

2ww churns on. in the immortal words of radiohead 'just cause you feel it, doesn't mean it's there.' next visit to rei 6/6. i drank wine and coffee because if i abstain, then i definitly won't be pregnant. if i do imbibe, i might possibly be. consult uterinus's law if you don't believe me. plus, since my track record isn't so great, i feel like i can't spend 2 wks out of every month (or however long the cycle is) making big concessions to phantom babies ad infinitum. for an actual baby, with an actual heartbeat, yes. for a maybe baby, no.

have my first clinical rotation tomorrow of the summer semester, in a pediatric orthopedics office. i am excited but nervous, as orthopedics=not my strongest subject. oh well.

lalaland

greetings from la--it isn't nearly as warm as i thought it would be. i brought jeans with me from sc on a lark...fortunately for me because otherwise i'd have to buy some here. i walked for a stretch today on santa monica blvd, where many of the boutiques were selling jeans. unfortunately, i don't have a firstborn to barter with, and the prices were just insane. santa monica blvd is a heady mix of the great unwashed and more trendy stores than you could throw a handful of sand at.

uterninusus law (ah sperm palace jesters, how right you were!) dictated that since weds was my probable O day, something would happen to make sex unlikely. first, cl and i had another stupid fight about him not covering me well enough with a beach towel while i was changing clothes on a public street. (i seem to be describing alot of cl's and my fights during this blog, but rest assured we are actually happily married with only occasional, if daunting, interludes of crazy). anyway, then we went out with a friend of his from work and my dh got Da-Runk. now, being da-runk, while fun, can often pose challenges if baby making sex is to be had. we were able to overcome some of the more immediate challenges, but i just cant help but think of cl's poor spermies, swimming around in circles, looking for the closest bar or maybe just a spot of gatorade. on the other hand, da-runk sex has made a lot of babies for a lot of people. onword then, with the psychosomatic and psycho in general hilarity that is the 2ww.

my sister's 11wk appt was fun yesterday. ucla's power was out, so we were on generator or 'mood' lighting. the sono showed both baby a and baby b were trying to shove their right fists into their brains via their mouths. poor things. they both looked healthy and if anything were maybe even big for dates. so that's encouraging. also my sister hasn't tossed her cookies for 3 days now (as of this post) and that's also encouraging. the bushes outside her work are missing their daily dose of fertilizer. she is having occasional arrythmia's with pregnancy, so she will have to wear a monitor for 24hrs just to make sure it is just pregnancy causing it and not some structural problem with her heart. poor sister!

it was actually very difficult to be in the OB's office, around all the very pregnant preggos. i am greatly relieved that at my rei's office, children under age 12 are not allowed, and neither do you see greatly pregnant women. we were discussing in the car yesterday how hard pregnancy is for women...between trying to achieve it, trying to maintain it, spending 3 months acutely ill, irregular heart beats, whatever. where is the dialogue? maybe it's because it gets all mixed up in the pro-life/pro-choice dialogue. to admit that pregnancy is exceptionally hard maybe gives credence to the pro-choice arguement that women should not have to put themselves and their bodies through that if they don't want. on the other hand, the pro-choice arguement doesn't give enough to women devastated by their m/c's, or even their abortions. not saddened that they had an abortion, but still feeling an acute loss.