Barely promoted

Around the mulberry bush

Hospital one didn't have a place for Annajane on Wednesday, so they sent her back to nursing home two. She stayed overnight, but continued to refuse medication, and, I just learned today, food, and to be rude to other residents.

Nursing home two called up yet another hospital on Thursday. I'll call it number three, although relative to the list I recently laid out of institutions since Christmas it's also hospital negative one—being the place Annajane spent a few months three years ago, before she got sent to the big state hospital (number zero), which then placed her in the adult home where she started 2004 (where she had managed to live mostly stably for almost three years).

Hopsital three is an all-psychiatric affiliate of one of the big teaching hospitals in Metropolis, built back when you sent crazy people out to the country because the fresh air just might be good for them. I suspect it's a better place for Annajane than hospital one, which is a community general with a small psych ward. But hospital three doesn't like to keep Medicaid patients around for long.

Her current social worker, Dorothy, remembers Annajane and how unpleasant she was from last time around. And she's just like that now. Arrogant, angry. She refused to speak with a doctor when Dorothy was in the room. She's insisting that everyone call her "Mrs. Maple." I'm sure she's regularly telling all of them how they're not very good doctors, or nurses, etc., too.

When I asked about the bed hold situation with the nursing home, Dorothy said, "They promised to take her back. We wouldn't have admitted her if they hadn't, and they confirmed to me today that they would. Our outplacement siutation is just so difficult." Oh, so it's your problem that there aren't enough assisted living facilities for the mentally ill out there? Not, say, my mother's problem?

Hospital three is where her case manager, Tom, is based. When I spoke with Tom today, he sounded a little hurt by how nasty she's being. "I asked her what medications she was taking, and she wouldn't tell me. She said she'd tell me next week." I sometimes forget that, even though the professionals know she's crazy, they can't help but react as human beings to the abuse.

Lather, rinse, repeat

A social worker from Annajane's nursing home just called.

Over the last few days, she's gotten anxious and hostile. I called her on Sunday, just to let her pick the color of some shoes I was ordering her, and thought that she was getting a little manicky: there was some attitude showing through in statements like "The doctors at the home are really of average quality," plus there was just something about how she needed to tell stories from her wild days. (She was really certain about wanting tan shoes, too.) Yesterday her case manager Tom visited and apparently thought she wasn't "at her baseline." Her psychiatrist upped her medication.

Today she refused her pills and got aggressive towards other residents. So the home sent her to the hospital. Which turns out to be the same place as she went in anxious and came out demented, all of two months ago.

I hope she's not just wandering around a waiting room now. Last time she went in through the emergency room there it took five hours for her to be admitted; her case manager sat with her.

She hasn't been at the new nursing home long enough to have a bed hold.

A sad day in academic blogland

Our queen, Invisible Adjunct, who always spoke the truth to academic power with grace, and whose site was the de facto meeting place for an entire community of academic bloggers, is stepping away from her keyboard.

Invisible Adjunct was the first blog I read regularly, and the first one I checked every day.

I wish her well. I hope fervently that whatever IA does next will give her writing the huge audience it deserves.

Open course web sites rock!

A course I've taught many times reached one of its sticky points today. One of those places where something more needs to be illustrated, where we need to pause and play with the ideas before we can comfortably move on. But I've never had a really good discussion question to open the issues up, so I've driven on—fully aware of the pedogogical sin as I committed it.

Twenty minutes before lecture, I did some Googling. It turns out that Dr. Junior of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople posts his lecture notes for a similar course. He's not a native speaker of English, and he and I disagree about a lot of methodological issues. However, he brought up a lovely little thought experiment that I knew about, but hadn't realized could be used at just this point in the development.

Both sections went very well today; the two discussions headed in different directions, as they should if something interesting is being discussed. Dr. Junior, thank you. You helped my students learn something.

Conversely, of course, closed courseware systems suck. Granolan is adopting one, and I hate it. I hate how little visual and organizational control I have over the pages generated. I hate how slow it is to get material posted. I hate how slow it is to navigate once material is posted. And, for a school our size, it's hard to see how much value is added by, e.g., instantly graded on-line quizzes. (Especially since I've just heard about rampant cheating in one of the big science courses that was trying them out.)

As more and more courses switch over to the courseware system, though, some of my students are getting annoyed that my (essentially blog-like) course pages aren't in the system.

Utter terror

When I was younger, I assumed I wouldn't have kids. With my mother? Oh, and her grandfather (committed suicide in 1933), and her father (mood swings throughout life; founded successful companies, but also took to his bed for years at time), and her two brothers (Ricky self-medicated for years and is not exactly normal now; the other left home for another country and doesn't write, but I hear from my cousin that he's had major depressive episodes too).

After I met Beaker and it became clear that we'd need major technology to have kids (he told me he was sterile on our second real date), I thought about trying to become an egg donor. I had the SAT scores and a basically WASP appearance going for me; more money wouldn't have been bad during grad school. It's a good thing I never actually pursued it. I realize now that my relatives' problems would have dinged me immediately. As well they should.

So, my biggest fear for any children I might have: insanity. Given my own genetic legacy, given current huge upswings in both juvenile bipolar disoder and autism, given reports like this, it's pretty easy to nurture that fear, too.

Really, now. Given Beaker's CF and my family history, what the hell are we doing even trying?

Deep breath. I need to remember: I don't know who the hell my "sperm donor" was, but, beyond the freckles, I got enough of something from him to make me not follow in Annajane's footsteps. And I'll be passing along that along, too.

I did finally call the RE. Our next appointment, for IVF #2 followup and reconsideration of strategy, will be April 13.

Have you seen this dog?

There are many bad things about having regular mental breakdowns. One of less significant, but more exhausting, is losing all, or most of, one's possessions. Over and over and over again. Annajane's lost many apartments over the years, and, with each one, furniture. Clothes. Letters. Photo albums.

My mother has been in five institutions since Christmas:

• the adult home she'd lived in for two years.

• the first hospital. For about a month. She went from anxious and a little psychotic on admission to apparent severe dementia. The doctors gave up and sent her to...

• the first nursing home. Which lasted 4 days. She was too tense and oppositional for their dementia unit. so they sent her to...

• the second hospital. Where she was for about a month, and where they got her back to some version of reality, thanks to puttting her on exactly the drugs I would have blamed for the decline at the first hospital—whatever works, hey?

• and now, the second nursing home.

A few clothes got taken with her to the first hospital. I brought over some others, from the adult home, when I visited in February. Everyone who knows Annajane knows she loves dogs, especially golden retrievers, so she was given three by visitors: one from her roommate at the adult home, one from a social worker from her old day program, and, finally, one from me. That's Rusty 1 sitting in my suitcase up there, complete with his tag from my local supermarket (!).

When Annajane arrived at the second nursing home, she had nothing. No clothes, no underwear. Maybe a pair of shoes. When I visited last Saturday, she was wearing a hospital gown. That's not hip on the floor she's on. Definitely an own-clothes kind of place. Plus it would have been very hard to sign her out on Sunday to come have dinner with Nanna and Ricky and Marina and me without some clothes on.

Her case manager Tom had managed to get some of her things from the adult home and taken them over to Nanna's apartment. Nanna hadn't washed anything. When I pushed her, first she said, "Well, it's not that dirty. And it's not like your mother is a very clean person, anyway." Then she told me that Marina is doing the laundry now—I suspect Nanna was afraid to ask her. So I spent Saturday night in the basement laundry room. But there still were no pants, no underwear, no shoes, no winter coat.

Ever try finding cheap, durable, machine-washable clothing (a) in a snooty suburb like Weatherwood (b) without a car (c) on Sunday morning? There's a shopping center within walking distance of Nanna's, but most of the shops are Talbots-ish. I managed underwear and a pair of shoes at Old Navy, but every non-jeans pair of pants there had a drawstring. Like Annajane has enough manual coordination. Plus, if she has to go back to a psych ward, I bet they won't allow drawstrings. Finally I found some elastic waist cotton velour sweatpants at a sporting goods store.

When I got to the nursing home that afternoon with my big bag, I found out that all clothing brought in has to be labelled. Which meant that I was supposed to leave it at the front desk. Bad! I took everything upstairs to show Annajane. We got her dressed. Then everything else had to be dropped off. They promised Annajane she'd get it all back in a couple of days, but she wasn't happy.

Meanwhile, I'm left with trying to call social workers at hospital one (who found her wallet a few days ago, sadly minus everything useful, like her ATM card, Social Security card, department store credit card, etc.), nursing home one, and hospital two to try to track down the things she had at hospital one. Like Rusty 1, above.

CODA 1 (the universality of great art): Thank you, Julie, for posting Elizabeth Bishop's One Art.

CODA 2 (the inevitability of bathos): I was wigged out enough by that February visit that, the next time I went to the supermarket after returning home, I got myself Rusty 2. He's softly fuzzy, good to squeeze—a clone, yes, but a therapeutic one.

Will we ever use bioethics in real life?

Last week, the Times published a meditative little piece by Edward Rothstein on an anthology, Being Human, put out by the President's Council on Bioethics. (The book appears to be free. However, when I followed the directions and sent e-mail asking for a copy, I got a reply saying they were all out right now, and, well, maybe forever, actually.)

Now, the President's Council on Bioethics is, as getupgrrl has pointed out, pretty darn scary. Especially for those of us who just want the freedom to pay up front for the chance to give ourselves hormone shots in the butt, then cry a lot. And, especially that Leon Kass. Some council membership changes he recently pushed through got portions of the blogosphere riled up, and I managed to follow a chain of links to this priceless Kass quote:

"Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone -- a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.

"I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many readers, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. [...] This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior."

(Okay: I have to ask. Does he really mean catlike, or doglike? Can he tell the difference between a cat and a dog? Or is he so focused on the distinctive qualities of human nature that all other animals might as well be the same?)

What really caught my eye, though, while I was reading that Times piece, was the list of ads I got beneath.

So: let's see. First, we have doctors playing off the paranoid fears and technologic hopes of parents-to-be. They'll take the money up front, thanks.

Second, a software company selling tools to help scientists keep track of their vast flocks of mutant mice.

Finally, some fundies who want you to know that cloning is very bad. To be fair, they do seem to have read quite a bit of the literature about what's gone wrong in animal experiments.

Hey, Dr. Kass et al.: you folks are falling WAY behind here.

The professorette wags a finger at improper props

Let's say you have a lecture demonstration that involves a balloon. First you'll wave it around uninflated, limp. Then you'll partially inflate it, hold it up, and use the change in shape as a metaphor. Finally, you'll let it go, untied, so it whizzes around the room making farty noises. That whizzing is part of your metaphor, too, see.

Please, please, do not use a pink, cylindrical balloon, especially not one with a bit of a nipple at the tip.

Please do not draw a smiley face on the tip of the balloon, with the nipple as its nose.

If, somehow, you find that you cannot avoid using a pink, cylindrical balloon with a smiley face drawn on the tip, please do not pause as you hold the inflated balloon up high, saying, "See, now it's shaped like... like... "

Finally, if you somehow find yourself in the situation above: I implore you to have the human decency to giggle. And, after you've let Mr. Pinky fly free, you must promptly rescue the flaccid corpse from its resting place by your feet.

Rants other people wrote...

... or should write, so I don't have to.

First, Julie and her bitchy, crass commenters (and I mean that as a compliment!) on the hell of infertility bulletin boards. You know, 7 months after I left, I still have a bit of a reflex, when I open a new browser window, to start typing "memb..." and wait for the URL for the Resolve "Getting Started" board (to which I refuse to link) to complete. Oh man.

My biggest problem with the boards, I think, was women for whom infertility was the worst thing that had ever happened to them. You know, there's some bad stuff in the world. I've lived through some of it. (E.g., an episode I haven't gotten to yet in the family stories: in '97, my mother had a breakdown while living on her own in a very bad neighborhood. Disappeared after acting oddly for days. We contacted crisis teams, the police, emergency rooms. No luck. Finally one hospital took me to see the only crazy white woman they'd admitted in the last 24 hours—and I didn't recognize her, all curled up in a stretcher in a hallway, due to her emaciation and aging and to the long estrangement that had preceded that breakdown. Oh—did I mention that I was in the middle of sending out academic job applications at the time?) I can anticipate that some more very bad things will happen to me, or to people I love, in the future. It's not like I wasn't sad after the cycles failed, or like I won't be very, very sad if we can't manage this baby thing. But life can get so much worse.

Second, grading. Oh my god grading. Three stacks are waiting. Would I rather be sick in bed, like Abu Aardvark? Should I try to taxonomize my students' errors in areas I hadn't suspected could be problematic, like the Little Professor? (On the most recent batch of exams, non-native speakers of English did notably better on certain abstruse syntactical points... oh goodness, is that depressing.)

Meanwhile, is it fair that the Chronicle this week has not one, but two articles in the "adjuncting isn't so bad" category, summarizable as "I got a permanent lectureship, but it's not so different," and "I love my Maine freeway flyer gig," respectively, but Invisible Adjunct is off at the beach? C'mon!

When too much isn't enough

When I was young, my grandparents went to the supermarket on Friday evenings. Each week we'd get a big bag of pretzels. They'd last the whole week. We almost never bought potato chips. See, we liked them too much. If we got a bag of potato chips, it would be gone in three days. So we got pretzels instead.

(Two bags of potato chips? In the same week? Inconceivable.)

We had Annajane over for dinner at Nanna's yesterday. There was a bit of fuss about the coffee ice cream that Nanna had bought for Annajane back in January: would it still be edible? It was, and Annajane was happy—she says the food at her new nursing home is horrible. But we got talking about ice cream in general. Nanna complained how Ricky always eats "all of that good Haagen-Dazs, the dulsee letchee stuff," so she never gets any.

It sounded like Nanna and Ricky are getting into the same situation with ice cream flavors as we all were with salty snacks way back when: now they both like the dulce de leche, it's getting too stressful to buy it. So I told Nanna the story about the pretzels.

Nanna blinked. No sign of recognition, let alone awareness of personal involvement. "Well, that sounds like a good idea to me, " she ventured. "To get the pretzels."

After we dropped Annajane back at the home, Ricky (who had missed the earlier conversation) and I stopped at the supermarket, where he got some dulce de leche. He dropped me off at the apartment building. "Emmie, could you put the ice cream in the freezer? And don't let Nanna see it. I couldn't help I got such a big one—they didn't have any normal size ones, and I like it so much."

He knew Nanna would be annoyed at his having gotten the quart. Because a quart is too much. Just like two bags of potato chips.