Barely promoted

A flavored lament

Why, why, why was it necessary to replace lime Life Savers, those tiny tokens of bliss once found in five-flavor packs, with nasty green apple ones?

More quick updates

Everyone is patting themselves on the back about getting Annajane inpatient without crisis. When I last talked to Dorothy-her-social-worker, they still hadn't heard back about her lithium levels. Apparently she's lost some weight (this is scary as hell, by the way; she's skeletal to begin with), and they're worried that, if Daisyfield wasn't monitoring food intake, well, what about monitoring pill intake, huh?

I haven't spoken with my mother directly yet. She's mostly been in the quiet area.

Meanwhile, my drugs arrived this morning. And I finally have really, truly arranged for sperm transport. The tank should go from New York to Ohindinois on Monday night, from Ohindinois to Cornell on Tuesday night, and should get up from Cornell on Thursday. I had to sign a form that said I'd give the rental company $800 if it got lost. Um, like I'm ever going to see it myself, dudes? (A biologist I know is shocked that we're not just driving the tank ourselves. Then again, she regularly performs "terminal hysterectomies" on the mice she's carefully bred and/or genetically modified... so she may have a wildly different point of view on many aspects of the, um, mammalian reproductive process. Not to mention liquid nitrogen.)

Two friends both had their 20-week ultrasounds yesterday. I love them dearly, and both could reasonably be viewed as miracle pregnancies... but they're also both being extremely solicitous about this IVF cycle. When they're around, when they're asking questions (our of honest concern and curiousity! they care!) I can't take it. It's too easy to remember having to tell people, too many people, about the last failure. I've told too many people that this one is coming up, they'll all know that's why I'm travelling even if I start refusing to talk about it now, and, and, and, I don't know what to do.

And then (since consistency is boring) I'll catch myself really wishing I could talk to someone, vent some of the little puffs of bitterness that flare out in between the practical hassles. But I can't bring myself to actually do so. It seems like it's just setting out to share pain, or making my future self vulnerable, somehow: they'll know why I hurt, they'll know it's about something that they have that I can't have yet, oh, I don't know.

Mostly, though, the election is being an even more compelling distraction from the work I'm supposed to be doing (remember scholarship? the purpose of the sabbatical? mmm-hmmmm...) than the doomed efforts at reproduction. I need it to be over.

Quick updates

ITEM: Annajane has been admitted to hospital three. She fell while getting out of bed last night (she's been getting up repeatedly at night, and being sent back to bed by the staff) and cut her forehead. They called paramedics, who took care of it, and sent her off to her day program in the morning. The doctors at the day program decided it was time for her to go inpatient.

ITEM: Stims have been ordered. 10 days worth of my starting dose, plus name-brand Lupron and a trigger. About the same cost as: heating the house for a year. Two mortgage payments. Five car payments. One-third of a 48-inch dual-fuel Wolf range. Six short-notice round-trip flights to Weatherwood. A full set of dentures. A substantial shelf of professional books. Dinner for 10 at the French Laundry.

The professorette largely concurs

... with Becky's fascinating scale, but suggests one one minor adjustment: jeans should be worth -17 points.

(She's wearing jeans every day of her sabbatical, too.)

A different edge

Yes, I'm still flipping the fuck out about the upcoming IVF, thank you! My helpful body has just provided a longer bleed than usual, so I have something else to worry about. Freedom won't even try submitting charges to my insurance (which wouldn't pay for them, but then I wouldn't have to do any extra MSA paperwork). And it's going to be $405 to ship Beaker's precious bodily fluids.

A few days ago, I had to drive out of Granolaton on small roads. The foliage is beautiful this year. I don't usually like driving, especially not on two-lane roads, but it was very calming. And then I located a note of that calm.

Exactly two years ago, when we got our snotty little manual-transmission car, I spent weeks driving around learning how to drive stick. Just ten or twenty minutes when I got home from work, every day. Stalling at stop lights, learning how to shift and turn around a corner at the same time, learning to breathe while I let out the clutch gently, gently.

And daydreaming about, and psyching myself up for, my first phone call to a fertility clinic. November 18, 2002. I started birth control pills December 1 or so, went in for a consult December 10, and started Lupron December 29 (we fit right into the holiday lull at the clinic). That initial hope, which for us was the first leap of, let's-have-a-baby—really, the very first, all this technology is the only way we ever can—is still somehow tied to the red and yellow leaves stuck under the wiper blades, the tang of woodsmoke in the air.

We never figured out a due date for either try. I was measuring by my tenure schedule. If the first had worked, it would have been the latest possible pregnancy for me to have a shot at delaying the decision for a year. The second was my last chance before leaping into the promotion process itself.

And the third? It's our first chance post-tenure—taking into account all my months-long fear-induced delays, how long it took us to get the discouraging local consult, and Cornell's crazy schedule.

If, when, this cycle fails, it will be a disappointment in a new category for us. Of course it hurt like hell when the other two failed. But for the first, we knew we'd try again, and, for the second, we figured out that we'd try again fairly soon (okay, yes, with professional help). This time, if, when, it doesn't work, that's the end of a road. I know most of you have hit ends of many roads along the way. That going to a doctor at all is the end of a road for most. Then the last Clomid cycle, or the last IUI, or...

IVF was our first road, though.

Holding onto the edge

All available reports suggest that my mother's not in very good shape at all.

ITEM: Tom, her caseworker says she's gotten obsessed with her dentist. He went with her to her last appointment, and apparently there are no visible problems with the lower dentures. But she believes there are, and she wants to keep on going back. Every week. For the foreseeable future.

Back when she was living on her own in the city (heavily subsidized by my grandmother, who used up everything my grandfather left her in 5 years of supporting Annajane), she got overinvolved with a dentist. I don't know how much human contact she was getting, otherwise, and I think the guy and his staff all understood what was going on. I went to the office once, after she cracked so badly, to pay off her bills, and the receptionist called everyone in: "Look, it's Annajane's daughter!" Perhaps they thought I and my fancy education were mythical? I don't know.

ITEM: Her caseworker also told me that the doctors at the day program all got together a big meeting about how she's doing, last Tuesday, with Annajane and Tom there too. She's been very tense and apparently hasn't been sleeping at all. So far they've just tinkered with her medication a bit. I think that some of what got said when I last talked to her, all the stuff about "trying," must have been at least partially in response to that meeting.

ITEM: Uncle Ricky called today to tell me how bad shape she seemed to be in yesterday. "I had to go up to the house to get her, she wasn't waiting at the door, and when I saw her, one word: MEDICATED." Bad tremors, very restless, can't stay still. Nanna can't stand the restlessness and spent the entire afternoon yelling, "Can't you just sit in a CHAIR?"

I worry about the increases in the antipsychotic dosage; she's quite physically sensitive to them, and it's hard not to assume that that's where the tremors are coming from.

ITEM: Tom says that there's some chance she might be taken in for evaluation at his hospital (number three, the one she was in during the spring and also during the summer, in the aftermath of the atypical drug reaction), without there having to be an acute crisis.

ITEM: at 7:25 p.m., no one at Daisyfield picked up the phone. At 8:20 p.m., someone picked up, but said nothing. So I asked, "Hello?" There was someone there, a staff member (!), and she went to find Annajane. Already asleep. (Well, perhaps the last bit is reassuring.)

Day 1, and I already feel like a failure

It was another 25 day cycle, you see. Not a huge surprise, given the day-early surge, given how much all signs and symptoms coincided with my short cycles last spring, but still: I look at my cycle records, at my short luteal phases and my long, but on-average-a-day-and-a-half-shorter-than-two-years-ago follicular phases, and I feel very broken.

This is the cycle where it starts, people. On day 10 I'll start a barrage of OPKs (my beloved CVS brand, along with whatever Cornell recommends). Day 14 or 15 (if not then, expect major spazzing) I'll surge. Sometime the following week I go to Cornell for my co-culture biopsy. 7 days after the surge, I start Lupron. (In the past, I haven't had any huge issues with the Lupron. Which I tend to regard as more evidence that I'm broken.)

Must get prescriptions filled. Must get Beaker's sperm shipped. Must order stranger's sperm, too.

I've been struggling with: well, you all know the drill. Hope and despair. Today I woke up with cramps and cursed my sorry body. Why are we even bothering? And why am I doing all the work, all the coordination, all the worrying? While Beaker notices unpleasant things about our friends' children and wonders if he'll be able to handle it all if it works?

But then I remembered that we started all this off by putting Beaker through honest-to-goodness surgery. He couldn't walk for three days afterwards, and it took a good three weeks for him to believe his balls would ever be the same size again. I think, if nothing else, I owe it to him to try using the precious proceeds.

As the days are getting shorter

Annajane's heading for trouble again.

Remember her lower dentures? She sent me the money, I sent the dentist a check, and she got them a couple of weeks ago. But they don't fit well. On Sunday morning some abscess or something burst and she was bleeding badly, so Sunnydale called an ambulance. It turns out that there is no emergency dental care available, anywhere in her entire (extremely expensive suburban) county, for Medicaid patients. Since she'd stopped bleeding, the paramedics just told her to see her dentist as soon as possible and vamoosed.

My uncle, may he rot in hell, reacted to the situation with his standard avoidance. And, as usual, he justified his cowardice as something that would make other people feel better, not worse. Because she was in a crisis, he didn't pick her up and bring her over to visit Nanna. Let me repeat: because an infected sore on her mouth had popped, and she was scared and in pain, he left her out at the adult home, instead of letting her visit her mother and get a home-cooked meal. "Nanna hasn't been feeling so good today, so I thought it would be easier for her. What if she started bleeding again and we had to call an ambulance here?" I didn't give him the abuse he deserved (probably that's why I'm ranting here, out of guilt), because I need to save the firepower for worse crises than this. When she's crazy, not just sick. Which may be soon.

When I talked to Nanna Sunday, she said that my mother had been very "jumpy" when she'd visited the week before. And for a few weeks, Annajane's been talking about how she's going to move out on her own, into her own apartment, any day now. Mmmm-hmmmm.

She did go to the dentist Monday. But when I talked with her tonight, she was extremely tense: unable to describe what had happened at the appointment, unable to describe how she would get her antibiotic prescription refilled, only able to keep saying, in a sad quavery voice, "I'm trying so hard, Emmy. You have to believe me. I'm really trying. Maybe next week when we talk I'll be a little better."

The staff member who picked up the phone didn't think she'd be willing to talk with me, and I got the impression that she's been causing trouble—and that Sunnydale is viewing the situation as "Annajane's causing trouble," rather than "Annajane may be destabilizing." Her case manager left me voicemail, and apparently the owner of Sunnydale wants to talk tomorrow, too—it may be a three-way call. God, I hope they don't want to kick her out. Look, people, she's crazy. She's going to cycle through hospitals some of the time, and maybe one of those times is coming up. But shouldn't you be able to handle that?

Sex or no sex

Some odd things over at the New Scientist right now. Like this:

Camperio-Ciani's team questioned 98 gay and 100 straight men about their closest relatives - 4600 people in total. They found that female relatives of gay men had more children on average than the female relatives of straight men. But the effect was only seen on their mother’s side of the family.

Mothers of gay men produced an average of 2.7 babies compared with 2.3 born to mothers of straight men. And maternal aunts of gay men had 2.0 babies compared with 1.5 born to the maternal aunts of straight men.

“This is a novel finding," says Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist and commentator on sexuality at Stanford University in California. “We think of it as genes for ‘male homosexuality’, but it might really be genes for sexual attraction to men. These could predispose men towards homosexuality and women towards ‘hyper-heterosexuality’, causing women to have more sex with men and thus have more offspring.”

And, even more oddly, this comment, buried in a big article on asexuality:

When it comes to having children, some asexuals say they would like to have a baby, but most would use IVF to avoid having to have sex.

You know, you don't have to go all the way to IVF, people. (I have to assume this line is the result of some sort of journalist/editor understanding problem—could the subjects of the article really be so turned off that they've learned that little about the biology?!)

Curriculum lessons

A colleague, X, has been preparing his reappointment paperwork. The department chair was concerned with his CV format (why wasn't something said before now?!) and told X to ask a few department members for comments, including me.

NOTED: I am much better at giving people constructive criticism than I used to be—say, before I started teaching. I ripped the organization and format into tiny shreds, demanded more detail, more white space, fewer resume tricks—but I was sympathetic, no, really, and I don't know if I could have been, a few years ago. I would have gotten too caught up in how the document could have gotten into the condition it was in, blamed X's inmost nature for the problems, and not been able to separate what needed to change from, um, who needed to change. Now, when I read other people's work, I look harder for what's good, and I think harder about what's really going wrong and why.

NOTED: X is laid back, and sometimes that's just a healthy way to be. He was entirely comfortable as the harpies fluttered around his head, screeching typgraphical suggestions and growling about page breaks. (Of course, his slack birthed the original CV.)

NOTED: All the harpies recruited by the department chair were female. Yes, we are the most detail-oriented members of the department. Yes, we can argue happily for hours about citation formats (and we all have office-supply fetishes). But is it coincidence? That we are so detail-oriented—or that we were the ones asked to edit?