Barely promoted

My pregnant sister-in-law

The younger of my two sisters-in-law is pregnant now, about six weeks behind me. She runs a tiny, struggling horse farm, mostly by herself as her husband drives many miles every day to his full-time job in the big city. She's legally blind, too. They announced at Christmas (while I was between my first and second betas) that she had just gone off the pill, and announced at New Year's that their efforts had been successful. I uncharitably cursed to myself: aside from the apparently instant fecundity, were we going to get only two weeks of undivided grandparent attention? (My MIL is an angel.) C'mon!

Their first ultrasound, expected to be past 8 weeks, turned out to be at mid-4-weeks. (Hmmm! One does have to wonder what happened there.) She's had awful, incapacitating morning sickness, but other than that things have progressed smoothly. Until now.

I don't know the root cause of her vision problems, but apparently things are getting worse in her less-bad eye. Her ophthamologist feels she needs immediate surgery to avert retinal detachment. Her OB has said yes—as long as it takes place before 24 weeks (???). Anesthesia will be local, and she'll go up to Labor and Delivery straight from the recovery room for a few hours of fetal monitoring.

I can't imagine making that decision: on the one hand, baby. On the other hand, what sight she has is crucial to her: with magnifiers and special lighting she can read, she can e-mail, she can stay connected to the world outside their isolated farm. I don't pray. But if I did...

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Am about to head off to F.'s wedding. Will stay with Beaker's lovely parents. Beaker will search their basement for relics of his childhood; we are hoping that the mildew will have spared some toys.

A dish not yet cold enough

Just over a year ago, our hometown clinic advised (as I'd feared they would) that we quit our IVF cycles and switch over to donor sperm & Clomid IUIs.

So then they sent us to a shrink to make sure we were okay with donor sperm, and the shrink pointed out that, if we wanted to do one more cycle someplace else, we should just go ahead and do it, so we went to Cornell, and, well. (Actually, if you've started reading recently, it all did get hairy for a while in November and December.)

I'll be back in Ohindinois in late June. For a variety of reasons, I don't have an OB there, and I'm really going to need one. Monday I called our old clinic looking for a referral to the giant OB/GYN practice next door (they share the ultrasound suite: yes, bitter IVF stimmers sit next to giant pregnant bellies in the waiting area!). Today I got a call back from Dr. Brash himself.

There exists an alternate universe in which I crowed immediately, "Remember how you didn't want us to fuck up your stats? Well, we went to doctors a lot more famous than you, bucko, and it worked when they tried!"

An opening

Before I tell you the rest, you have to promise me one thing: you must believe the box is real. It is, see, and the only reason I'm not posting a picture is that one of my officemates came back in the evening and I was too embarrassed to take one in front of him.

The box is full of monographs and offprints and notes from long-dead projects of mine that I'd been hoping to resurrect. I shipped it out here back in January. It's been sitting unopened on my desk ever since; along with the oversized computer monitor, it makes a wonderful barricade. I can't be seen from the hallway. Arriving officemates generally don't realize I'm in until I click the mouse, or turn a page.

Why not open the box? There's a nice bookcase next to my desk where the books could go. Most of the contents are standard references—useful for others, too. But no one else brought out any books, and I'm embarrassed to be different. Plus I've felt safe behind my little wall.

Today there were lots of extra visitors to the institute. More reason than usual to hide. Late in the afternoon, though, one of the directors (the one who's found me hiding before) came in to talk; let's call him Professor Cactus. He started by telling me (very nicely) why my pathetic little thoughts on a few silly issues we'd talked about before were probably not worth considering further, but that wasn't why he was there.

He's writing a book, along with some of his former grad students, and wants me to join the project. He likes the course materials up on my web site, thinks I could do some good for the exposition, and, well, they need warm bodies, if a draft is going to get done this summer. (This summer?! Can I spend June in Vancouver? He'll be there. Um. We'll see.)

OH MY GOD THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER. I have been so jealous, watching him with his former students, wondering why—despite the efforts of many well-meaning institutions—I've never had a professional mentor I can trust. I'm still sort of resentful of my graduate advisor making me pull out of a book project with someone else my third year in grad school (it took me a whole lot more years to finish, anyway...). The material is fabu. I'll need to learn a lot, but I sort of think I might have something to offer.

WHAT IF I FUCK IT UP? You know, I don't think my scholarly career can really go any further down, in terms of isolation and stalled output.

Beaker made the point a few weeks ago that Professor Cactus might well have been the one who originally pulled my application from the pile—that he might feel like he has a bit of a stake in whether my semester out here is worth anything to anyone. Or perhaps Professor Cactus is simply as thoughtful of a guy as he appears to be with others.

He called in some of the others on the project. One of my first questions was, how will this differ from the recent books by Smith and Jones? The Jones book was rapidly dismissed, but Smith was not so simple. Did anyone have it around?

You can see where this is going, can't you? There was a copy of Smith's book in the box. I knew there was one.

So I opened the box.

Saturated

The local Girl Scouts were out today, selling cookies from a card table in front of the local coffee shop. But they weren't selling official Girl Scout cookies. "We thought the normal ones were too unhealthy," said one scout, as she gestured towards the little cellophane bags of scorched lemon bars and flat macaroons. "So we baked these ourselves. Using pure butter."

Yet another peaceful ultrasound

Everything where it should be and appropriately sized/arranged, including the placenta. Feet are down where I feel kicks. Little labia clearly visible, about which the doctor was oddly sqeamish; the tech had pointed them out happily, but the doctor just focused in on the crotch cross-section and said, "I don't see anything sticking out!"

To be fair, the tech was clearly much, much better at wielding the probe. E.g., her pictures of the four chambers of the heart were lovely; he had to hunt for a while at extremely high resolution to even see a heartbeat. (Not like the guy works, at, um, a perinatal imaging clinic, or something? What does he do all day?)

Question for the day: why are so many of my friends who (unlike me) changed their names upon marriage so much more freaked out than I am by pink baby clothing?

I promise I won't sue

Here's most of a short article in today's Times:

Older patients with dementia who are given antipsychotic medicines are far more likely to die prematurely than those given dummy pills, federal drug regulators said Monday. The warning adds to growing worries about the safety of the widely prescribed drugs.

The Food and Drug Administration said that it would now require manufacturers of the medicines to place black-box warnings - the agency's most severe - on the labels of all the drugs. In 2003, the agency required manufacturers to add a warning about an increased risk of diabetes from antipsychotic medications.

Zyprexa and Symbyax from Eli Lilly, Risperdal from Johnson & Johnson, Seroquel from AstraZeneca, Abilify from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Clozaril from Novartis and Geodon from Pfizer are all affected by the warning.

The drugs belong to a class of medicines developed since 1989 that are supposed to be safer than the older class of medicines for psychosis, like Haldol. In high doses, Haldol and drugs like it can cause a debilitating condition called tardive dyskinesia, a lifelong affliction that can involve uncontrollable trembling, tics and jerky movements.

Doctors have become so comfortable with the safety of the newer medicines that they are now among the biggest selling in the world, with some physicians using them to treat a wide range of conditions, including schizophrenia, depression and dementia in the elderly. Indeed, some psychiatrists prescribe cocktails of antipsychotics to patients with persistent mental problems.

Zyprexa is the biggest drug expense for many state Medicaid programs, the health insurance for the poor.

But the safety of the pills has come under increasing scrutiny. Studies now suggest that the newer drugs are only slightly less likely to cause tardive dyskinesia, and worries about other side effects are mounting.

The Food and Drug Administration said that it had analyzed the results of 17 placebo-controlled trials involving the drugs, which are known as atypical antipsychotics. The agency found that elderly patients with dementia who were given the pills were 1.6 to 1.7 times as likely to die as those given placebos.

The causes of death varied, although most died of heart-related problems like heart failure or infections like pneumonia, the drug agency said.

My mother was on at least four of these during the last 7 years, and at least two of them most of her last year, although the antipsychotics had been stopped and restarted briefly shortly before her death—when they were getting very worried about her weight loss.

Her doctors were aware of the rising concerns about these drugs: her blood sugar was being monitored, for instance. Even on the newer antipsychotics she had odd neurological symptoms (e.g. her mouth "worked" almost all the time), but no one ever pinned down a cause. (I don't know why they didn't think it was tardive dykinesia, but they didn't.) They often gave her old-line drugs like Haldol, too, of course.

No autopsy, no cause of death.

The best day ever, the worst day ever, and the halfway point

INTRODUCTION. Dreaming in Keynote

I spent most of the week preparing my very first projected-from-a-laptop presentation. Thursday night my sweat-soaked teeth-grinding pregnant dreams featured little animations, keyboard shortcut errors, and a lot of swear words.

I. The chocolate factory

My college roommate F. flew out to visit. She's getting married in a few weeks. I blew off work on Friday and we toured a chocolate factory. Afterwards we sat in their cafe for hours and talked, well, like we used to, way back when, except about weddings and babies and so on. (I try not to scare friends who are setting out to get pregnant at thirty-six or so, but sometimes it's hard. Look: I only ever got to walk on the end of that road, folks, and I don't know much about the rest.)

We spent the afternoon cruising thrift shops for layette stuff (hellooooooo Petit Bateau onesies for $3.50!). In the evening, we met two other close college friends and assorted spouses for extreme tapas (crispy calamari with jalapeno-spiked batter, anyone?) Three quarters of my wedding party, folks. All in one place. All at interesting moments in our lives: weddings, newly arrived or impending babies, extensive house renovations.

II. "Turn, asshole, turn!"

After dinner, Beaker was drunk and F. was really jetlagged. I had to drive the car up the hill, people. The stick shift car. We've been here three months and this is only the fourth time I've done it. The light at the steepest intersection is on a sensor, and a car was stopped there already with its left turn signal on. The light changed as we got close, and there was no opposing traffic, but the car just sat still. "Turn, damnit, turn!" I shouted, and Beaker and F. laughed the raucous laughter of the intoxicated and the exhausted, respectively. The car finally moved, and I got through the intersection without having to hill start. It felt like a blessing.

III. "Kick, damnit, kick!"

Saturday I woke up at 6:30 to join a carpool down to the one-day conference. We arrived quite early. I found a bathroom immediately. Icky brownish mucous on the toilet paper, with little threads of red. OH MY GOD. I hadn't spotted at all since implantation. I drank two glasses of water and two little cups of orange juice and shook through the first talk. "Kick, damnit, kick!" I screamed deep inside. I was stuck two hours away from home, and the carpool wasn't going back until after the conference dinner. My cellphone was just about dead. It was six hours until my own talk. I didn't know what I should do. And then my doctoral advisor walked in, halfway through the lecture (cue scary music). Would he stay for my talk? Would I feel worse if he did, or if he didn't?

As my bladder filled, I felt a few kicks against it. At the second tea break, I asked the organizer if there was any place I could go to put my feet up during the lunch break: a lounge? a library? He shrugged: it's an urban campus, and they have a real problem with vagrants.

The morning talks by junior people were all sort of sucky, which made me feel better. But my advisor asked all the speakers abusive questions, which made me feel bad for them and anxious for myself.

After my fluid binge, I went to the bathroom during every single break. No more spotting.

IV. The homeless guys have good taste

During the breaks, people collected in cliques by school and age. I'm not local, and I'm awkwardly in between young and well-established. My advisor made eye contact once, smiled, and went to talk to the important people. By lunch I was a total basket case. I grabbed food, wolfed it down at a table of cheerful post-doc boys, and set off to find a couch.

The campus was nearly dead. It's a commuter school, and not much happens on weekends (I hear that attendees at other Saturday meetings there have been mugged in broad daylight). The student union was open, though, and there are padded benches along its hallways. On the upper and lower levels these were mostly occupied by sleeping homeless guys, but they were empty on the main floor. I hooked a wrist through my computer bag strap and lay down for a little while.

I shivered through the other afternoon talks. Almost fell asleep, too, so I had a few tablespoons of coffee before my own. Which went fine. It was snappier and better looking than most that day. My advisor stayed, asked one relatively harmless question, and disappeared during the applause. Afterwards four people came up and engaged me on the content—only one was a crackpot!

EPILOGUE. Still more excellent food

At the conference dinner, I somehow ended up seated by exactly the people I wanted to sit with. It was fun, especially as the eccentricity of the corporate sponsor rep to my left grew more obvious. The eager grad student to my right, either totally oblivious or exceedingly polite, recommended strenuous local hikes and hot yoga instructors (ambiguity intentional). The curries and pad thai were the best I've had out here. During the carpool back, full of other ergonomists working at the institute along with me, I admitted to being pregnant.

Sunday F. and Beaker and I had a panini brunch with one set of college friends, then wandered through some lovely gardens, and finally had dinner with another set of college friends. Their children were much more cheerful and engaging than usual. F. told stories and sang songs. We made the current Cook's Illustrated orange chicken and a raspberry tart; there were little cookies cut from the leftover pastry.

We left F. over there, since it's much closer to the airport. You know, I haven't met her fiance yet? But oh, I'm looking forward to that wedding.

Today is 20 weeks. There has been no more spotting, and the kicks have been steady and getting stronger. Neither feet nor hands are swollen. My level 2 ultrasound is Tuesday. I will see Dr. Pippi-Poisson Thursday. And, I promise, if anything else remote sketchy happens before then, I will call her immediately.

Questions

ITEM: Wouldn't everything we think about raising infants be different, wouldn't all the arguments be different, wouldn't all the dogmas be different, if even a few people were able to remember back then? (Without, like, hypnosis.)

And wouldn't everything be even more different if everyone were able to remember back then?

ITEM: Should I be more annoyed that my employer broadcast my forthcoming maternity leave to the entire faculty (in the middle of a long list of personnel actions that contained, sadly, no other worthwhile gossip), or that no one on campus wrote afterwards? Hmmmmmm.

ITEM: Our sublet features a couple of houseplants which outweigh us by a fair margin. I don't mind them; Beaker hates them. Yet it is Beaker who waters them every week, ranting all the while about the mold festering under the pots. Recently he spent all morning on a ladder polishing the leaves of the largest, which has a little scale problem. (He did let himself prune the dangling roots that get caught in his hair.)

What does this bode for future dependents of ours?

ITEM: Don't unicyclists have to follow the rules of the road? Even when they're, like, really late to yoga class? (I saw a guy with a purple mat under his arm blow through a stop sign this morning. Chee!)

ITEM: Why won't the damn blue (but dark blue, really it's almost black) helicopter out there stop circling overhead?

No bus

Twenty-five years ago the New York public transit system went on strike. And I missed school.

Elementary school alternated good years and bad years. Second grade? Bad. New school, unpleasant teacher, incomprehensible math (they taught us to add and subtract in base 3 before base 10), and worsening undiagnosed myopia. Third grade? Fabulous. Fourth? Not so good. Fifth? Wonderful. Having my two best friends in my class, especially. We played freeze tag, highly strategic freeze tag, every day at recess.

I can synchronize family events with my academic progress, although there's no emotional alignment of the memories. My mother's breakdown, the one that got me sent to live with Ray, was in the middle of second grade. Ray moved to a larger apartment early in third. And my grandparents got a court order blocking me from going back to Ray's during Christmas break of fifth grade.

I had to finish out the year. The school only went up through fifth grade and I was doing so well there. So my mother took me down to school every day. We walked to the station, took the train to Grand Central, took a bus downtown. After school, she met me at the door and we reversed the journey. I think it had all been cleared with the principal.

Annajane was thirty-seven, only three years older than I am now. I have no idea what she did between 9:00 and 3:00 for those six months. She was less depressed than she'd been when she first gotten out of the hospital, and she didn't cry most days. But she was very thin and had already lost a couple of front teeth. I could tell she was different from the other mothers. Back then, even in New York City, most fifth-graders weren't met by parents every day; there was little risk of her being revealed to other adults, but I was still embarrassed.

She had a pastel cotton shirt, one wide stripe in each of pink and yellow and blue and green, with white cuffs and collar, that it seems like she must have worn almost every day that spring. I had a shirt with narrow stripes in the same colors and she liked the near match. I found her widde-striped shirt, worn to indecent translucency, every time I had to pack up her things last year; she'd taken it to both adult homes.

After looking at a modern account, I suspect I didn't miss much school, and probably didn't need to miss any. Apparently it was spring break for part of the strike. The long-haul trains kept running, and the two miles from the train terminal to the school would have been quite feasible to walk—I did a comparable distance many, many days in high school, saving the subway fare to supplement my allowance.

But, just like my family would never have considered taking taxis in Manhattan, we never even considered walking. My mother never learned to drive, and my grandfather took the only car to work, anyway. The bus was the right way to go, but there was no bus. So my mother and I stayed home.

Welcome Inside Higher Ed readers!

And, sorry, but this blog isn't what Diana Rhoten's piece implies it might be. My "barely" refers to how long it's been since the decision was made not, not to any personal or institutional insecurity I might be experiencing about the status. I'm not about to leave for greener pastures ex-academe. I'm enjoying my sabbatical in a wamer climate, and will happily go back to my "real" job in a couple of months. And, actually, I enjoy my narrow specialization, too, and am grateful to live in a society rich enough that a few people get to pursue it.

If anything, I'm an example of another overdiscussed phenomenon: women who are, uh, taking it easy, uh, by not pursuring high-powered university careers. I work at a liberal arts college, and I sought such a job in part because I knew I'd have an unusual level of family obligations the whole way along: chronically mentally ill mother, chronically physically ill husband, etc. etc. (really, all that is what most of this blog is about). Also because I care enough about teaching that I want my work on it to be considered in the formal reward structure, but that's a whole other story.

Go check out the Invisible Adjunct archives (oddly, not linked from Rhoten's piece!). Follow her links for a more relevant story (although still one very different from the outright peculiar one Rhoten tries to tell).