Barely promoted

The good news and the bad news

The good news: the book is in!

Even better, there was no co-author-on-co-author violence in the final days, despite the sudden (brief! it came back up! oh my god!) collapse of our version control system.

The bad news: this grading thing. So I just started. Like, for the semester. This afternoon. They're way ahead of me: seven assignments in, and another coming tomorrow. Wheeeee!

Reanimation

My grandmother has tuberculosis. Not unheard of in the very elderly, although more common in immigrants. Generally it's a reactivation of a previous primary infection. Since, in cases like this, it was acquired, say, 50 years ago, it's not usually drug-resistant.

I asked my grandmother 3 years ago, when Miss T. was small, if she had nursed her three children. Yes for my mother, her first. No for the other two. The doctors had told her not to, since she tested positive for TB. That would have been in 1947 and 1952.

My uncle told me tonight that my grandmother had had a friend at high school (a tiny Catholic girls' school in the midwest) who died of TB. "She was just fifteen. She sat next to her in class every day! There were just twelve girls in the class, and the rest were pallbearers." That would have been in about 1930.
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My ultrasound yesterday went well. No heartbeat, but that's unsurprising at 5w6d. One gestational sac with fetal pole and yolk sac, placed high up in the uterus just like it should be. Perhaps the ghost of another, a quarter the size. "You might get a little spotting with that."
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I promised myself that I wouldn't even look at maternity clothing until after we see a heartbeat (it's sort worth worrying about: I have a midwestern winter of teaching coming up, versus the California sabbatical of last time). But then Garnet Hill sends me a catalog full of stuff like this and this. What are they thinking?

Sense of doom

My grandmother started coughing up blood last night. She's in the hospital now. She's had a bunch of scans. The staff are wearing masks around her, because "it might be TB." Ricky and Marina are both there with her today.

Ricky will be able to stay with her there tomorrow. See, he got fired from the taxi company. A second accident was enough to convince even the high school buddy who had taken him on (and kept him on for over seven years) that he wasn't worth the trouble. (The first accident? Somehow the accelerator hit the floor, as a six-year-old was trying to climb into the taxi. Marina told me about that one, and about how her painkillers were going missing, when I was last there. It was an unfortunate conjunction, as she was only too aware.)

This means that they're living off Marina's income. It also means that they have no transportation but buses and trains. Ricky asked the ambulance to take her to the hospital that's sort of on a bus line that goes by the apartment. Conveniently, Marina is working further down the same bus line. She'll be putting in an evening shift with Nana.

The detail that killed me? They've put a baby monitor into Nana's bedroom. That's how she got Ricky up when she started coughing.
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I re-checked Cornell's stats today. In my age group, 31.3 percent of cycles result in pregnancies; 20.6 percent in live births. What exactly do they mean by "pregnancy"? Gestational sac in the uterus, actually. So that's taking out the chemicals and the ectopics already. And I'm not yet past that threshold -- and just looking at that final number makes it seem like too much, like I cannot be that lucky, it is too damn low to allow hope, why did I do all of this again?
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Dr. Wow asked the publisher to extend our deadline by a week. It's a fucking good thing he's thousands of miles away from me. I am currently regenerating some very slow pictures and stewing.
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A ray of light? Radio Nigel. That's my 80's. (Ah, if only someone would stream WLIR's Screamers of the Week...)

5w0d and counting...

One week later, we're at 2239. A fine number, and entirely comparable to last time (this is a day earlier, again). Progesterone today? Unknown, but the the Saturday number had made it in and was "fine" at 31.

So that's it for bloodwork. Dr. D has changed his mind about early ultrasounds. Last time I had to wait until 7 weeks. Now he wants to check for ectopics, so I'm going in in six days and then again a week and a half later to look for a heartbeat.

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The bloom is off the new semester. Well -- it was never really on, I suppose, with the 2ww and all, and the book manuscript coming back from the copy editor and due on MONDAY FUCKING MONDAY OH MY GOD. 

So I haven't been doing a very good job of prepping, or grading, or being aware that my students exist as separate people with, like, names and opinions and needs and stuff.

For my upper level elective, it's been okay. I'm terribly lucky that it's huge and filled with enthusiastic students -- that makes everything so much easier.

But ergonomics-for-the-awkward? The class I have never been happy with, and neither have been its desperate distribution-requirement-fulfilling students? That I was supposed to redesign last summer, but then the book, the fucking book, and two goddamn cycles ate up all the time?

It could be worse -- and has been. But today I got e-mail from a student too, um, tired to come to class, and then e-mail from another that I'd offended in lecture, and -- and I don't want to get defensively depressed about it this early, really I don't, it's so unhealthy to do that, but it's going to be hard not to.

I'm really sort of obsessing about the second e-mail. If I'd been able to focus, really focus as I prepped, I don't think there would have been a problem.

I'm still maintaining faith that after the manuscript goes OUT THE FUCKING DOOR I'll be able to catch up. But so much of the quality of the interaction is determined by what happens at the outset, and I have let some of them down already.

Strangely consistent

So, last time, I had a doubling time of something crazy like 34 hours during the first week. I blamed it on switching labs between the two tests. Cornell claimed to be worried about multiples, which is sort of crazy; you change the initial conditions, but not the mechanism of increase, and Betabase shows (as you'd expect) that the doubling times aren't all that different.

I had blood run again this morning, 14dp3dt. God only knows when they'll get the progesterone number back (a week from Thursday?), but they managed to run the HCG in-house (like they're supposed to! today's phlebotomist didn't even believe me when I told her how they'd sent the last one out!), and it's up to 437. Which gives me a crazy-crazy-crazy doubling time of 28 hours and change.

I suppose that, technically, I did switch labs again... only 10 miles apart, not hundreds. Still.

And the number is...

... 72, at 11dp3dt, which is totally comparable to the 100 at 12dp3dt that we got before. (They like above 50.) Progesterone at 13 is a little low (they'd like 20), so I'm going to have to double my dose (ow!). Last time this worked I also doubled the dose at this stage, but that was because they never got a number back. The nurse first said come back for bloodwork in a week, then seemed to waffle about my going in earlier, maybe, because of the progesterone, so I volunteered for Saturday. Dr. D. used to do first ultrasound at 7 weeks, but now prefers 5 and a half; have scheduled something for 5w6d at local clinic, but am sort of seriously considering flying to NY...

Greater than zero

(I couldn't take another night of sniffing my own underwear in abject ignorance.)

NO REALLY, PLEASE STOP FUCKING WITH ME

The lab at the local hospital took my blood at 8:05 this morning... and no-one's touched it since then, because the phlebotomist skipped the "STAT" on the order sheet while she entered the tests into the computer system.

(Guess how many phone calls it took to figure that out!)

The Cornell nursing station stops answering the phone at 5:00, so no results for me today.

Wooo-hooo!

What I am chanting to myself

1. The Internet doesn't know whether I'm pregnant.

2. If there were any consistently indicative symptoms, any at all, then there would be something quantifiable somewhere in the body, and medical science would have figured out how to exploit that to test earlier.

3. I am taking drugs that make me feel pregnant.

4. I am taking drugs that have fooled me EVERY SINGLE TIME. (Well, except once.)

5. Ordinary people have no symptoms at this point.

6. Most of the possible symptoms are things than can easily be brought on by, say, anxiety.

7. Plausible probability: 35 to 45 percent, said Dr. D., after January's failure but before June's cancellation. So let's move down from there. That puts me waaaaaaay below 50 percent.

8. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

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I'm not entirely sure whether I'll get my blood taken tomorrow morning or not. It was a day late both times before--Cornell does 11dp3dt, unless that's on a weekend, and it was---and I teach a lot on Wednesday, not at all on Thursday.

But, who am I kidding. I can turn my phone off, I might leave it at home with Beaker...

DEAR GOD: STOP FUCKING WITH ME

I got a little nosebleed right before class today.

The department secretary sits right outside my office. "You know when I got nosebleeds? When I was pregnant. Just turned my head and it'd start pouring out."

Ya think that someone who sees me walking past 25 times a day might have noticed the extra eight pounds in my gut and how often I'm going to pee?

FUCK THE PIO.

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My favorite committee from last year? The one where we got stuff done? This year it's loaded with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs with grudges against the institution and each other.

ROAR.

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The book manuscript, marked up, came back today. It's so close to going out the fucking door... but why couldn't it have come in on Monday, after Miss T.'s birthday party? About which I am shitting bricks. It's her third, but our first party...