Keeping The Romance Alive

Even after six years of marriage, I can still surprise my spouse! 

Today, I caught three baby bunnies with my bare hands.  

(They were in my garden.)

(They're in a prairie now.  Hop away, little bunnies!  Also, mama bunnies, STOP having babies in my FENCED IN GARDEN!!)

Panic Meter Set Too Low

This week, I cut myself while cooking.  You must understand that our knives are heavy steel and extremely sharp.  So, I cut through my thumbnail and sliced a nice bit of thumb. 


And then I stopped the bleeding and superglued it back together, stabilized by gauze cannibalized from a bandaid. 


Afterwards, it occurred to me that perhaps this was not a normal response.

Hoping

Someone I know had a stillbirth a few months ago, followed by a recent miscarriage. We went to grad school together, but I haven't seen her in years.  She and her spouse are very, very far away, and there's little I can do for them in practical terms. 

So I made a donation in memory of her babies, and emailed her to say, I'm thinking of you both, I'm sorry for your losses, and I hope there are better times ahead.

I hope it was the right thing to do.  I hope it eases her heart just a tiny, tiny bit.

I don't know what else to say.

What Urge Is This

I don't know why, but today I had an overwhelming urge to cook something complicated.  So I:

• Went to the park and picked grape leaves
• Cooked them
• Went to a different park and picked mint leaves
• Made chicken broth from odds and ends compulsively saved in the freezer
• Made rice with the chicken broth
• Made it into dolmades
• Made a nondairy yogurt sauce and baked fish in it
• Served the entire ensemble to my toddler, who ate two bites of grape leaves, two bowls of rice, two bites of fish, and three bowls of weird almond yogurt

The end.

Excuses, Excuses

My mother-in-law's latest excuse for not coming up after Tot 2 is born?  "But.. it'll be the first week of November!  There might be snow!"

They live in Ohio.  And even here, in November, there's never snow on the ground. We're talking the equivalent of driving in a drizzle, people.  

Lame excuses aside, I don't think it's sunk in for her yet: when we said "We are no longer driving to Ohio with the child/children, as of now, until the youngest is about 4".... we really meant it.

Vagaries of Memory

Do you ever look back at a memory and wonder "Did that really happen?"

Mine was from college.  The pot-smoking hippie crowd used to hold a variety of strange concerts.  One night, a bluegrass band played one of the best shows I've ever heard, in this tiny rebuilt pine-scented barn in the middle of the Great Lawn.  And in my memory, they were Old Crow Medicine Show (a now-extremely-famous modern bluegrass band). 

Later, I thought that couldn't possibly be right.  Why on earth would they play a college town, population 2500?  But I just asked the Internet. And they were really there.  That really happened.

Annoyance By Proxy

Dr. S's boss, as I have mentioned before, is a mildly psychotic tinpot tyrant. 

They are trying to get a paper published.  They submitted it; the rejection came back today.  They agreed to consider their options for a day.  Dr. S and I talked about it; he would have to do a lot of reformatting, but he wants to submit it to Appropriate Respected Journal, one of whose editors has already told him, in person, at a conference, that they would be very interested.  He went downstairs to email his boss and try to boot her into action (her turnaround time for editing papers is eight months because she is insane; normal people do this in two to four weeks).

She had ALREADY submitted it to Third Tier Completely Inappropriate Journal- without Dr. S's consent.  If it is published in TTCIJ, his job-application prospects go down by an order of magnitude.  Also, it's a journal full of unicycle-repair diagrams, and this paper is about how to grow orange trees in cold climates: completely inappropriate.  He's upset, I'm upset, and I don't see any way this is going to end well.  He can and will withdraw the submission, but then it needs to go somewhere else, and will she take another eight months just for spite?  Probably. 

And people ask me why I don't miss academic science. 

Birth Memories, 5

The midwives fish the placenta out of the birth tub and show it to me.  It looks like a cooked jellyfish mated with a large steak.  "Do you want it?" they ask.

"NO!!" I say, and completely involuntarily, I put out my hand to push away the idea.  I am grateful that it functioned well for nine months; now we are both done with it.  Please, go set it on fire somewhere else. 

Birth Memories, 4

I am having back labor, because the baby is posterior.  I am sitting in the tub, in a great deal of pain.  My mother is somewhere in the room, crying.  My spouse is sitting next to the tub, looking worried, possibly also crying. 

I cannot possibly handle anyone else but me being upset in this moment. 

I wrap myself in three towels, ask the student midwife for some ice cubes, and hide in the bathroom, where I stay for the next two hours.  I come back out right before the baby is born.

Birth Memories, 3

I am in the neuro-ophthalmologist's office, waiting to be squeezed in between 80-year-olds with cataracts.  People almost never have neuro-opthalmological emergencies without pointy objects or head trauma.  However, I have managed!  I am SPECIAL.

I am having contractions every ten minutes... nine.  Eight and a half.  Dr. S asks if he should tell the receptionist that I am in labor.  "I don't KNOW!" I say, and bend over the chair.  I am, like most women in labor, neither fully rational nor fully there.  He looks at my mother, who says YES!  Now! Nownownow!, then goes and talks to the receptionist.

Thirty seconds later, the doctor and all five nurses pour out of the exam rooms, looking extremely worried.  They offer me food, water, a washcloth, a chair, and some tylenol.  They bite their nails.  Thirty minutes later, we walk back out the door, reassured that I am not, at least for now, going blind.

Birth Memories, 2

The baby's been born.  I'm laying in bed with him, and the midwife asks, "How's your vision?"

"I can see my hand, and I can see you, and I can see the canopy outside the window, but I can't focus past that," I say.  And everyone laughs, because apparently, it's foggy as a London pea-souper and nobody can see outside. 

Later, I don't even remember this.

Birth Memories, 1

I once promised Belle I wouldn't post a birth story (plus, it's pretty boring: I went into labor, eight hours later my kid came out, then there was a lot of lidocaine, the end).  But I keep reading Bionic Mama's highly entertaining and only mildly horrifying birth story and remembering bits and pieces.  So here's one:

I'm in the giant tub at the birth center.  Or maybe I'm leaning on the bed, or in the shower, or hiding in the bathroom; I wasn't exactly present, if you know what I mean.  There is a midwife, in her late forties, immensely experienced and a little sarcastic, and a sweet, blonde student midwife.  "Is the baby coming soon?" I ask the older midwife.

"No," she says, "it's going to be a little while."

"Can't you just LIE to me?" I say, exasperated.

"No," she says, "I generally make it a practice not to lie to my patients."

"You could make an exception here," I say.

Much later, I ask her again.  "Yes," she says, "very soon."

"Well, now I know it's true, if you finally said it."

Public Service Announcement

It turns out that Advair Diskus does, in fact, contain medically relevant amounts of milk protein.  Well!  I'm so glad we settled that empirically!  Nothing like some itchy ears and headache to round out the weekend.   Turns out that one should NOT inhale finely powdered substances to which one is severely allergic!

I have calculated: there are no more than 10 micrograms casein per dose.*  However, I have also had bad reactions to eating no more than one milligram of milk protein.  I calculated that, too, from past experience. 

It also turns out that the contraindications-and-interactions database used by most medical practices does not list 'milk' as an ingredient in this medication. (The company includes it, as I said before, at the very bottom of the labelling.)  I would complain, but true dairy allergy is so rare in adults that they'd probably ignore me.


Let me add (though I've probably said it before): it drives me crazy when I say "I'm allergic to milk" and people say "Oh, you're lactose intolerant."  No, that is not what I said.  I said allergic.  Wheezing, coughing, itching, hives.  Nobody gets "Oh, so you hate kitties?" when they say "I'm allergic to cats."  The pharmacist informed me that a lactose-intolerant person would probably need to inhale 3 grams lactose to get a reaction.  That's nice.  ALLERGIC.  Wheezing, coughing, itching, goddamn HIVES, people.

Also, let me add that this same random Giant Chain Pharmacy pharmacist, even though he clearly thought I was off my rocker, called the company three times until he got a real answer, then called me back, then called my doctor's office and got it fixed.  Bless his responsible little heart.


*If I had been willing to stay on the phone with GSK for, oh, forever, I'm sure I could have eventually gotten hold of someone who had the spec sheet for the !@#$ lactose.  (I estimated using this.)  However, it's much like calling bio suppliers: you get a receptionist, then a person who's qualified to answer the equivalent of "I can't find the RETURN key!", then two people reading off same spec sheet you're already holding, then someone in the wrong department, then put on hold for ten minutes, and then, maybe, a half-hour later, a competent tech. 

A Little Learning

This morning, I read through all the prescribing information on my New Magical Asthma Meds- you know, that enormously long sheet in tiny print that they include for the delectation of the medical professionals and professionally curious among us. At the very, very end, it says "Contains lactose (contains milk proteins)."

I have a severe dairy-protein allergy.  So what I need to know is: does it have a legally-relevant quantity, or a biochemically-relevant quantity?

The pharmacist is confused why I am asking this to start.  The company says "Ahh... it's USP grade?"  My doctor says "Well, you took it before [NO, I took the HFA-propelled version] and the lactose protein* probably isn't relevant."

None of these people has inspired me with confidence.


*Lactose isn't a protein.

Atypical

Sunday, I was talking to my mother.  "We sent you a little something," she said.  "Let us know when you get it."

(Usually this means a toy truck or a pattern or a toddler cup.)

Today, I opened an envelope from my parents.  It had a check for $1000.  I nearly had a heart attack.

This evening, I called my parents and said, thank you very much, and also, have you been ABDUCTED BY ALIENS recently?


(My parents are nice, normal, financially stable, responsible human beings who gave us this with no expectations attached. "Your father's business has been doing really well," Mom said, "and we thought it would be fun to send it to you!"  Well, we think it's fun too.  Just unexpected.)

Dear 4th of July,

Now that I have small children, I hate you.  Next year, I am going to Canada. Or I am getting a magical device that will allow me to log your address, then wake YOU up at 2 AM, 4 AM, and 6 AM.


With fury and too many fireworks,


A New Canadian.

Dear Spouse,

No, you cannot finish your lunch before you take the toddler to the bathroom. 

Sincerely,


Your Loving Wife