Mollywogger

Final day of Clomid.  Haven't had a single side effect yet (even Hal agrees that I am not the SuperBitch he was fearfully anticipating).  Do those generally hit after the pills have been taken?

In other news, poor Pru and her baby girl are not home yet.  Pru is in excellent health, never fear -- mothers are generally kept in the hospital until their babies are released in the UK.  Little Enid (no, she didn't actually decide to name her child Enid) has beaten her jaundice, but the doctors suspect that she may have a heart murmur and wanted to keep her one more night after looking at her EKG so they can monitor it in the future.  Hopefully, if all goes well, Pru and Enid are supposed to be home today!

I chatted with The Dude yesterday and he said that he had both jaundice and a heart murmur as a baby, so we are to place the blame for Pru and Enid's slow release squarely on him.

Oh, my dear friends.

Ever time I sit down to start a post, something else happens. Each time my hypothetical post grows longer, I get more overwhelmed by the prospect of actually creating it.  I am practically tied to my chair today, because I know that if I don’t post something soon my brain might actually explode.

So!  When last we left off we had bought a condo, I had publicly admitted my infatuation with Stephen Merchant, my husband had once again warned me of the upcoming flu epidemic, and I was gearing up for my first RE visit.  These last few weeks have been just PACKED.

I’ll start with the appointment.  Doc T ’n’ B looks like a doctor on a soap opera – tanned, glistening white teeth, deep set blue eyes, salt and pepper hair.  Hal came with me to the appointment, which turned out to be about an hour of chatting (no clothes were removed – no, not even the Doc's).  He called my husband a “superstar” in the sperm-production area (multiple times, in fact) and drew us numerous diagrams of the female reproductive system.  I made it clear that finances were a concern for us, and he made it clear that decisions on how to proceed would be entirely in our hands.

Before treatment, however, he recommended two more bits of testing for me: day three FSH and estradiol tests, and an HSG.  After that, we can try 3-4 cycles of Clomid with monitoring, and then see where to go from there (as a side note, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my insurance company just added clomiphene citrate to its drug formulary list, meaning that I’ll only be paying a few dollars a month for Clomid).

Cycle day one was Sunday the 28^th, so I went in on Tuesday the 30^th for my blood tests.  They came back as normal as can be – FSH was 6.8 (doctors like to see under 10), estradiol was 49 (25-75 is normal).  HSG is scheduled for this Thursday.  If it is normal, we still remain entirely unexplained.  As many bloggers have said before, that’s both good and bad – good in that I won’t have blocked tubes or abnormal anatomy, bad in that we will still have no clue what the fuck the problem is.  But of course, I’m jumping ahead of myself in saying that.  I’ll let you know what the verdict is on Thursday.

In other news, paperwork for the new condo has been flying back and forth between us, our realtor, and our mortgage counselor.  We are now a scant 19 days away from our closing date (yeah.  HOLY SHIT.) and have yet to begin packing.  Totally, entirely overwhelming.  All I’ve done so far to prepare for the move is order new address labels and dream about having cable and HBO all for my very own (incidentally, we finally got our hands on season 2 of Deadwood last night and watched the first three episodes.  Bliss.)    So, another reason why this next month will be busy.

Life was also shaken up when I was offered and accepted the job that I interviewed for a few weeks ago!  I’ll still be a state employee, but I’ll finally be working in a library, doing something more in line with what I want to do with my life.  Exciting, and also overwhelming (how many times have I used that word in this post so far?  Seriously.)  I start on July 10^th, and before then I have to document everything that I do at my current job so that the employee who takes my place doesn’t have to start with absolutely nothing (as I had to do when I began this job four years ago).  So, there’s that to do.

Also, some sad news for my little family.  Our darling little blue dilute-tortoiseshell kitty, Stella, has always had a bit of a limp – she had some sort of old injury from when she was a kitten which led to osteoarthritis of the joint (you can see her slightly wonky front right leg in this picture).  Lately, the limp has worsened and she began hopping around on three legs, so we brought her in to the vet.  Unfortunately, the joint has deteriorated to the point where there is no joint anymore.  The poor girl has bones rubbing against each other with no joint to keep them in place.  So, on Wednesday morning we’re bringing Stella in to have her leg amputated.  We feel so sorry our girl.

AND!  Went in a few weeks ago to have my titanium implant put in to my upper jaw (mentioned here) and guess what?!  There wasn’t enough bone there!  So instead of an implant, I ended up having to have more cow bone put into my jaw!  I swear, this will never end.  At this point, I won’t have an actual tooth until December.  Ridiculous.

I’m sorry that I seem to have lost much of my wit while I’m struggling to keep sane over here – thanks for sticking with me while I try to pull myself together.  My sense of humor will return in approximately August.  I hope.

Me: Hello?

Her: Hi Molly!  It's Tammi!  How are you?!

(Niceties follow.  Then . . . )

Her: So, are you pregnant yet?!

Me: No.

Her: I AM!!!

(Very polite, excited exclamations, a flurry of questions, etc.)

Her: Yeah, we had stopped trying (nota bene: they tried for about 4 months) and it just happened!  We were so surprised!

(At which point I'm thinking, "If she fucking tells me to just relax, I swear I'll cut her."  Luckily, she steered clear of that, the most damning of all clichés.)

End of conversation:

Her: So you'll have to get pregnant right away so our kids can grow up together!

Me: Huh.  I'll get right on that.

Hmph.

Now, she's generally a great friend, and quite fun to hang out with when she's not intoxicated, so no name-calling, please.  BUT -- if you were announcing a pregnancy to your friend whom you KNEW had been trying to conceive for 11 months, would you have used that tactic?  Yeah.  I didn't think so.

I love this new study by the British Cheese Board regarding how cheese effects the quality of your sleep and even the type of dreams you have.  And I love cheese.

I've also been tagged by Nico to complete this fun little assignment:

THE RULES:
1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five people to do the same.

The 5th sentence of my 23rd post was a bit of a list:

"A British survey of 103 Roman Catholic priests, Anglican bishops and Protestant ministers/pastors showed that:

-97% do not believe the world was created in six days.
-80% do not believe in the existence of Adam and Eve."

Illustrating, of course, the different courses that Christianity has taken in America and Britain.

In return, I'm tagging Pru, Dooney, Manuela, Jenn, and mm.

Damn it, now I'm hungry for cheese.

. . . then evidently my heart's dream is to see Manuela baked into a birthday cake.

I've been put on Trazodone (for some reason, I can't say that word without adopting an ugly, scary monster voice)  to help me sleep through the night.  Lately, I've been waking up about 4 or 5 times a night, and sometimes lying awake for an hour before finally dropping off again.  The Trazodone has been doing its job, and I've been sleeping well lately.

However.

My dreams this past week have been seriously fucked up.  In one of them, I was the First Lady (my husband, the president, was Sala Baker, the guy that plays the big scary Uruk-hai/Sauron on Lord of the Rings -- which means my dreams aren't even constitutional, since he's from New Zealand), and I was infinitely excited that becoming First Lady meant that I would probably get free movie passes.  In another, I had to sit through a gut-wrenchingly horrid rendition of Carmen, with Kirsten Dunst playing the title role (UGH!)  All I could do was smugly muse on how much better I would have been.

However, the bizarre nocturnal brain exercises also gave me my fourth dream about a fellow blogger.  Previously, I had had dreams about Julie at alittlepregnant (namely, I was walking through her house and was slightly horrified to find that she had framed copies of all of her blog posts in every room of her house), Deborah at The Trying Game (though I can't for the life of me remember what it was) and Heather at dooce (she was performing a duet with Jason Mraz on the Tonight Show).  Last week I was gifted with a dream about the lovely Manuela.

I'll refrain from telling most of it, as it's quite long-winded.  Short story: brother-in-law and his wife comandeer a helicopter and start randomly kidnapping people, tying them up, and hiding them in a church basement.  Manuela was one of those people.  Later, at a party we're throwing for all of the captives to help them forget the fact that they've been starving and wallowing in their own waste for 3 days, I suddenly come upon a cake box with an intestine sticking out of it.  Of course, I started pulling on it (because, really, when you see an intestine sticking out of a box, isn't pulling on it the first thing you want to do?), and kept pulling until I got to the end of it.  A note was attached to the end, which read:

"I've been baked into this cake.  Please either dig the rest of me out of  this cake and put me back together, or just kill me, because I won't live very long without my intestines. -- Manuela"

So I open the box (my brother-in-law has shown up to help at this point), and we start pulling out bits of Manuela (I expressly remember pulling out one of her eyeballs) and put her back together, and once she's fully assembled, she says, "You didn't manage to polish up my reproductive organs after you pulled them out of the cake, did you?"

Poor girl.  It was all we could do to try to rinse bits of chocolate off of them.

So, have you ever had any dreams involving fellow bloggers?

Sorry to remain silent so long. Suffice it to say that the LH did surge, sex was had, hips were elevated, etc. Now I'm in the two-week wait, with three fresh First Responses sitting at home in their box, ready to be christened tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I've been entertaining myself with various projects. On Monday, I got this email from my boss: "Hello Molly, So here is a bit of friendly advice: seriously organize your work area before your annual review that is coming up in a few weeks. Tom" Guess what I've been doing for the last three days?

Granted, it was SERIOUSLY in need of "organizing." I found stuff under the piles that hasn't been applicable to any part of my job since October of 2002. And I started here in August of 2002. So an "organization" was long overdue. I actually was quite lucky -- I didn't find a single thing that, having been left so long unattended, would have warranted immediate firing. Not bad. This is especially good since I work in a University department, and the documents I deal with daily affect people's education and, by extension, LIFE. Frightening.

My mother and I both have this problem -- leaving various piles of un-dealt-with junk in our wake wherever we go. My mother has always referred to it as "clean clutter." Mom has obsessive-compulsive disorder, and her obsession is cleanliness, but not in the way you'd think. She has an aversion to anything grimy, sticky, dusty, etc., but no problem with piles of mail, shoes left by the door, or towels hung crookedly.

A few examples of what I mean: 1) One of her big things is dust. To counteract dust, Mom covers board games, books, unused furniture, photo albums, and unfinished craft projects with dish towels. White ones, with little ducks doing laundry embroidered on them by some family matriarch. There are many of these snow-covered mountain ranges throughout our house; or 2) Mom is also concerned about the possibility of ant infestations - before anything goes into our recycling bin, it must be thoroughly washed out with dish soap and water. Also, all food garbage is kept separate from paper trash and packaged in an empty milk carton (notice I said "garbage" - which, to my mom, refers to food-based refuse, and "trash" - which is "clean" refuse).

Yup, she's still a bit nutty. Yet, she's been on Zoloft for about 15 years. I'm kind of glad that my childhood was spent semi-oblivious to her mental illness, or I probably would have gone nuts. I do remember one incident, however -- my sister and I were lying in bed, half-asleep, when we heard Mom bellow from downstairs, "Girls?! Who knocked over the rolls of toilet paper under the sink down here?!" Mom made us get out of bed to re-stack the toilet paper rolls. Memories.

Incidentally, all three of us are on Zoloft now. Small wonder.

(Original Comments)

Tonight at my part-time job at our friendly neighborhood Barnes & Noble, one of the managers (I use the term loosely -- the moron is about a year older than me and considers himself to be quite the shit because he was a history major. Yeah, and I was a religion major. Who the fuck cares?!) informed me that I "have the personality of a wet blanket."

Not quite the thing you want to hear when you're experiencing depression and your feet hurt and you're doing your best to ward off an ever-approaching migraine. Jesus Christ.

He apologized later, in no uncertain terms, after I was found crying in the break room.

Zoloft, sweet ambrosia of the gods, I could use some help right about now.

(Original comments)

Two months ago, I called the clinic to see if I could get an appointment with a psychologist. I had never liked fall, and certainly never liked winter, but the dread of the upcoming season was just too much for me to handle this year. I live in the midwest, where winter means long underwear and car accidents and sidewalk salt and road gravel and scraping frost off of windshields with numb hands. And, what is surely the most defeating, only 10 hours of sunlight manage to push their way into our part of the northern hemisphere.

This year the dread of winter consumed me. I sat at work in a stupor, unable to force myself to work. I snapped at my husband, stayed at home every night, and seriously considered talking to my boss about the possibility of working only 3 or 4 days each week. I have a history of depression, but it's been controlled for years by Zoloft (a gift from the gods). This fall, it just wasn't cutting it.

I suspected Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and bought a book to read up on symptoms and treatments. The most frequently mentioned treatment was a light therapy box; these boxes emit 5,000 - 10,000 lux of light (as compared to a normal light bulb, which emits less than 1,000), and start, may I add, at upwards of $200. I had called and made my appointment, but couldn't get in for two months.

I couldn't let two months of my life slip away in this fog. We took some of my husband's most recent student aid loan and bought a light therapy box.

Godsend. Not quite 100%, but incredibly relieving just the same.

I finally got in to see Dr. N this morning. I was officially diagnosed as having SAD, and my Zoloft has been upped for the fall and winter months. I will continue using the light therapy box daily.

I firmly believe that if you are suffering from chronic emotional difficulties that are adversely affecting your life, there's no need for you to be a martyr. It's trendy right now for people to piss and moan about how Americans are drugging themselves into a stupor and crushing every negative emotion with a bottle of pills. Don't let that make you feel guilty if you need to seek help. A mental illness is exactly that -- an illness -- and should be treated as such.

So, we'll see how my treatment plan works. I'll keep you posted.