April 2007 Archives

The good news is, I did not throw up today. My stomach may have been wee bit touchier than usual, but all in all, it behaved. I’ll admit that I felt a bit of a clench as I drove up to the hospice tonight, but tonight’s visit with Nora went pretty well.

In even better news, I had my annual check up today, and my doctor was so complimentary. She congratulated me on how much weight I’ve lost and all the progress I’ve made since last year. There were only three negatives – first, when the nurse was asking me very insistently about about what birth control I use. "None? Not even condoms?" she asked incredulously. I finally said something along the lines of "that's not an issue for me." Then the doctor seemed a little put off by my reluctance to be hopeful that having my diabetes diagnosed and getting it under control has made some difference to my fertility. I remain skeptical. I want to be proven wrong, I really do. If I got pregnant without IVF or IUI, I would be delighted. I just don’t think it is going to happen. And finally, when I realized that the reason the gown they gave me was so enormous was not because I am so very thin, but rather that they make them big for pregnant bellies. That was depressing. I hope I do have a big pregnant belly someday.

The best news of all – a project I’ve been working on since November, the redesign and re-launch of a massive website – is going to be pushed live tomorrow. Oh, sure, there will still be plenty of little clean-up items here and there, but it is finally, finally going to happen.

What was the best part of your day?

I ran my first 10k today. Well, ran is probably a little bit of an exaggeration. I ran about five of the six miles, but my time was terrible, and I dragged my poor friend Becky down with me. I told her she could go ahead and run faster and leave me behind, but she said it was ok and stuck with me. Becky is a good friend. Here we are in our post-race glory:

I’m pissed about the fact that all of my careful training completely fell apart over the last few weeks, leaving me struggling with what should have been a pretty easy race. However, I’m trying to let it go. I’ll do better next time.

After the race we went to John’s mom’s house to pick her up and take her back to the hospice. She had gone on and on about how she had to go home to sort through some papers, so we arranged for her to go home for the weekend. John’s sister was back from Colorado and could stay with her. Unfortunately, as soon as she got home, she started refusing to go back to the hospice. We spent the whole weekend arguing with her about how she can’t stay at home by herself. And she really can’t. She can’t make food for herself. She can’t make it to the bathroom and back without getting exhausted. She’s incredibly frail, and easily confused. The steroids that control the swelling in her brain could stop working at any second, leaving her unable to talk, or perhaps unable to walk. The doctors have said very clearly that she needs 24 hour care. She doesn’t believe us. I’m not sure what reason she thinks we have for lying to her about it, but I can tell you that she can be extremely unpleasant when she puts her mind to it. And then there you are, trying not to yell at this frail little old lady who is dying, who you care about so much, and who is completely irrational.

Anyway, the stress of arguing about this with her for three days has finally pushed me over the edge. I got sick after we left her house yesterday, and by this morning I was so upset I threw up as soon as we got to back there. And so I’ve had it. After what may have been one of the longer and more uncomfortable days I’ve had in a while, she finally went back to the hospice, and there she will stay until we can arrange 24 hour nursing care. And then she will leave the lovely hospice with its caring, kind and highly trained staff to go die at home in her crappy little house while being tended by some underpaid but still extremely expensive nursing assistant. But she’s going to do it with less involvement from me. I’m going to make sure I get my workouts, and I’m not going to go see her every night. No more getting home at 10 after a long frustrating evening, eating dinner, and then crawling off to bed. I’m determined that John and I will have time for ourselves. Next weekend I’m getting a massage and a long overdue pedicure, and I’m going to take some time to work in my garden. I am most definitely not going to spend part of every day throwing up, that’s for sure.

I'm still alive.

So is my mother-in-law.

Even more miraculously, so is my sister-in-law.

The last two weeks have been two of the most difficult weeks of my life. I've watched my mother-in-law go from being a woman who tired easily and was a little vague every once in a while to someone who was barely conscious half the time, then someone who was clearly out of it and dying, and now who is someone whose symptoms are responding to treatment, at least in the short term.

It was terrifying to see her struggling to form thoughts and sentences, and to know that she really had no idea what was going on a large percentage of the time. She'd look at me and give me a very polite British "yes..." and I'd know I might as well be speaking Hindi to her for all the good it was doing me.

It is heartbreaking to watch my husband half-help, half-carry her to the bathroom because she's so frail now she has trouble standing sometimes.

It's frustrating to explain over and over again that the doctors have given her one to three months to live. Sometimes she gets it. Sometimes she thinks we're mistaken. Sometimes she's sharp and funny (or cranky) and lucid. Other times she's very confused. No one can tell us how long the steroids that are helping her will continue to work. They could last five weeks, or cut out tomorrow.

When she first responded to the treatment, they announced she was no longer a candidate for the hospice we'd been talking to - for them, you must have 14 days or less left to live - and then they sent her home from the hospital. Apparently the hot new thing is "Hospice at Home." Do not be fooled by the enthusiasm with which Hospice at Home is presented. It sucks. The hospice people are really nice and really helpful, but they are only around for an hour or two, and not even every day. That leaves family members to care for their terminally ill loved one the rest of the time. Non-medical family members. It became clear almost immediately that hospice at home was not going to work for us. As my sister-in-law got more and more hysterical and my husband got more and more depressed, I scrambled around trying to find an alternative. An alternative that we have to pay for, because even though Nora has Medicare and Kaiser Permanente, no one will actually cover the cost of caring for her 24 hours a day. Don't get cancer or Alzheimer's. You'll be screwed. We finally got her in to a hospice up near our house that has a longer-term time frame yesterday. It's a lovely place, designed for people in her situation, staffed by people who seem to be truly kind, caring and compassionate.

She gave it an hour and then announced that she wanted to go home, but we told her she had to stay there until Friday. Today she seemed to like it a little better. We'll see. Ultimately it is her life and her money, and if she wants to pay for round the clock nursing care at home and die at home, then those are her wishes and we'll make it work. John and I feel very strongly that the hospice is the place where she'll get the best level of medical care, but we don't want her last days to be miserable either. It's a tricky set of priorities to balance. And in the end, she'll die no matter what we do. How's that for uplifting? But it is the cold hard truth.

And that's where I am. Tired, ok, beyond tired, cranky, grateful for my wonderful friends, family and co-workers, who've been as helpful and supportive as anyone could ever ask them to be, up and down at any given moment, stressed out and maybe a little overwhelmed and definitely in need of a good stiff drink.

How are you? I'm totally out of touch with the blog world right now. What's new?

Dear members of my husband's family,

This is a trying time for all of us. We're all sad and struggling with the news that Nora is dying. We have a lot of decisions to make and a lot of stress to cope with right now.

I promise to do my best to help out where I can and to make this the best situation that it can be, given what it is. In a way it is a little bit easier for me to be slightly removed. I love Nora, but she's not my mom or my sister or my aunt. I can help track down details and try to keep everyone reasonable when emotions run high. But, and this is a very important but, you do NOT want to get hysterical and start wildly criticizing my husband just because he has a different way of dealing with his grief than you do. I'm feeling very protective of him right now, and I will get medieval on your ass.

Sincerely,
Bad Penguin

P.S. It may be hard to tell by the above entry, but I'm actually trying very hard to develop some sort of "I will defuse the situation. I will not rise to the bait." mantra. Please wish me luck.

In-laws are weird, at first. You get married, and all of a sudden you have all of these new people who are family. If you've been with the person you marry for any length of time, hopefully you've had a chance to develop some sort of relationship with the rest of their family before the wedding. John and I dated for seven years before we got married, so I knew his parents and his sister pretty well. Still, it was an adjustment, being married. I had to get used to new family traditions on the holidays, to different ways of interacting (every family has its own unique dynamic) and to add a whole new layer of family to the way I looked at my world.

A couple of months after our wedding, John's mom Nora reached out to me, and suggested that we start having lunch from time to time. She'd come meet me at work, and we'd go to the Corner Bakery. I'd have the mozzarella and red pepper sandwich, and she'd get a muffin and some coffee. We'd chat, and eventually I'd have to go back to work. Sometimes she'd call me just to talk on the phone. I got to know her better over the last five years than I did for the first seven. We went from being people who liked each other and cared about the same person (John) to being people who cared about each other.

She's been ill with lung cancer for a couple of years, and today we learned that the cancer has spread to her brain. She only has weeks left to live. Their hope is to keep her as lucid and free of pain as possible in the time she has left.

It's so very sad. There are so many things I never learned about her. I don't know how she and John's dad met, for example. Or how she ended up coming to the United States from England. Or what it was like growing up in England during World War II (I do know that while she was sent out to the country during the Blitz, she never went through the back of a wardrobe to a magical land. I asked). We had talked about going to London together, and maybe even Paris. She loved France, and sometimes we'd try, hesitantly and a bit self consciously, to speak French to one another. When John and I do have kids, they won't get to know their Grandma Nora. Yet another loss to chalk up to infertility.

And then there's John. As sad as I am about this, he's losing his mom. I can't even think of the prospect of my mom dying without panicking, and here he is, facing it head on. I don't know how to help him. I know I have to be the strong one, but this is something that I can't fix or make better in any way. So far all I have provided is a sympathetic ear, and junk food. I'm really good at buying junk food. I love him so much and I hate to see him hurting. I hate to see his mom dying. It helps, a little, to believe in rebirth as we do. To think that we'll see her again in another life. But not quite enough. I'm not ready to say goodbye, but I guess I don't have a choice.

It turns out that if you work at it long it enough, you can eventually go from being a couch potato to being one of those psychos who likes exercise. Yes, that’s right, I’ve gone to the dark side. I now not only like working out because of the benefits it provides – lowering stress, getting more fit, losing weight, getting smaller – but also because I’ve come to just plain like it. I realized today that I was really looking forward to going and running at the gym tonight. Part of that is no doubt that I was looking forward to hanging out with my friend Becky, but the rest of it was that I just wanted to move. And when I realized I wasn’t going to make it to the gym, I was actually bummed. I did come home and do a workout video. That’s good too.

So for anyone out there who is just starting to exercise, or just getting back in to exercise, take it from me – it WILL get better. There will be plenty of times when you feel like complete crap. Times when you just want to lie down and die. Times when you finish working out and your arms quiver with exhaustion, and your legs ache and you stumble upstairs to sit on the couch and moan. Keep at it though. It will slowly get better and better until one day you’ll want to do it.

I’m still not Miss Perfectly Fit by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve got plenty of weight left to lose, and even now I still get tired and sore. But apparently I have crossed that magical exercise continental divide and now I’m on the good side of it.

One of the things I like best about being a grownup is having the chance to build your own traditions. John and I are known for going our own way in our families (the fact that Seamus was best dog and ring bearer at our wedding is still a subject of some controversy) but in my mind, following our own path is part of what makes our marriage special and strong. Today we had a lovely Easter, managing to meld the old and the new. John and I aren’t religious, but we had Easter lunch with John’s mom and sister and her husband and kids, but instead of the typical lamb or ham or whatever, we had takeout Indian food. John’s mom doesn’t cook much anymore, and she was never really all that comfortable cooking vegetarian food anyway. If you’re wondering, Indian food makes for a delicious Easter lunch.

We had a short, chilly Easter egg hunt in the front yard for my niece and nephew. Good thing the Easter bunny knew where to find them! He left them plastic eggs filled with candy and cookies. We got to see my nephew play the tiniest violin I’ve ever seen. Well, to say he plays it is a bit of an exaggeration. He sang us a song about the parts of the violin, and then showed us the proper way to hold it. When I came home I read an article in the Post about how Josh Bell started the violin when he was four, so my nephew may already be on the road to being a virtuoso.

Then we had the fancy cake I made, hoping that my niece and nephew would get a kick out of it. It looks like a chocolate bunny, see:

With eggs:

And they did love it. Their delighted little smiles made me very happy. Hope your Easter was just the way you wanted it to be too.

Sometime between Thursday night and Friday morning, my Wednesday and Thursday posts just disappeared. At first I thought I'd made some mistake while tired and hadn't posted properly, or something, but I confirmed that John saw them too. And then I remembered that I had received comments on them, so I had proof that they had existed! But they are gone from the site, and gone from my archives none-the-less.

I can only conclude that:

a) my little website here decided to go on a bender and lost the last two days after one too many shots of tequila (possible)

b) inspired by all the alternate history reading I've been doing lately as I work my way through the SM Stirling bibliography, the blog figured out how to generate a wormhole and was transported back to Tuesday in the lamest time travel/alternate dimension adventure ever (not all that likely)

c) like me, the blog is ridiculously clumsy and fell down the stairs, hit its head, and developed a short term case of amnesia (the soap opera explanation)

d) there was some sort of server hiccough that I can't explain, don't understand and don't know how to fix (probable)

Whatever the cause of this mysterious outage, I have restored the last two posts, but alas, not the comments on them. I'd like to direct your attention to the "What's it like?" post, because I really am interested in the answer.

And watch out for those wormholes.

**Disclaimer: I am not writing this post because I think I am pregnant. In fact, I made the decision a while ago to give up thinking that I am pregnant. It’s less disappointing that way. I still hope, sure, but I just assume that I’m not and proceed from there. At this point it is a policy that has yet to be proven wrong. **

I have a question for all you who have been pregnant. (Sorry, guys, you’re kind of excluded from this one.) What’s it like, at the beginning? I realized the other day that I have no idea. I know some of it can be similar to PMS, because you hear people talk about sore boobs and being tired and cranky and moody, which pretty much describes my PMS symptoms. I always kind of assumed the absence of PMS would be a clue, because maybe the pregnancy symptoms kick in later, but now I’m not so sure.

There’s a whole long technical explanation for why I’m not so sure, but I just wrote it out, and it’s really boring. Really. Boring. So let’s just leave it at I’m curious. If (when) I don’t get pregnant this month, we’re moving ahead with either one more IUI or straight to IVF, and so my chances of getting pregnant should be improving. And I want to know what it’s like. When we first started trying to conceive, I had naïve notions about how we’d have a perfect, romantic evening followed by fireworks-filled sex in perfect harmony, and then somehow, I’d just know that we’d been successful*. Going on four years later, I may be just a tad more cynical about the process. Still, I’d like to know, did you feel different at all, or was it like any other month? If you felt different, how early did you start to feel different? Were you taken by surprise, slightly suspicious that something might be up, or totally expecting it?

I’d love to hear your stories.

P.S. Totally unrelated, but very exciting to me – I won my first chess game tonight! John gave me two do-overs when I made particularly stupid moves (“are you sure you want to do that?” he’d ask. “You might want to examine the board a little more closely.”) and then refused to give himself a do-over when he made a stupid move, so I had a little help. I’m happy the game is starting to make more sense to me. It’s nice to have one win under my belt. I’m sure I’ll have to work really hard to get the next one!

* Not that we don’t have “perfect, romantic evenings followed by fireworks-filled sex in perfect harmony...”. It’s just that I don’t think they are going to result in conception anymore.

Remember how earlier this week I said I was starting a six week focused burst to break through my weight loss plateau? That has been a complete and total bust. I ate healthily on Monday, but I didn't get to work out. I didn't get to exercise last night or tonight, either. In the past three days I've eaten approximately 6,923 Cadbury chocolate mini-eggs, and this morning, after arranging my mother-in-law's birthday lemon bars carefully on a plate, I may or may not have scraped lemon bar crumbs out of the bottom of the pan with a fork and devoured them like Cookie Monster.

Yeah. Not exactly a resounding success. So my six week burst starts now.

...maybe after one last Cadbury mini-egg.

Imagine a day without the internet. Is that a scary picture or a good one for you? We had no Internet access at my office for hours today. None. For hours. It was awful. By 10:00 a.m. my hallway (the e-business team hall) was filled with twitchy, shaky, pale co-workers muttering to themselves about storming the Starbucks across the street for wireless access.

Pretty much my whole job involves accessing the internet for one reason or another. Every five seconds I would think “I’ll just pop on the internet to look up…oh.” “Well, I can go run this report…oh.” “I know, I’ll just go assign some keycodes…oh” To make it even better, I had a project that had to be done today that was impossible to do without getting online. I had even made sure that I got in to work earlier than usual, just to ensure I had plenty of time to work on it. Ha!

I contented myself with sending emails for a while – all those little follow-up emails I’d been meaning to send and just hadn’t gotten to for one reason or another. That worked until I realized that we were having email problems too. Delivery was very spotty, and I couldn’t get emails from anyone outside our building. I ended up resorting to emailing people from my trusty Sidekick. I love that phone. I admit it was a frivolous purchase, but I don’t care. It makes me happy.

Then I discovered how hard it is to eat lunch at your desk without the internet. I had no idea how dependent I’ve become on lunchtime entertainment via the computer. I couldn’t read blogs, I couldn’t go check out eonline, I couldn’t do anything! Verizon finally fixed the problem around two. You could actually hear the huge sigh of relief that raced from one side of the building to the other as people realized they had their connection back.

Please, please, please, dear Internet, don’t ever leave me again.

It occurred to me when I made resolutions this year that I might do a better job of sticking to them if I checked back in on them periodically. The first quarter of the year has come to an end. In fact, it flew by so fast that I’m astonished that April is here, but it feels like a natural point for a progress report. Tonight I bring you the first installment of ResolutionWatch 07.

I had 10 resolutions for the year.

And here is how I’ve done so far:

#1, have more of a financial plan…not so much progress on this one. I’ve been sending extra money toward our mortgage each month, and I got a brochure about Roth IRAs, but that’s it. Next resolution, please!

For resolution #2, I’ve been trying very hard to be neater. I’m not sure if John agrees with me or not, but I think I’ve been doing a better job of keeping the kitchen clutter free, and cleaning off the desk in my office and filing away mail each weekend. We reorganized all our books and took a bunch of stuff to Goodwill. And this weekend I put all of our photographs in to albums. That was actually a lot of fun.

#3 was reach out to others more. I’d say I’ve been halfway successful here. It’s a start, but I need to keep working at it.

My 4th resolution was to sign up for a writer’s workshop. I poked around online, and found one that might be interesting. I haven’t actually signed up for anything yet. I’m saving that for the summer. I wouldn’t want to rush through all my resolutions in the first half of the year.

#5 – Work on being a better boss to my employees. Well, I have two more direct reports now than I did in January, but that doesn’t mean I’m any better a boss. Just a busier one. I’d say some days I’m more successful at being a good boss and mentor than others.

#6 is one where I have been very successful. It was do more to help others. In January, I sent a bunch of toys to Children’s Hospital as part of Beth’s Small Change idea. In March, I raised $140 and participated in a bowl-a-thon for Junior Achievement. And February’s donation is a little different. I decided I wouldn’t buy any books in the month of March, and then I would donate all the money I didn’t spend (based on what I did spend on books in February) to a charity. I made it through March without buying any books – way harder for me than it sounds, and I did use a gift card to pick up two books, which may or may not count as cheating – so now I just have to pick the charity.

#7 Write in this blog more frequently. I don’t know. I’m probably posting about the same as I always have. I get busy, I get tired, I get uninspired. I should be more disciplined.

#8 – Worry less about what other people think. Recently, someone at work mentioned that I have a blog in a meeting, and someone else asked me point blank what my url was. I always worry that work people are comparing me to Amy, who is a former co-worker, and obviously a way more popular and successful blogger than I am and finding me lacking. But then I remind myself that I like who I am just fine and I don’t want to be Amalah (although I would love to get the volume of comments she gets. Who wouldn’t? Yes, I know, I’m not supposed to care about comments. Just call me a comment whore.) So, maybe some progress here, and maybe not.

#9 Try new things. Well, I tried a spinning class, and loved it, so that was a success. I still want to try a kick boxing class, but I haven’t made it to one yet. I have a couple of books that go outside my usual genre, but I haven’t read them yet. I will. Soon.

And finally, #10 – finish losing weight already. I still have 20 pounds to lose. You have no idea how badly I want to be done with dieting and into maintaining my weight loss. I’m not there yet. I have lost a couple of pounds since the beginning of the year, but holy crap, it is taking forever. I’m actually starting a six week focused burst on Monday to see if I can get my weight loss speed pushed back up past glacial. It will involve lots of exercise and lots and lots of healthy eating. Not that I don’t eat healthy now, but I could be a little stricter with myself. Particularly if it is only for a six week burst.

Did you make resolutions? How are you doing with them?