Category: Personal

There’s a lot going on but it’s been really hard to find any time to blog about it, or really update anyone beyond a quick Facebook post.  I don’t really understand how the folks who blog 2-3 times per week (or more!) pull it off. I suggest ghostwriters. Or maybe addictions to 5 hour energy.

I had yet another miscarriage. At this point I’m more aggravated than sad. I mean I’m sad too. But this time when the ultrasound tech said “let me check with the radiologist” I knew what was coming. I cried when they came in and told me there was no heartbeat, but mostly I was angry. The whole situation just seemed stupid. I also immediately (and rather unfairly) started hating the mom on 19 Kids and Counting. Why does she get to have like a million kids, and I can’t even have 2? And what the hell is suddenly so wrong with my body? I had my first daughter with no incident. I’m starting to wonder if she torched the place on her way out.

The silver lining here is that now I’m officially an infertility patient, so there’s a new crop of doctors and tests waiting for me. Of course there’s still a good chance that we’ll never find anything noteworthy, which is annoying, but there’s also still really good odds for me having another child. 70% of women with consecutive miscarriages go on to have more children1 . So it’s not all bad news. But after 3 pregnancies in the span of a year I’m just feeling tired and grumpy.

While I’m glad we’ll be getting some more testing it sometimes feels like there’s an infinite number of steps between me and even attempting to have another child. I had a D&E last week so they can run tests on the not-even-a-fetus. Hopefully next month my body will be back to “normal” and then my OB can start running blood work. Many of the tests have to be repeated over a span of a month or two in order to get meaningful results. For example: Antiphosopholipid Syndrome (a blood clotting disorder) is one of the first things they check for, and the treatment is relatively simple and effective (blood thinners), but the test has about a 5% false positive rate so you need two positives 6-8 weeks apart for it to count.  If nothing exciting turns up in my blood I’ll likely be referred to a reproductive endocrinologist (RE), genetic counselor, or both. They’ll check to see if my husband and I are horribly genetically mismatched, if my uterus has any obvious problems missed by the ultrasound, etc.

My mood and outlook come and go, and today I mostly feel exhausted. Between my four pregnancies I’ve had a cumulative 10 months of morning sickness. I’ve lost count of the number of ultrasounds I’ve had. When I went in for surgery my arms were so bruised from blood draws they had to put the IV in my hand. As much as I’m looking forward to getting some test results, I’m dreading all the trips to the doctor’s office.

Fingers crossed that someday soon I’ll start loving this view again instead of resenting it.

1. Every time I say those odds they seem terrible. But then I imagine someone saying “70% of people who eat this die immediately” and those odds seem really incredibly high and obviously I would not eat that because obviously it will kill you. So I suppose odds are a matter of perspective [↩]

It’s been super quiet over here, huh? It’s not that I haven’t been blogging, it’s just that I’ve been seeing another blog. In an effort to keep my hacking blog for hackers and leave the mushy personal details out of it, I’ve moved all posts on my huge upcoming life changes over to their own subdomain.

I wrote a longer post about the nuts and bolts of the transition over on offbeatmama.com (the only parenting blog I can stand), but the short of it is: if you’d like to keep up with my posts about cooking, home decorating, and sprouting a family, then you’ll want to add http://home.kellbot.com to your RSS reader.

Amit Gupta, friend of a friend and the founder of Photo Jojo, was diagnosed with leukemia and needs a bone buy levitra canada marrow transplant. Unfortunately, because South Asians (think India, Afghanistan, East Africa) are under represented in the national bone marrow registry his odds of finding a match are only one in 20,000.

Amit is using the power of his social connections to hold bone marrow donor registrations all over the country, in search of “brown bones,” i.e. minority registrations. People of any ethnicity are of course welcome to register but people of color are most desperately needed.

Unlike some events, which only help the high-profile person lucky enough to have such a network, these bone marrow drives will help anyone who matches with a potential donor. So your registration helps bring up the odds for all people in your ethnic group, not just the ones with a big twitter following. And I think that’s huge.

Registration is free, though if you can afford a $100 donation to cover the cost of processing it’s always appreciated. It takes less than 5 minutes – you swab your cheek and drop the kit in the mail. You can also go to any of the registration drives around the country. Should you match, the donation process is similar to a blood draw – “painless but boring.”

And just in case you needed motivation to register sooner rather than later, Seth Godin is offering a $10,000 bounty on some matching bone marrow.

I’m a member of NYC Resistor, and while I think we’re a pretty awesome group of people, we’re not without our bikeshed arguments. These kinds of arguments, in any group, can range from mild time-killers to arguments so intense people end up feeling personally hurt.

One of the biggest problems I’ve noticed is when people start shooting other people ideas down. It starts a negative feedback loop, and everything goes downhill from there. But lets face it, some ideas really are terrible, and maybe we think it’s worth a bruise to the person’s ego to save us all from a huge mistake. How do you skirt a bad idea without killing a friendship?

Personally, I’m going to work on shifting away from saying “no” to people. Which is not the same as saying yes. I’m banning “no” from my discussion vocabulary, and replacing it with the phrases “what if, instead/additionally…” and “I’d be OK with that if…, ” followed by an explanation of what would make me more comfortable with the project.

For [an absurd] example, let’s say someone in the group wants to buy an iguana and keep it at the space. I think this is a terrible idea, the space is for people, not animals. Instead of saying, “no, an iguana at the space is a disaster waiting to happen, it will totally die,” I could say “before diving into herpetology, let’s get a few plants for the space and see how that goes.” Or maybe, “I’m worried it will be forgotten and die, what could we do to make sure Iggy is cared for?” This gives people a way out of the stalemate and on to continue the discussion.

It takes less than a second to say no. Yet we spend too much time reciting our many and varied reasons to say no, rather than listening and considering what we could do to find a compromise.

So just like giving up “you should,” cialis cheap I’m giving up “no.”  I invite you to call me out on it when I backslide, and hope you’ll consider ditching “no” too.