THE WEEKEND IN PICTURES

Charlie's best friend came to visit for the weekend.



AirForceDog showed up for wrasslin' and tomfoolery. He's got a few pounds and a lot more muscle on Charlie, so most fights end like this:



But Charlie gives as good as he gets. You can't imagine how disappointed I am that this photo isn't in focus:



It was a fun visit, but it made me content that we only have one dog.

We also sadly lost a pet this weekend. Our betta fish, honorifically named Bunker, passed away from old age. I had seen it coming for weeks now, and I'm glad I didn't have to help him along like I did my last fish.

He was a beautiful fish and his empty bowl makes me a little sad.



So it's Mother's Day, and it's been a little bitter for me to receive the blanket "Happy Mother's Day!"s that I have been getting at work this weekend. But I got an email today that made me feel better. It was from the de facto president of our knitting group, who is also childless.

Amen to that.

Plus, I have my own mother still, while others do not. I am grateful for that and am choosing to focus on that today.

I wrote cryptically about it when it happened, but my second miscarriage showed me what it means to be a mother.  My mother was right there in the bathroom with me, holding my hand, coaching me on, and even (close your eyes, squeamish people), reaching in to pull stubborn uterine lining out for me when I panicked.  She didn't ewww, she didn't rush to wash her hands, she just helped me and never made me feel like what I was having to go through was weird or gross.  It was amazing.  Either she would've had an excellent career as a nurse, or she was just being a mom.  No one else could've filled those shoes that day.  I got to see as an adult that I will always be her child and that she will always be there to help me.  And that mothers clean up bodily fluids for their kids whether they are 3 or 30.

I said I had a similar reaction when my father lent me his eyeglasses.  I have learned so much about parenting from my own parents in these recent years.  And every year, I just want to give my parents grandchildren on Mother's and Father's Day.

Happy Mother's Day, Mama.  I'm still working on getting you the biggest present of them all.

Posted by: Sarah at 10:10 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 462 words, total size 3 kb.

WE'RE GONNA NEED A TRACKING NUMBER ON THAT PACKAGE

At the end of my appointment yesterday, the genetics counselor said that I seem remarkably well-adjusted and calm about my predicament.  I told her that some experiences have been easier than others, and when I started explaining a few of the more difficult ones, I got choked up.  Especially when I explained how I feel frozen in time while everyone else around me moves forward with life.

I sometimes forget how deeply this cuts.

When I first learned of the balanced translocation, I went through a vengeful stage.  I wanted to knock on the door of everyone who told me to just relax and punch them.  I wanted to point out everyone's wrongness and tell them to their face that it was even worse than they could've ever guessed.  I wanted them to feel bad for all the stupid advice over the years and for their nonchalance in telling me I just haven't been patient enough.

I'm kinda over that, mostly.  Somedays moreso than others.

The genetics counselor said that my specific translocation isn't the worst one in the world, and that if my husband and I wanted to keep trying the natural way, we'd have about a 50% miscarriage rate.  We've flipped three tails already, but with a large enough sample size, we'd eventually get a heads.

When I pointed out that my husband is gone for nine-month chunks and I'm 31 1/2 and we don't have a great track record of getting pregnant quickly and we're just flat out done with gambling, she agreed that PGD might be a good option for us.  Especially since I already have a military fertility doctor to offset some of the $20,000 pricetag.

The next step is meeting with my doctor to find out how quickly we can get started and which company we will do the PGD through.  She guessed it would be someone in New Jersey.  Then I asked how that works, like do they run a test on the embryo and mail the data to NJ for interpretation?  She said more likely they would have to send the entire embryo to a cellular-level specialist.

Let that sink in for a second, because it was the most interesting thing she said all day.  My husband and I would start babies here with our doctor.  The babies would then be FedEx'd to an embryologist who will take one of their eight cells out, test it, give the babies the thumb's up or down, and then FedEx the babies back to us so they could be injected into me and hopefully nestle in for nine months.

FedExing a replicating and growing baby.  Of all the wonderments...

I definitely will be following that tracking number.

If we manage to have a baby through this process, imagine telling our kid that story someday, that we loved him so much that we swaddled him in bubble wrap and sent him on a trip to a doctor to make sure he would grow up healthy and strong.

Or her.  Or them.

Hopefully them.

Posted by: Sarah at 07:55 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 516 words, total size 4 kb.

CONSPIRACY

Oh my heavens, how come no one told me about the Army Combat Shirt?
Makes me wish we were still babymaking...

Posted by: Sarah at 02:43 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 22 words, total size 1 kb.

THE BADNESS OF OBAMA

Amritas pointed me towards a Lawrence Auster post that is the perfect explanation of how I too feel:

And when we combine this with the fact that Obama is extremely popular according to opinion polls, with 73 percent saying that he "cares about people like me," meaning that three quarters of Americans feel that this manifest anti-American president represents people like them, I frankly find it hard to get a handle on the situation.

I too am overwhelmed by the events unfolding in our country.  And I agree with the further comments at that Auster post and the Tea Party guests on last week's Glenn Beck show that our country has gone so far off the tracks that a McCain presidency would've only been incrementally less bad.

I'm frankly battered by the idea that there seem to be so many regular Americans out there who think like I do and want the kind of country I want...and none of them are in Washington.

And all that keeps running through my head is "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another"...

I'm with John Wall: I'm ready for a divorce.

Posted by: Sarah at 10:55 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 310 words, total size 2 kb.

THEY DRINK OUR MILKSHAKE

Looks like I'm not the only one who's annoyed about granting the Democrats their premises...

(Via CG) Dr. Melissa Clouthier asks who owns the Republican brand:

I’ve got bad news: The opposition owns the Republican brand. Oh yes, they do. Democrats define Republicans and the Republicans accept the definition by operating from their false premises.

How do I know Republicans are owned by the Left? Because the Republican message is consistently negative and defensive: "I’m not mean." "We don’t believe that." "I’m not extremist like them". And by them, Republicans are defining themselves against the press-Obama-grassroots caricature of Republicans. In doing so, the Republicans with a national voice diminish their own party.

The Republicans will never be strong until they stop operating from a defensive position.

Posted by: Sarah at 09:48 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 130 words, total size 1 kb.

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE

I was looking for an old blog post and stumbled upon something remarkable...

Here's an interesting little dig I found in the MSN movie review for Day After Tomorrow:

The Story: A paleoclimatogist (Dennis Quaid) races to save the world and his Manhattan-trapped son (Jake Gyllenhaal) from an impending Ice Age brought on by the effects of global warming (or, as the gun-shy Fox marketers call it, "global climate change"), which causes cataclysmic hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, hail, heat and a colossal tidal wave. Not for the weatherphobic. [emphasis mine]

Amazing what a difference five years makes.  Nowadays, it's not a right-wing conspiracy to call it "global climate change"; it's the preferred nomenclature!  (Pssst, because we're not warming anymore.)

Who knew that Fox was the vanguard of global warming terminology?

Posted by: Sarah at 04:17 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 131 words, total size 1 kb.

MEET THE NEW CLINIC, SAME AS THE OLD CLINIC

Now it's my turn to rip on civilian medicine.  My case manager here on post called the civilian doctor's office and said I needed genetics counseling, and they booked me with the wrong guy.  I wasn't supposed to go to that doctor yesterday at all; he is just a regular maternal fetal medicine doctor.  Absurd screw up on their part, costing me $14 in gas and a day's worth of confusion.  Oh, and costing my fellow taxpayers the amount of the worthless visit.  Which I'm sure is sky high.  I hope Tricare sticks it to them by only paying the bare minimum.

New appointment with a genetics counselor set for this Friday.  I have high expectations for this one.  I want Punnett squares and PowerPoints and a much higher level of detail than found on Wikipedia.

My case manager here was horrified and very apologetic.  I said that she ought to hear the litany of screw-ups over the past two years.  She said, "I know, and I was trying to stop that cycle, not make it worse!"

Posted by: Sarah at 10:31 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 186 words, total size 1 kb.

UNPRODUCTIVE

I would wager that the internet has had a profound effect on the medical field.

If I had discovered my balanced translocation 15 years ago, I would've been completely overwhelmed.  To find any information on the topic, I would've had to visit my local library and use the card catalog for books or the goofy old Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature to find articles.  It would've been far easier to have an expert just explain it to me.

But in 2009, within an hour of coming home from the doctor two weeks ago, I had a basic understanding of a fairly specific genetic problem.  By the end of the day, I was educated on two chromosomes in particular, the risks of PGD, and had even managed to find a medical article from 1982 on someone with my specific translocation.  Eventually I even read about translocations in Swedish.

So let's just say that when the doctor at my appointment today started drawing chromosomes on a paper, I had two thoughts: 1) "It's much clearer if you do it with play-doh" and 2) "No, you're doing it wrong, chromosome 22 is one of the short ones and you've drawn it equal in size to chromosome 7."

Therefore, all in all, the appointment was a disappointment.  The man was neither a geneticist nor a genetic counselor.  I don't quite understand why I had to meet with him and what we were supposed to accomplish.  I plan to spend tomorrow trying to answer those questions.

I did learn one thing though: this process could even be harder than we originally thought.  I got another blood test done today to see if we're at risk for eggs carrying 22q11.2 deletion syndrome.  Fantastic.  If so, it means that even fewer of my eggs will be able to create a healthy baby.

Just one more frustrating and unproductive day to add to my collection.

[A special hat tip to my librarian cousin for reminding me what those goofy green books in my high school library were called.]

Posted by: Sarah at 04:41 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 318 words, total size 2 kb.

I HAVE TEH SWINE FLU

[Update: It's not swine flu (obviously.  I never really thought I had it; it was just fun to joke about.)  Am waiting for results of a strep test.  In the meantime, I plan to drink lots of hot whiskey.  Either it will sooth my throat or make me not care it's hurting.]



Yesterday I started joking with my husband that we have swine flu.  He is caughing and snuffy, and my throat hurts like all get-out.  Today, it's less funny.  I had to call in sick to work and I am headed to the weekend med clinic.

I thought all that bacon we eat was supposed to inoculate us...

Posted by: Sarah at 09:31 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 62 words, total size 1 kb.

MILBLOGS CONFERENCE

My husband is definitely not a blogger.  He reads Abu Muqawama, so I was excited that Andrew Exum was at the conference.  After the final panel, I excitedly asked if he'd like to go talk to him.  My husband shrugged and said, "Nah, it's no big deal."

Definitely not a blogger.

I asked my husband on the way home what he thought of the conference.  He said it was interesting.  I asked him what he thought of the content as a non-blogger, because I think that's an element that's rarely addressed in our discussion.  Are milblogs relevant?  Asking bloggers is going to elicit a different response than asking non-bloggers.  We touched on this during last year's conference, when one non-blogger audience member suggested that maybe blogging was not the highest priority for the chain of command.  That stuck with me; those who aren't completely sucked in to the world of blogging don't see the same level of importance as we do.

But it's hard for my husband to really have an opinion right now.  Even if he had the desire to blog, the job that he has now is absolutely not bloggable.  All of the interesting stuff he does is opsec, and the stuff that bloggers can write about, the non-opsec stuff, is less interesting to him.  It doesn't float his boat to read milblogs because his life is a milblog.  So he comes at the whole thing from a completely different angle than the rest of us, which I find interesting.  Someone who has no internal push to put his every thought online is always going to look at this activity differently.

But still I think he should've at least said hi to Exum.

(I will say that I impressed the heck out of him by getting a big hug and smile from Bill Roggio.  To him, Roggio is big-time, and the fact that Mr. Big-Time was all excited to see his wife, well, he thought that was pretty cool.)

(He also came home still oblivious to the fact that people wanted to meet him.  I had tried to explain that some people have been reading about him for about five years, but I don't think it sunk in until we were home.  Then he said, "Maybe I should've been more charming."  Sigh.  I told you no one would describe him as nice.)

I still want to write about the content of the conference...someday.

Posted by: Sarah at 03:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 407 words, total size 3 kb.

ARMY OF ONE

I got lucky and there's an opening with the geneticist this coming Monday morning.  Unfortunately, Monday morning is the only day next week that my husband has training he cannot skip and cannot reschedule.  So it was either go to the appointment alone, or wait three weeks for the next available appointment.

I think they need to designate Army wives as the Army Of One.

Posted by: Sarah at 01:55 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 68 words, total size 1 kb.

TWO PHOTOS

the funny one at Unliberaled Woman, which made me LOL (especially the "and plus")
the serious and quite interesting one at Yaacov Lozowick's (via Boxenhorn)

Posted by: Sarah at 01:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 27 words, total size 1 kb.

TIME IS TIGHT

A SpouseBUZZ post: I'll Take "Wasted Time" for $200, Please

In the coming days, I plan to write up a summary post of my whole infertility journey.  After emailing with Julia from Here Be Hippogriffs, I decided that one post with everything laid out might be a good resource for new readers or people finding me via google.

Posted by: Sarah at 08:39 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 61 words, total size 1 kb.

"HEH"

I "heart" AWTM, who sent me a link to this awesome blog: The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

Posted by: Sarah at 07:24 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 19 words, total size 1 kb.

IN DOUBT

I thought of this line from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance while reading the post The End of the Debate.  Great line:


No one would need to repeatedly remind others that the debate is over if it truly were.

Posted by: Sarah at 07:05 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 125 words, total size 1 kb.

ON HIS BEHALF

I have done this kind of list twice before, but I started thinking this morning that it'd be a hoot to do one for my husband.  And then see what he thought of it.

THINGS MY HUSBAND LOVES

Deadwood
Wolverine
bacon
saving money
Dexter
Wu-Tang Clan
Greg Mankiw
Thai food
The Black Crowes
the RX-8
his XD-M
"I'm On a Boat"
Alton Brown
me wearing pink
Burn Notice
beer
the St. Louis Cardinals
sleep
My New Haircut
not having to do laundry
Jim Gaffigan
early Simpsons

(I showed this to my husband this evening, and he said it was a pretty accurate list.  He would've added one thing though.)

getting good gas mileage

Posted by: Sarah at 08:07 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 116 words, total size 1 kb.

I LIKE SOMETHING HE DOESN'T? WHA?

My husband and I are the exact same person replicated in two different bodies, and we've decided that when we're super old, we're going to catapult ourselves into a black hole so we can be smushed together into an eternal quantum singularity.

Therefore, I am disturbed that he doesn't grok Retweet Theater.  We love all the exact same things, so how can he not find this hilarious?  Nothing makes me giggle more than spelling "t-o-a-s-t"...except for the fact that the Lileks character has the exact same voice as our Garmin, so every time I drive, I am chuckling to myself about $37 waffles.

Seriously, if he doesn't like Hamiflu, we may have to rethink this eternally smushed thing.

Posted by: Sarah at 04:05 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 124 words, total size 1 kb.

WOW

Via David Boxenhorn

Posted by: Sarah at 08:53 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 4 words, total size 1 kb.

EXCEPTIONALISM

Mark Steyn:

Sigh.

I could write about why this is so disappointing, but Steven den Beste already did it better than I could.  Read The Cracked Mirror and American Exceptionalism.

Posted by: Sarah at 08:42 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 117 words, total size 1 kb.

LINK

AirForceWife expounds on one of her answers this weekend on her Milblog Conference panel: My Explanation.

Posted by: Sarah at 02:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 17 words, total size 1 kb.