wildblueangel47

February 22, 2018February 22, 2018

The lists we make.

I truly hate this time of year. Why?

Cold.
Taxes.
Darkness.
Seasonal affective disorder.
General sense of foreboding and/or malaise.

Not to mention I’ve been having a real sad about the general state of the world, what with all the Russians and the dead kids and the golf-club-wielding-heads-of-state. After a flawed attempted at sharing peer-reviewed research on the internet, I’ve basically been hibernating and sulking about having to eat healthy and go to work in order to maintain my adulthood. I write things on my to-do list like “take a shower” and “eat breakfast”, not because there’s any real risk of me forgetting these things, but because goddammit, I need something to feel good about.

I’m a list-maker. I like making lists. I even have this quote hanging in my office that says, (paraphrasing, I forget the exact words) “Each day find three things you can do really well. Then, let the rest go.” Which is kind of the ironic anti-list list, because it’s like, hey, try to live more in the moment and don’t focus on making long lists to accomplish but do that better by making a SHORTER list. So meta.

Similarly, Wife will tell you that I have a favorite past time of turning EVERYTHING into a task to be accomplished or a competitive challenge. (See also– 30 day exercise challenge, read 50 books in a year challenge, write a novel in a month challenge, etc etc. ) It got so bad that my only new year’s resolution this year was to not do anymore time-based challenges. (Which I’m actually just realizing the irony of right now as I type this. hahaha.)

Nonetheless, I’ve been on this real death-and-terrible-things-inspiring-introspection podcast kick lately (see: Terrible, Thanks for Asking, This is Actually Happening, and Everything Happens). I’m not really sure how I got sucked into this genre, but it does seem to be a hit on iTunes lately. My best guess is that many of us are feeling a little unsteady in our world these days, and also the beautiful thing about these podcasts is that they’re just so human. But anyway, thinking and talking about death and dying smacks me in the face with a serious truth– all of our listmaking, goal achieving, weight-loss challenging, 30-days-to-a-better-you is based on the idea that there will be 30 more days. It is as much about “pacing yourself” to accomplish things as it is a prayer for the future. A hope and belief that you have more days. Just as I’ve always believed that (in many cases), regret about the last moments you had or did not have with someone before they died is as much about a last ditch effort to feel like we are in some kind of control as it is about the actual thing itself. That if only we had done this thing or that thing, we would feel better. We would feel less powerless.

I’m trying to make fewer lists and be more present, and more human, just like we’re all trying. (Or so I’ve decided to believe.)

But some days I still make lists. Because if making lists is a small prayer of hope for the future, some days I need a little hope. For old time’s sake:

Things I did to feel better about the state of the world in my 20s:

Pretend/convince myself that I was a decent writer.
Drink too much.
Have politically charged arguments and believe I could actually argue my opponents into having common sense. (Okay, I still do this. Just with a little bit more ennui.)
Try to feel superior about my awareness of independent/alternative cultural phenomena.
Fling myself into any number of impulsive “life-affirming” projects which I was convinced were the key to everything, but really spend a lot of time analyzing the experience rather than experiencing the experience.

Things I do to feel better about the state of the world in my 30s:

Make shorter lists.

January 28, 2018

The Gaybies Project.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Wife and I decided to embark on the thrilling adventure of trying to procreate. We quickly discovered that this was weirdly difficult due to having the wrong set of hardware between the two of us. So this is the post about everything-you-never-actually-wanted-to-know-about-same-sex-family-making-and-therefore-never-asked.

Before starting this blog I did actually think about whether or not I wanted this journey to be a public one. But here’s Thing One about deciding to become same sex parents: none of it is easy or private. There are a lot of doctors appointments and nosy people and weird decisions you have to make. It’s not like you just wake up pregnant by accident one day. Not that getting pregnant as a straight couple is always easy, and honestly our fertility journey (so far) is a lot easier than most people struggling with infertility. But the thing is whether you’re a straight couple going through this whole process or a gay couple, it’s not really that easy to keep it quiet.

Plus, I’m also not great at keeping secrets anyway. And I like to talk about myself. (Okay, these are the real reasons I’m documenting this.)

Besides, these are all the juicy details that people secretly want to ask you about and now I can just give them a business card with my blog address on it and be done with it. I was thinking about making business cards in the shape of Tiny Dog’s head.

So, here’s the beginning of this.

I wouldn’t know what the road is like for gay men trying to become parents, but here are the basic choices for gay women:

1. Adoption. You can just chose to forego the whole pregnancy nonsense and adopt.

2. One of us provides the egg and carries. The “simplest” biological option, this is basically like being a straight couple except you have to borrow some other guy’s sperm. Once you choose to do this, you can pick a donor. If you know someone you want to use (and they’re not completely freaked out by the idea), you can use a known donor and ask them to provide a sample. Or, you can go with a donor through a sperm bank.

3. One of us provides the egg and the other one carries. More expensive and convoluted, you can have one partner take a lot of drugs to convince their body to pump out a ton of eggs at once, harvest them, fertilize them outside the body, and put them in the other person. This is similar to what straight couples do when they do IVF.

4. Outsource the whole deal. You could use a sperm donor and an egg donor and carry it yourself, or do option 3 but then use a surrogate. I’ve never heard of anyone actually wanting to do this option, mainly because it’s super expensive, but it’s sometimes a choice for people having fertility issues. Also I guess if you were both totally grossed out by pregnancy but did want to have a biologically related child, you could go with a surrogate.

Wife and I opted for choice 2 (at this point). We decided early on though that if we had major fertility issues we wouldn’t spend a lot of time and money trying to make it happen; we would then consider adoption instead. Door number 2 is a lot like being a straight couple having a little difficulty conceiving naturally, at least at the beginning.

They use a procedure called “IUI” or “intrauterine insemination”, which means they inject the sperm into the uterus directly. This is different from “IVF” or “in-vitro fertilization” which is what most people associate with fertility treatments. Even for straight couples with difficulty conceiving, IVF is not the first option and usually comes after a series of many other procedures because it’s pretty expensive and complicated and painful. In IVF, they take the eggs out (as described in option 3 above), test to see which ones are the best, fertilize those, test the resulting embryos to see which ones of those are healthiest and then put one or multiple of those back in the woman’s body and cross their fingers.

But, back to IUI. This is what we decided to do and we decided we would go with whomever was more fertile, although it’s not exactly a perfect science. Since Wife has never really had the desire to carry a baby (though said she would if it came to it), we started with me. Unlike with straight couples, you then have the option of going through the pre-insemination testing. We opted to do this because I have really good insurance and we’d rather do the work on the front end than try for a year without success and then find out there’s some type of fertility problem.

When we had our first appointment, it was really long. They took blood to see what my blood type was and to see if I had antibodies for the CMV virus (another weird thing most straight couples don’t think about). They also do an ultrasound to look at your ovaries to make sure everything looks good and count how many egg follicles you have, which is a weird experience. Wife was sitting there with me and we were both asking the ultrasound tech things like, “what’s that black thing?” and then feeling strangely victorious when she pointed out that I have an excellent number of follicles.

Then we had to meet with a psychologist (ironic) for pre-insemination counseling. Wife and I have a long history of being weirdly enraged/offended about all of the wrong things (for example, McDonald’s in our midwestern state should NOT have two drive through lanes because they are clearly not ready for that technology and it actually makes things slower). Other things which should bother us do not, so we were kind of surprised when our friends pointed out that it was annoying and unfair that we had to meet with a psychologist just because we are gay, but i’ll be honest that didn’t really occur to me. And it’s true that most straight couples would not have to do that if they didn’t need fertility treatments, but it also sort of made sense for someone to remind us about all these weird decisions we didn’t know we’d have to make, like do we want our baby to be able to know the donor some day, etc etc. It was a condition of our appointment anyway.

We also had to sign a lot of forms saying that we won’t sue the clinic if the baby turns out to be a serial killer or a conjoined twin or needs glasses.

There was another test I opted to get which is a really long name I can’t say but basically they inject radioactive dye into your body and watch it travel around your uterus and Fallopian tubes to make sure there’s no blockages or tumors or other weird things. The bummer about that test is that a) it can be painful and b) they have to do it a certain number of days after you have your period and before you ovulate so it’s a little bit hard to time. Also my doctor’s office only does this type of scan on Wednesdays, so it’s been a pain in the uterus to schedule (see what I did there?? hahaha).

After all that is done, if everything looks good, you then pick a donor. See future blog posts about the supreme weirdness of picking a sperm donor. We didn’t really know anyone we liked enough that we felt comfortable putting in the extremely bizarre position of being a donor, so we decided to go with a sperm bank. The other weird thing that I didn’t realize about using a known donor is that it can actually be pretty expensive. You would think you would save money, but all the samples from sperm banks come pre tested and treated, whereas your average Joe off the street has to provide the sample and then they do some fancy stuff at the lab to make sure it’s “clean” and everything. Plus you have to pay for storage anyway.

Sperm is pretty much the only thing my insurance won’t cover, and it can be pretty expensive. It’s usually between 600-1000 dollars per “vial”, and each vial can only be used once. You have the same odds (basically) of getting pregnant with IUI as you do with regular straight-people-trying-to-start-a-family sex, so you could get pregnant on the first cycle if you’re lucky. For most people it takes about 4-6 cycles though, which translates to 4-6 months and 4-6 vials. That’s kind of expensive. And yeah, I get that babies are expensive and so I shouldn’t really be complaining about it, but realistically most straight couples don’t have to drop $3000-$6000 just to START trying. So that’s kind of a bummer.

From there it’s basically like regular family planning… you try to figure out when you’re ovulating and then you have se… er, pop over to the doctor’s office and have them stick that stuff in you. A side note, some people opt to do this at home (read: the “turkey baster method”), but Wife and I decided that would be totally gross and weird and potentially messy, so we’re not going to do that.

For those of you who have never tried to get pregnant or don’t know much about it, basically there are a few days every month for a woman that are best to get pregnant, when you are “ovulating”. This is when your body releases an egg, and you try to time sex so that the sperm and the egg are in the same place at the same time, basically. You can use these handy-dandy things call ovulation predictor kits (“OPKs”) which is like a pregnancy test because you pee on a stick every day and then you get a smiley face when you’re ovulating. Then you call the doctor and they tell you to drop everything and come over there right away (or within the next 24 hours), and slam, bam, thank you ma’am, deed is done.

And…. that’s basically it. See? I told you it was something you never wanted to know and therefore didn’t ask. But I spent enough years creeping on other people’s personal blogs about similar topics that I thought some people might want to know. We are somewhere in between the testing phase and the selecting a donor phase, so I’ll write more later about what it’s like to try to find a sperm donor (it’s hilarious and strange and stressful all at once. And my mom had a lot of opinions.) In the meantime, we will be blissfully enjoying our (hopefully?) numbered nights of uninterrupted sleep.

January 18, 2018

Update: The Tiny Dog Fails Prozac Trial

Dear world,

Today I am writing this (or started writing this) while on hold/talking to one of the leading medicaid providers in my state about how they will not provide mental health services for one of my patients. It is not going well.

(See also: extreme irony, crushing disillusionment, American healthcare crisis, etc, etc).

In the meantime, did anyone know that the following are possible side effects of fluoxetine use in dogs??

Anxiety. (Read: unrelenting panic.)
Irritability.
Insomnia.
Loss of appetite.
Gastrointestinal distress.
Excessive panting.

No?? Me neither. Guess what??

Tiny dog experienced all of these. Here is the picture on the internet of a dog on Prozac:

prozac-for-dog-anxiety_canna-pet-e1510009262116

Here is a picture of the Tiny Dog on Prozac:

IMG_0114 (1).jpg

It was a good try. And everyone was very optimistic that it would work. Unfortunately, Tiny Dog is one of the very few dogs for whom Prozac had a paradoxical effect and he had exactly the OPPOSITE response as what the drug was actually supposed to do.

Right around day 4 or 5 of giving the pill, Tiny Dog started to seriously distrust us. He was very suspicious of his nightly cheese snack. He probably bugged our phones. He also took to crying ALL. NIGHT. LONG. One night, when he was in our bed, there was a gust of wind outside. That was it for Bed. Bed can never be forgiven. Tiny Dog will no longer enter the bedroom. Instead, he paced and cried and barked all night long for 4 days.

Initially, Wife was like, “I told you so.” and I was like, “This is normal. It will get better.”

By day 10 of the pill, no one had slept in days, Tiny Dog had entirely stopped eating, and I was home with him by myself trying to do work. It was impossible. Not only did Tiny Dog want to spend his entire day and night in the dirty clothes hamper in the bathroom closet, he also wanted everyone else to do so as well.

The vet cautiously suggested that, maybe, just maybe, Tiny Dog was having an adverse reaction to THE VERY THING THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HELP HIM.

10:45 AM: It will get better, they said. Give it a few days, they said.

12 PM: Cue Tiny Dog, strapped to my body in a tiny sling, shivering, gags and vomits.

12:45 PM: (at vet’s office.) Maybe we should take him off the prozac.

Moral of the story: perhaps we should all just love each other for who we are. HA- just kidding. You better believe we’re (read: I’M) trying a new anxiety medication as soon as he gets detoxed from this one.

…or maybe we’re just happy to have Tiny Dog back, for now…

Love,

Emily

P.S. Managed Care Organizations can SUCK IT.

January 15, 2018

Life with EoE: The pits (and ridges!)

Well, it’s been about a month since I finally got my less-than-satisfying diagnosis of eosinophillic esophagitis. Actually, I should rephrase that– it was INCREDIBLY satisfying at first, and then a major bummer once I realized there was no quick fix for it.

Eosinophillic Esophagitis (or EoE) is an autoimmune disease of the esophagus that causes inflammation, ridges, and scarring in the esophagus. I am here to tell you that it sucks. It really sucks. It causes a variety of unpleasant GI symptoms, the most common being feelings of food being stuck in your throat or being unable to swallow. For me, the symptoms were periodic episodes of severe nausea and vomiting that always happened in the morning, seemed to be triggered by nothing, and were pretty much incapacitating. It was like having really bad morning sickness but with no baby and no end in sight.

My GI doctor recommended a whole host of tests which I basically never followed through with because the initial, least-invasive ones found nothing, and I find GI problems to be depressingly elusive. Around November though, things seemed to get much worse– I had extremely severe abdominal pain that sent me to the ER, I couldn’t sleep anymore because I kept waking up in the night feeling like a brick was lodged in my throat, and I had basically constant heartburn/stomach pains. I was also starting to get really bummed out and feel like a failure, because I’m neurotic and that’s how I roll. I always find it helpful to sink into a self-blaming depression whenever something bad happens.

Everyone seemed convinced it was my gall bladder, but after about a billion tests turned up nothing, I finally agreed to do the endoscopy, which I thought would also turn up nothing. Even though I did get a diagnosis from this, clearly the best thing to come out of the endoscopy was the video that Wife took of me crying about Carson Wentz’ recent knee injury as I was coming out of anesthesia.

I was so convinced that the test wouldn’t find anything that I never bothered to listen to the message from the GI doc for 2 days, at which point I discovered by biopsy was positive for EoE. That was momentarily elating, as I noted, until I realized there’s no quick fix for this. Like Lupus or allergies or eczema or Chron’s disease or a million other things, EoE is basically the body being an idiot and deciding to attack itself due to an overreaction. In the case of EoE, it turns out that it’s often triggered by food allergies.

I was like, food allergies??? WHAT???!! I’ve never been allergic to any foods! Not to mention I guess the universe wasn’t listening when I said I would lose all will to live if I was ever allergic to gluten. So obviously the next step was getting an appointment with an allergist which takes about a million years. I finally found an allergist who could see me at the end of this month, which is a small miracle, because before that the earliest appointment was May. Until then, I’ve embarked on the recommended treatment for EoE which is the-worlds-worst-you-can’t-eat-anything diet.

This is called the 6-item elimination diet, in which the 6 items to be eliminated are joy, enjoyment of life, worry-free social activity, hope, sense of humor, and patience. …or: wheat, dairy, soy, eggs, nuts, and fish. Which if you’ve ever read food labels, you know is basically everything processed ever. And a lot of stuff that’s not processed. I confess that I haven’t really stuck to this religiously, because I refuse to cut out dairy. It seemed to difficult to do all at once, so I started with the first 5.

The results of this are as follows:

Extreme crankiness. Wife has noted that I’ve started becoming bizarrely defensive about completely nonsensical things. Example:

Wife: When I was laying in bed last night I heard an owl!

Me: I KNOW. I heard it; I was here TOO.

Hatred of Health Fanatics. I’ve become really unfairly judgy and resentful of anyone complaining about their New Year’s diet that they voluntarily embarked upon. I know it’s unfair and petty, but I can’t help it. YOU CHOSE THIS.

Whininess about all the things I can’t eat. at least 10 times a day I feel compelled to point out to someone how hard my life is because of this. For example, I’ve started glaring at Wife every time she eats an egg.

Self-pity. See above.

Improvement?? It’s only been a week and a half, so really too soon to tell, but I have to grudgingly admit I feel better. The nausea and vomiting only comes on periodically, so it could just be I’m in a symptom-free period. But I can honestly say I haven’t had any heartburn, abdominal pain, diarrhea, or other GI symptoms since I started the diet. And, Wife totally appreciates that I’m far less gassy. (Which I never perceived as a symptom, personally.) It’s hard to say whether I’ve truly eliminated an allergen, or if it’s the placebo effect (because dammit, this better be working), or if it’s just that we would all feel better if we didn’t eat processed shit all the time.

Well… I guess I’ll find out at my allergist appointment on the 22nd! Stay tuned!

January 7, 2018

The Tiny Dog Gets Prozac

First, some notes about the Tiny Dog. The Tiny Dog is a shelter dog, meaning that he comes with his fair-share of baggage. I’ve never owned a dog before. Wife tricked me into this venture because a) I was out of town b) it was her birthday and c) his face looks like this:

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She assured me (and the shelter assured her) that Tiny Dog was the most mellow, sweetest, laid back of all dogs. He’s great with kids! He’s super friendly! He’s great with small animals and other dogs! And totally house broken! You can probably tell by the sarcastic exclamation points and the title of this post that Tiny Dog is none of these things.

The first thing Tiny Dog did when we brought him home was attempt to reclaim my childhood stuffed animal as his sex toy. He is, however, very, very, very cute. And, let’s be real, we’re not the most disciplined owners (despite the fact that I have an advanced degree in behaviorism…), so his behavior is almost definitely 80% our fault.

Tiny Dog kind of looks like a fancy small wolf or coyote, so we were convinced that he was chihuahua (which we knew) mixed with other fancy breeds. So we bought one of those extremely expensive dog DNA kits for insane dog owners who want to attempt to stick multiple swabs in their dogs’ mouths. Tiny Dog is not exotic. It turns out that Tiny Dog is exactly 2 breeds: Chihuahua and Pomeranian. In fact, his DNA results would suggest that he’s somewhat of a fancy designer dog. Which further led us to question our assumptions about Tiny Dog being a meek little stray street puppy who had to fend for himself before being saved by the humane society. Now armed with more information about Tiny Dog’s intelligence and survival instincts (or lack there of), we are forced confront the probable reality that he was the intellectual runt of his designer dog litter who probably just wandered off until the shelter found him 20 minutes later.

But we really, really love Tiny Dog. Nonetheless it became quickly apparent that his neuroses and personality (100% Chihuahua) were no match for us. The first summer we had him he was constantly hysterical about storms and would hide behind the toilet if he heard so much as a truck driving by:

After 3 days of incessant shivering, whining, hiding, and lack of sleep for everyone, I took him to the vet who informed us that he had a urinary tract infection, which was probably making the anxiety worse. She treated the UTI, gave us a bottle of the world’s tiniest valium for storms, and gently suggested that we might wish to consider prozac.

Wife was really opposed to this. In spite of the fact that we both benefit from modern medicine to maintain our own sanity, she was worried about the health ramifications and the overall weirdness of putting a chihuahua on prozac. So we did work on training mostly diligently for a while. We took Tiny Dog to an obedience class where he excelled, unless it was storming. He seemed to like us more and have less separation anxiety. His wonderful trait of spontaneously growling/snapping at people whenever he was so much as breathed on while sleeping seemed to be diminishing.

But then Christmas came and Tiny Dog was extremely distressed by all the noise, action, and changes in routine. He kept threatening to bite people and terrified my mom’s 70 pound flat coat retriever. We tried to fly home with him on a plane which was a fiasco resulting in the entire plane hating us, me refusing to sit next to Wife and Tiny Dog, and the flight attendant noting, “wow, he’s really hyperventilating, huh?” Not to mention, he growled at a baby. A baby. (As a side note, Wife also bought me a Furbo for Christmas, which is a fancy schmantzy dog-cam that allows your to watch your dog when you’re not home. You can also talk to them and feed them treats from the machine. This terrified the Tiny Dog, and he wouldn’t come in the living room for 3 days.)

At this point Wife started to become paranoid and frantic that we would have to give him away if he bit someone (he never has), so we pulled out the big guns. We made an appointment (later this month) to work one-on-one with a professional dog behaviorist (embarrassing: see previous notes about my profession) and I bundled Tiny Dog off to the vet again. Within 30 seconds of walking in the door Tiny Dog pooped on the floor and growled at a dog 12 times his size. They put the world’s tiniest muzzle on him, but he made a valiant attempt to bite the vet anyway. The vet tech seemed to find this endearing, as she had previously made friends with Tiny Dog while he was under sedation for a dental exam, and also she has 5 chihuahuas of her own. I was vaguely mortified. Following the exam, Tiny Dog jumped down, hid under my chair shivering with his tail between his legs, and promptly peed on the floor.

They gave us the prescription.

Stay tuned…