30
Apr
If anyone can’t guess why I haven’t been posting that’s really too bad ’cause I am not explaining. Suffice it to say I haven’t really been active anywhere until this week.
So I am burned out on politics again after my brief period of arguing against the health care plan that got shoved down our throats. Neither party has any solutions that will actually help us a nation on pretty much any front so my brief bit of political musing is over for now. All the anger has pretty much dissolved into disgust and apathy and that’s just depressing to write about and to read so I will save all of us from that path by not taking it.
I have been working a little bit on a side project that is kind of a mediafire for a limited number of bloggers I associate with through due to my association with 9B and that has come along pretty nicely. My Idiotbox and Mixwidget backend projects have been dormant but I am starting to work on them heavily again. I am also working on losing some weight which means I need to get a doctor to sign a release so I can avail myself of the free gym here at work. So there’s a lot of stuff swirling around in my head at the moment which might make this particular post seem a little disjointed. I still suck at finances and while we have a great budget program I suck at working within that construct so I will be buying a Dave Ramsey book in hopes of helping myself get better at money since I got a raise and am still operating at a loss every month. I am also deep in thought about modifying the behavior of my horde of screaming children and helping my wife deal with the social anxiety that cripples her in relationships and even affects ours. And the icing on that cake of busy-outside-of-work is that I have major remodeling/repairs to take care of in the house as well and time to spend with the kids who have pretty much begged me to spend more time with them. I don’t know if there are enough hours in the day to do all I need to do but I must throw myself at it and pray that I don’t falter as these are things that must be done.
I am going to try and go back to posting three days a week (Mon, Wed, Fri) but not bother with specific topics for each day. I need to have a log of things like my progress in making time for the family, losing weight, getting in a shape other than round, and fixing up the house. I have, at times, prided myself on my sense of story so I think that writing here will help me recapture that sense as it feels like it has slipped away a bit in the past couple of years. So my epic adventures into the lands of home repair, parenting, marriage, and all of other things that make up this thing we call life are what I intend to try and keep chronicling here. This will be my lowest priority so if I miss a day or two here and there I won’t consider giving up on this or more importantly anything else.
I don’t think I even listed everything I want to get done or get better at and that’s a little scary. Have a great weekend!
12
Apr
I didn’t post this until now because I didn’t know what to say. We are not having a baby. Technically it’s going to be a miscarriage. I thought I would be alright once we finally knew but the news hit me like a Mack Truck. I didn’t finish Wednesday out very well and was useless most of Thursday. Friday I did get some things done around the house (I took the rest of the week off work once I knew how hard it had hit me) and Saturday night I got to go see an old friend from out of town and I slept in Sunday missing church and most of the day. I didn’t handle this in the healthiest way possibly but I got through it without going to jail, getting in a fight, arguing with the wife, yelling at the kids, or generally being an asshole so I guess that’s an improvement on how I have handled similar things in the past.
It’s Monday and I am back at the office working, writing for 9b, and trying to get back into the swing of things. I think the next step is to get my routine back and help Michelle do the same with hers. So for those who didn’t see my tweets on this Wednesday night this is the update. I almost want to post an analysis of why this hit me so hard and what is still on my mind but I think it’s best to simply move past it and not dwell on it too much. In the end it’s what I’ll have to do regardless of whatever I post here or whatever introspection I let myself sink into so I have decided to just get to that part of it and skip the self pity morass that looks so comfortable from here.
So last Wednesday we went in to the ob/gyn for Michelle’s first appointment. All the usual stuff: paperwork, ultrasound, meeting the doctor, blood work and such. For us this is usually sort of an interview with the doctor where we find out what he requires from us and what we can assert so we can make a birth plan that the doctor will support. If you know me or Michelle you know that there is a distrust of the medical community as a whole that for her is valid as she’s been lied to about drugs being safe for use during pregnancy and even about whether a doctor was even an ob/gyn and for me is closer to a phobia but with some valid horror stories. This interview is necessary as is following up throughout the nine months because we have had doctors tell us stuff like rooming-in was taken care of only to end up in a confrontation with a hospital administrator who threatened yours truly with the police if I didn’t hand over my newborn child to the care of the nursery. We take precautions to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. With all that said we didn’t get to that point with this doctor yet. You see the ultrasound showed a birth sack but no baby, both ultrasounds in fact. The good doctor explained that it could be that Michelle’s body is on the far end of the bell curve for early fetal development or it could be a blighted ovum.
The bell curve explanation would go a long way to explaining why Michelle always, every single time, goes two to three weeks past her ultrasound-based due date. A blighted ovum would mean there is no baby. But we don’t know. Even after blood work on last Wednesday and Friday we still don’t know because the tests were inconclusive. Now you would think this would be driving Michelle crazy but it’s really not but it is driving me right out of my tiny little mind. There’s a possible problem and I can do nothing to find out if it really is a problem much less to fix it and worse yet it is affecting my wife. I want to yank what little hair I have out by the roots and run stark raving naked through the halls at work screaming like a mad fiend. Of course I can’t do that so I am stuck in this limbo of not knowing and today’s promise of some kind of answer turned into being in the same state of not knowing as before. For me the problem is that I am reading stories of women who were diagnosed with this that chose to let nature take its course and as late as 12 weeks a baby showed up so even an ultrasound with no baby tomorrow doesn’t mean we have an answer. So I may stuck in the little world of crazy for a while yet.
I can handle either answer. I didn’t want another baby. Well I did but I didn’t but that’s not for this post. But I accepted this, seeing the look on the faces of the clan children, and had progressed to being excited about it. If it turns out to be a blighted ovum I will disappointed but not heartbroken and if we are having a baby then I finally get my ginger girl. What I can’t handle is not knowing.
The upshot right now is that the doctor is amazing. He managed to make us both comfortable in all five minutes. He doesn’t act like I don’t exist, which pisses me off about the whole medical community when it comes to birth, and is very confident in his speech and demeanor. He said, without us asking, that he prefers to do as little as possible to insure a healthy mom and baby, he allows VBAC (which is why we are seeing him as this will be VBA2C for Michelle) and is a Christian. I know I don’t oft talk about that here but it’s important in this situation as both Michelle and I are opposed to abortion and one of the things he said was “We have to make sure because one thing I don’t do is interrupt pregnancy”. While I wouldn’t be as comfortable with a doctor that didn’t hold the same beliefs as us this is a very important thing because it means he won’t pressure Michelle to do anything she doesn’t want to do. Even if he decides it’s a blighted ovum she has the option of letting her body take care of it naturally so we will never have a question in our minds and that’s important.
In closing that’s why I haven’t been posting. I didn’t know what to say and we don’t want the kids knowing anything just yet. So if you read this, know my kids, and happen to speak them then don’t say anything to them or you risk getting me pretty mad. Just say a prayer for us and pray there’s a baby on the ultrasound tomorrow because if there isn’t I am still stuck in limbo slowly going insane.
