WTF?

So, after a brief break to get knocked up, here I am back again for the edification of my..um...no breathless readers!

I realized today that my poor OB has to contend not only with a patient who is, ahem, a wee bit on the high-maintenance side but is also genuinely high-risk! I don't think they cover this in med school, but he is rising to the challenge admirably. At least he still returns my phone calls.

So, let's have a brief reminisce of the last time I was tied to the pregnancy wheel:

Um, bed rest. Bed rest sounds like fun, especially when you're in college, completely sleep-deprived (or at least as sleep deprived as you think you are until you have a child and realize you haven't slept a full night in four years) and hung over. In fact, then bed rest sounds vaguely Victorian and soothing, a rest cure, the kind of thing a heroine might take to protect her fragile sensibilities from the invasion of the Cruel World. Then you get put on bed rest, and you realize you're living in The Yellow Wallpaper. My room's walls got smaller day by day, 82 of them to be exact, that I spent trudging from the bed (left side!) to the bathroom to the bed (right side!). There are entire books written on how to survive bed rest without losing your mind. Sadly, I never read any of them.

Severe pre-eclampsia with HELLP syndrome. You know how you get your blood pressure taken at a doctor's visit, and it's a benign or even mildly competitive event where you are once again pronounced healthy? Scratch all that when you get pre-eclampsia. Not only does your blood pressure rise to science-fiction levels, but you become -- I shit you not -- a "hostile uterine environment". Yeah, I'm an environment, but one whose fetus and/or placenta (yeah, that's the funny thing -- no one really knows what causes pre-eclampsia, despite the fact that 8% of pregnant women, or 80,000 women a year, develop it) have managed to make my liver, kidneys and nervous system work like a 1982 Volvo with dirt in the engine. Very "Steel Magnolias", except my hair is fucked and I'm nowhere near as thin as Julia Roberts.

So, let's add into the distinct possibility of a repeat appearance by the ever-popular Pre-Eclampsia Fairy isoimmunization to the Kell antigen. Um, yeah. I didn't know what it was either, but apparently you can have really bad things happen and still not know what they are. You know how they're always talking about a "type and cross" on "ER", and it sounds all studly and technical? Well, apparently they only screen for ABO and Rh types, not any of the dozen or so minor antigens. This is proving to be a big pain in my keister.

I'm sure there will be more. I'm like a frigging episode of "House" here, and not one of the good ones with the hot guy from "Dead Poets Society" playing a major role while House is bitter and funny. More like one of the "Disease of the Week" ones where the docs are doing a nurse's job. And where are the nurses in that hospital anyway? Are they having coffee with the non-existent ones on "ER"?

Okay, I'll close with a picture of my bubby, who reminds me every day of why I'm doing this shit all over again.

Linkin' Linkin' and Blog

There are few things in life that give me more reasons to waste time on the computer than the following links:

Knitty: How can you go wrong with a knitting website that includes a pattern for a truly frightening knitted uterus, among dozens of other free and not frightening patterns? Also, incredibly clear instructions for finishing, the bane of my knitting life.

East Village Inky: I love Inky in the springtime, I love Inky in the fall...Ayun Halliday's zine saved my heiner (her word) during my early mothering days. Completely not "What to Expect.." Ayun is an amazingly talented writer about travel, mothering and truly crappy jobs.

BUST: While occasionally a tad cutesy for my taste, in general a kickass mag for women who are decidedly not ladies. Carries the above-mentioned Ms. Halliday's column.

More to come.

What Fresh Hell Is This?

One thing eternally entertaining about both parenting and politics is that just when you've got a game plan in action, the little buggers go and change on you. You can be finally set with an answer to "Mommy, did you and Daddy ever do drugs?" and they'll look up at you with glowing trusting eyes like ET and ask, "Mama, why do you and Daddy lock the door to your room sometimes?" Likewise, you can be resigned to the retirement of William Rehnquist -- maybe not okay with it but resigned to the fact that he will be replaced by someone equally as frightening; after all, he is 800 years old and we know he wants to be replaced by a Republican nominee -- and then out of nowhere, POW! Sandra Day O'Connor socks you like the Incredible Hulk. So while you're still wiping up the spit the roundhouse knocked out of you, you realize that a man whose compassionate conservatism allows him to call an 82-year-old woman old to her face (Times, 2005) is going to replace ol' Centrist Sandra with someone slightly to the right of Fred Flintstone.

It is nice to know that there is absolutely no satisfaction in being right. All the yammering I did during the 2004 elections -- hell, during the 2000 elections -- about how this election was about the Supremes, not about a chief executive whose power is so limited by a split Congress...well, it doesn't make me feel any better to have been right. Serve up some right on toast; I hear it tastes just like shit on a shingle.

I spent six years, off and on, working in abortion clinics. It was my first job out of college and the reason I became a nurse. I know a hell of a lot more than Georgie does about compassionate anything, and I earned that knowledge from listening to story upon story upon story from my patients. My patients taught me how hard people work to keep their heads above water, how complicated it can be to get from their house to the pharmacy to refill their birth control, how the money to pay for it might not be there when they do make it. My patients came in terrified by the propaganda of the right, believing they would leave the clinic infertile or dead, but desperate enough to show up anyway, They showed up, just as they will show up at the houses of illegal providers after whoever Bush's nominee is succeeds in tossing the remaining shreds of Roe. Human need and human conditions don't play a part in his compassionate conservatism, or in the lives of the people who elected him.

Bush voters all carry the responsibility of this carnage. When women die of illegal abortion,as they did before Roe, as Becky Bell did in Indiana in 1988, as Rosie Jimenez did in the president's home state of Texas, it is the responsibility of all who put him in office. If I could, I would sentence you all to explain to any of my patients in person why you thought your continued affluence and fear were worth their lives.

Remember the glowing ET eyes from the first paragraph? Here's my problem: how do I explain to the owner of said eyes, my gorgeous and perfect offspring, that the reason he doesn't have any civil liberties is that half the country (well, half of the half that were eligible to vote...which makes around 18% of the total population) elected a village idiot to tell the rest of us what to do.