Mile Eleven

About a month after my PCOS diagnosis and before falling fully down the rabbit hole of infertility treatments, I ran a half-marathon.  It was one of those “bucket list” kinds of things I’d begun training for in earnest shortly after we originally began trying to conceive in April because I knew deep down something felt “off” and didn’t want to face it.  I took my running habit, ramped up, and signed the papers to run in November.  If I was wrong, I figured, I’d walk or give my registration to someone else.  In the meantime, the long runs gave me something else to focus on.

The day of the race was a mildly overcast, cool but not cold November day – perfect weather.  I lined up at the start and took off with the other runners.  The first mile was great.  I was excited, my adrenaline was high, and it flew by.

The second and third miles were not so great.  This was the point where I began to realize what I’d gotten myself into and I fought the part of my brain that kept telling me I’d never make it 13.1 miles.  When I passed 3.1 miles, I wondered why I hadn’t just signed up for a nice 5K.  Then I’d be done.  However, as I kept running, mile four felt easier and I started enjoying the thing.

I ran through the countryside.  This particular race tends to be quiet, isolated, and doesn’t have the quantity of spectators or cheering that I’ve read others have.  I ran over country roads, admiring the farmland, enjoying the quiet.  I caught up with an old buddy and ran a mile or so with her, chatting.  Otherwise, however, I was by myself with my i.pod and loving every minute.  Seven miles passed.  I have this.

Then I hit mile eleven.

I really wanted to run the entire race without taking sections to walk.  But as soon as I got into that eleventh mile, it wasn’t merely that I wanted to walk.  I wanted – seriously – to lay down at the side of the road, quit, and let the race organizers come pick me up.  I hit the wall, and I hit it bad.

A combination of factors were probably at play here: eleven miles is a long way to run, it had been a bit since I’d had water or electrolyte replenishment, and in a 13.1 mile race, eleven is right at that nasty spot where I was close to the finish line and yet far enough away not to have the adrenaline rush of being “close”.  It did not matter.  It sucked.

A hill rose up in front of me.  You have got to be kidding me, I thought.  This wasn’t even a real hill.  I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, so I know hills.  This was more of a tuft of dirt but the placement infuriated me.  The irritation gave me strength.  I ran up it and finished out mile eleven.

I finished shortly thereafter, just in time to see the winner of the marathon cross the finish line, get some water, and celebrate with Arthur and a few friends and family who had come to cheer me on.  I was glad I had done it and I had managed to complete it my way – without walking a single step, and well under three hours.

~*~

Really, in the vast majority of ways these days, I’m fine.  Happy, really.  Not needing the support the way I once did.  At this point, I love where we are in life and it’s good.

There’s one more embryo, frozen.  Tested.  Waiting.

I’m procrastinating on calling the RE’s office even though Arthur and I have a reasonably solid plan because…well, it opens doors.  It reminds me that I’m not all powerful, that plans fall apart, that doing everything right can still result in heartbreak in both expected and unexpected ways.

I like feeling in control.  I know I’m not, but on a day to day basis, it’s really easy to pretend, to slip into the minutiae and let the illusion remain.  Calling the RE, putting in motion the final plan, means letting go.

It’s time to run mile eleven in this race.  Face the tuft of dirt.  Keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Because the finish line is somewhere close.

This (long-form 😉 ) post has been a part of Microblog Mondays, where the idea is to write in your space, usually a short post but whatever moves you.  If you want to read more, head over to Stirrup Queens!  Thanks to Mel for originating and hosting.  

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Adulting – Cold Weather Edition

Living in the Midwest, it’s cold.  According to the local meteorologists, we’ve broken the 50-year record for cold and have to go all the way back to 1918 to find a colder low temperature.  Wednesday the low was -13 Fahrenheit with wind chills much lower.  Needless to say, we’ve been indoors the last several days.

Tuesday night, we went through the house, making sure faucets were dripping and preparing.  When we got up Wednesday morning, all was well.  Arthur’s work day was reduced due to the extreme weather, so he didn’t leave until late morning.  It was pleasant to have a relaxed start to the day and the furnace was pumping out heat, so despite the cold, we were cozy.

I put the girls down for a nap around one and did my workout.  Around 2:20, I headed up to shower, turned it on, and…no hot water.

What?!

I cranked the lever over to the hottest setting and the water stopped.

Uh-oh.

The house is laid out such that the second full bath is on the opposite side of the wall from the master bath, where I was, and uses the same pipes.  I sprinted to the second bathroom, turned on the water in the tub/shower, and waited.  No hot water.

I quickly checked the sinks in both bathrooms, which did have hot water.  My stomach sank.  The pipes to the showers weren’t on the outside wall of the house, but they were close to it.  I knew that all wasn’t lost yet because water was still coming through, but probably didn’t have long before the pipes completely froze.

I called my parents, who I knew were home and had dealt with a wide variety of house issues.  “Furnace up, run the water as far to hot as you can while getting a flow, and warm up the pipes wherever you can find a spot.”  We normally keep our house at around 69 degrees (Fahrenheit) and just put on another sweater, but in this case, I cranked the furnace to 76 and prayed it would hold.  I kept the water running, which precipitated another issue: the tub drain in one of the bathrooms had long been running slowly and now was blocked.  I spent the next half hour bailing so I could keep the water going to keep the pipe unfreezing and wondering where Arthur was, as he was due home.

A few minutes later, I found out: at the auto supply store.  The car battery had died in the cold to the point where it would no longer even jump.  Fortunately, Arthur happens to work across the street from the auto supply store and getting a new battery was easy.  About thirty minutes later, he was home.

We spent the next several hours unblocking the drain (hurrah for baking soda, vinegar, and hot water), bailing the tub, and cleaning up the mess.

Honestly, we were fortunate.  It’s sheer luck that I caught the freezing pipe in time to get it thawed before it got to the point of bursting (and we’ll be watching for the next several weeks to make sure there are no small cracks/leaks).  It’s also lucky that Arthur was able to get a new battery so easily.

But hey, so far, so good 😊.

Budgeting Life

This weekend, I picked up Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s extraordinary memoir When Breath Becomes Air.  I had bought it on a fire sale as an e-book before Christmas (thanks to this Stirrup Queens post) and when my lunch break rolled around, I thought I’d start on it.

Reading it at two in the morning, just down the hall from the ORs, wearing periwinkle blue surgical scrubs, a vital sign monitor on my desk that I needed to put away after my break made the story more real, and I was pulled in almost immediately.  It was not at all hard to imagine Dr. Paul Kalanithi as a physician, as a neurosurgeon, walking in and issuing his postop orders, doing the usual things surgeons do.

But of course, that is not the whole of the story, nor its most brilliant, poignant part: Paul Kalanithi was an undeniable genius, yes, clearly a gifted physician, yes, but he was also a patient.  The two personas, brought together in one who could clearly articulate the connections, tensions, and even find humor between them are what make this one of the most exceptional books I’ve read in a long time.

Kalanithi’s book was published posthumously and while it is absolutely about dying, it’s about more than that.  It’s about living within limits – unusually cruel tight ones in Kalanithi’s case – but limits are a fairly universal human experience.  I think what I found particularly instructive and lovely about When Breath Becomes Air is its acceptance of human limitation.  Kalanithi accepts that his cancer is terminal and seeks to live within that diagnosis – there’s no talk of “fighting” or being the exception or beating cancer.  Instead, he thoughtfully decides to live fully whatever time he has left.

It’s rare in this day and age where a relentlessly ‘positive’ mindset is stressed and the acknowledgement of the chance that an outcome might be anything less than miraculous restoration of health or a return to previous life is often met with “oh, don’t say that!” to see a treatise like this one.  Even outside of life and death situations, there’s a cultural notion about being able to accomplish anything with enough effort/investment – one with which I know much of the infertility community is intimately familiar.  I think the way this book challenges that is a central part of the appeal, or at least, it certainly was for me.  Kalanithi’s resolution to move forward by grieving his losses, knowing his death will come untimely early, and doing his best to both find and continue in what he valued until that death reads as far more positive than an empty promise to seek a ‘cure’ at any cost.

Personally, when confronted with limitations that truly grieved me, I’ve tended towards anger.  Maybe it’s because sadness and grief seem passive and anger gives the illusion that there’s something I can do, something that with enough force might change the distressing situation (even when I know better).  Kalanithi suggests a very different path.  He interrogates himself to find the values he wishes to cling to within the whirlwind.  And then he does it.  It’s not a denial of emotions or grief or putting a good spin on a tough situation, it’s a measured choosing of response.  “It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget” he writes.

There’s so much more to consider in the book – and hopefully write about – but that felt particularly resonant.  The next time I must budget my life, I know I’ll return to Kalanithi’s thoughts on doing so.

This post is a part of Microblog Mondays.  If you want to read more, head over to Stirrup Queens.  Thanks to Mel for originating and hosting.

2018 Year in Review: Books

Every time I put on the Rent soundtrack, one of the ways I consistently answer the question “how do you measure a year?” is “In books I read!”  Naturally, there are plenty of others, but books are a marvelously quantifiable answer.

Fiction:

Two Dark Reigns – Kendare Blake

Crazy Rich Asians – Kevin Kwan

Kingdom of the Blind – Louise Penny

Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

Prep – Curtis Sittenfeld

Sisterland – Curtis Sittenfeld

Rapid Falls – Amber Cowie

Burial Rites – Hannah Kent

Innocent Traitor: A Novel of Lady Jane Grey – Alison Weir

Three Wishes – Liane Moriarty

We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson

The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror – (Daniel) Mallory Ortberg

Three Dark Crowns – Kendare Blake

One Dark Throne – Kendare Blake

The Young Queens – Kendare Blake

Origin – Dan Brown

The Family Next Door – Sally Hepworth

The Long Drop – Denise Mina

Small Great Things – Jodie Picoult

Nonfiction:

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start Up – John Carreyrou

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder – Caroline Fraser

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa – Adam Hochschild

Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things – Jenny Lawson

Year of No Clutter: A Memoir – Eve Schaub

Between the World and Me: Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter – Margareta Magnusson

Hell’s Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men – Harold Schechter

Siblings Without Rivalry: How To Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too – Adele Faber

In Bloom: Trading Restless Insecurity for Abiding Confidence – Kayla Aimee

Night Driving: A Story of Faith in the Dark – Addie Zierman

Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy – Sheryl Sandburg

Life in a Medieval City – Frances Gies

The Art of the English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock – Lucy Worsley

Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith – Barbara Brown Taylor

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) – Mindy Kaling

The Blood of Emmett Till – Timothy B. Tyson

Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again – Rachel Held Evans

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened – Jenny Lawson

Mary Boleyn: The Mistress of Kings – Alison Weir

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America – Alissa Quart

The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster – Sarah Krasnostein

You’ve Been So Lucky Already – Alethea Black

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI – David Grann

Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century – Peter Graham

Dead Mountain: The Untold Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident – Donnie Eicher

Infreakinfertility: How to Survive When Getting Pregnant Gets Hard – Melanie Dale

The Cross and the Lynching Tree – James H. Cone

When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith – Addie Zierman

Unf*ck Your Habitat: You’re Better Than Your Mess – Rachel Hoffman

The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game – Mary Pilon

More Than Halfway Through, and Still Reading:

The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down: Colin Woodard

World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made: Irving Howe

Reread:

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End – Atul Gawande

Ready For Air: A Journey Through Premature Motherhood – Kate Hopper

Juniper: The Girl Who was Born Too Soon – Kelley Benham French, Thomas French

I’m looking forward to reviewing a few of the highlights on the list and looking forward to more books in 2019!

This post is a part of Microblog Mondays.  If you want more, head on over to Stirrup Queens!  Thanks to Mel for originating and hosting.

Reading: The Merry Spinster

Fairy tales have long fascinated me.  I grew up with Tatterhood: Feminist Folktales From Around the World and The Maid of the North (both compiled by Ethel Johnson Phelps) as well as a Hans Christian Andersen collection.  Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains, we had no TV and the internet wasn’t around yet, so I loved those stories.  I read them often and was completely shocked when I saw the Disney version of The Little Mermaid – I can very vividly remember telling my mother that the ending was wrong (the ending of the movie and the original story diverge pretty wildly).  More recently, I’ve been fascinated by how much fairy tales incorporate experiences of infertility and loss.

So when I read a review of (Daniel) Mallory Ortberg’s* The Merry Spinster: Tales of Every Day Horror, I knew this was a book I had to get my hands on.  I was a little apprehensive about the “horror” part as I’m not at all into scary stories, but having enjoyed Ortberg’s writing in the past, I was curious about the twists he might put on the fairy tales he incorporated into his short stories.

Besides, let’s face it, fairy tales are horrifying in the originals.  The Grimm Cinderella has parts of feet being cut off to fit in shoes and eyes being pecked out.  I figured I could probably handle Ortberg’s renditions, which turned out to be as gruesome as any Grimm story in places.  Blood runs freely throughout the book.

Like most short story collections, there are a few misses in The Merry Spinster.  I really did not get The Wedding Party despite having read it several times.  Some of the stories just didn’t pick up Ortberg’s usual wit or really pull me in.

The hits of the collection, however, made the book absolutely worth it.

Fear Not: An Incident Log is one of my favorite stories from this year.  Ortberg replays the incidents from the biblical book of Genesis from the viewpoint of an angel and the result is biting and also very funny.  Written like a dry technical support log, the angel starts off explaining why such appearances always begin with “fear not”: because “…appearing before [humans] without some form of reassurance is liable to result in total system overload, followed shortly by shutdown.”  Despite the humor, it’s also beautiful and profound in places and I don’t think I’ll ever read or hear the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel quite the same way again.  Ortberg’s background as a PK (pastors’ kid – both his mother and father) is on full display in this story, and I wasn’t expecting the humor or tenderness that Ortberg gives the original text in his retelling.

The horror promised in the title is on full display in The Rabbit, Ortberg’s retelling of The Velveteen Rabbit.  The quest to become “real” takes on a whole new meaning in this imagining.  An early conversation between the rabbit and the well-loved Skin Horse immediately tips into a creeping awfulness: “’Whose skin do you have?’ the Rabbit had asked him, and the Skin Horse had shivered to hear the excitement in his voice.”  Ortberg’s description of the rabbit’s voice as “… a crawling black thing across the floor…” is hideously evocative.

Cast Your Bread Upon the Waters explores a different – but no less terrifying – horror.  Examining the ways in which the character uses certain passages and beliefs to justify and even encourage the unspeakable acts at the culmination of the story feels timely and relevant as a reminder and a caution.

Finally, The Six Boy-Coffins holds not only a well-done recasting of the original Grimm tale The Six Swans but also an incisive discussion of power and consent.  The line “She was beginning to learn the danger of silence, and that someone who wishes to hear a yes will not go out of his way to listen for a no” feels particularly resonant in the #metoo era.  The ending packs the rarest quality in this volume: the sense of justice done.

Ortberg is very fluid with genders throughout the stories, and in fact, was in the process of exploring the beginning of his transition from female to male at the time of writing.  Daughters may be referred to with male pronouns or have traditionally male names and husbands and wives may choose which role they want, regardless of sex.  Initially a bit confusing, it took me a story or two to get used to this particular quality, but overall, it enhanced the stories and makes playing with the tropes of fairy tales sharper.

As a rating, I’d give it 4/5 stars.  It’s definitely a book that appeals to a particularly dark sense of humor and a tolerance for fairy tale type violence/gore is a must.

*Author is listed on the book as Mallory Ortberg, but he has transitioned and taken the name of Daniel Mallory Ortberg

Those Ads

Reading the other day, I came across this article on Slate about ad algorithms, grief, and social media (TW for stillbirth).  Basically, it explores the phenomenon where, post loss, people are still bombarded with ads for baby or pregnancy items when they go online.  It also has the FB shortcut to hide some of these ads but less advice about the vexing problem of FB’s tendency to “celebrate” anniversaries of particular posts.

When it happened to me, I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who had it occurring.  I can vividly remember getting baby ads after my first miscarriage because I’d spent time looking up pregnancy-related websites.  It sucked, especially in those first few days after arriving home from the hospital post D&C when I was physically and emotionally achy.

My second loss was a little less problematic in terms of the ads – mostly because I had known something was wrong from the start and my searching had been confined to things like “ectopic pregnancy symptoms” and “really low beta HcG” and “pregnant but bleeding”.

The one that really wrecked me, however, was after E’s birth at 28w4d when I kept getting ads for maternity clothes while she was in the NICU.

The Slate article goes on to talk about why there aren’t better algorithms to prevent these triggering ads: “The real problem is that there’s no quick capitalistic incentive for Face.book to do the work of sorting ads or pictures for you.  As one grieving woman told the Australian website…’There’s no money in miscarriages, obviously.’”

Having walked through infertility and miscarriage, I can’t help but think, as do the women featured in the article, that there really does have to be a better way.

Reading: “Crazy Rich Asians”

I finally got to the top of the hold list at the library for Crazy Rich Asians.  With all the hype from the movie coming out this summer and the gorgeous trailers and movie posters, I knew I definitely wanted to read the book.

It’s a comedy of romance, manners, and people from somewhat mismatched backgrounds coming together.  There are the obligatory parties, snubbings, and displays of wealth and power with the tension set up by the expectations of society and family.  I found a good bit of it fun and the gorgeous clothes and settings a lovely change from my own currently dreary, grey, wintery surroundings.

That being said, I have to confess that I…didn’t really like the romantic interest/hero, Nicholas Young.  I’m not really spoiling anything to say that the plot pivots on the fact that Nick is handsome, incredibly rich, but has made a life for himself in New York where he has distanced himself from his family wealth and glamour to present himself as a regular college professor.  I mean, he’s handsome (cool) and down to earth (also good), but he’s been in a relationship with his girlfriend for two years and still has not revealed his full identity.

In the Jane Austen novels I’ve read (or heck, even in similarly wealthy/escapist shows like Downton Abbey), one of the qualities I appreciate is that generally, everyone knows The Rules.  Society is fairly rigid and people know when they’re social climbing, the rules surrounding manners and expectations, and how social interactions work.  I mean, Elinor Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility) knows that Edward Ferrars is out of her social range.  Charlotte Lucas (Pride and Prejudice) makes a very calculating decision surrounding the realities for women to marry the awful Mr. Collins.  There are definitely many surprises and tensions deriving from social mores, but while the players may not be evenly matched, everyone is governed by rules that are widely understood.

That’s where Crazy Rich Asians departs from Austen and company, because one of the major plot movers is the fact that Nicholas Young asks Rachel (and let me stress this again, after two years of romance) to go on a ten-week vacation to Singapore for the wedding of Nick’s good friend without telling her much of anything about his family or wealth.  In other words, a major time commitment for Rachel that implies the possibility of an even greater romantic attachment, with a huge piece of information withheld.

Basically, Nick sets the woman he purports to love up for some really severe cruelty at the hands of his some of his family and friends when Rachel inadvertently trips over all the social mores, norms, and gives various impressions that Nick’s family (predictably) interpret uncharitably.  While some of this may have been unavoidable, not giving Rachel at least some basic pointers on his social group feels unconscionable to me.  Oh, sure, Nick’s presented as ambivalent and somewhat troubled by his own wealth and social standing, but it didn’t code to me as “down to earth” when it came to bringing home the girlfriend.  It felt immature and selfish to throw his girlfriend into a pit of some not-very-nice people and social situations that would be challenging for even the most well-versed.

Rating this book, I’d give it a 2.5 stars out of 5.  The escapism and wealth-gawking part is really beautifully done.  The romance, though, didn’t gel for me.  It says something, though, that I’m curious enough to see some of the big conflicts resolved to be on the wait list for the sequel.