The Snarky Momma occasionally (okay, sometimes) reviews products on her review blog related to parenting, domestic goddess-try, and personal care. Her opinions are honest, based on her own experiences, and will be published even if she does not find the product satisfactory. She will always disclose how she got a product and whether she was compensated to talk about it. If you want to send her a product, contact her via email at tiffany [at] snarkymomma [dot] com.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Little people.
You know, I think I’ve finally gotten to the point where I see Rosco as his own little person and not just as an accessory of his parents. You know what I mean. Up to a certain age little kids really aren’t all that independent, don’t show much personality, and just take what you give them.
There’s some unmarked milestone they reach where they become actual members of the family and not just cute little blobs that get carried around in the crook of your arm. I figured this out yesterday when I was in Target (forever may it reign) buying Rosco a water bottle. Normally when we go make outdoor excursions I just fill my water bottle up and share it with him. But, 2.5-year-old that he is, he wants to hold it himself when he drinks. My bottle is sort of unwieldy for him when condensation forms on the outside so I thought I should get him a smaller one that he can tote around himself.
So, now he has his own red bottle. And what struck me was that it’s not a sippy cup or one of those straw cups - it’s a grown-up bottle. My little boy has a grown-up water bottle. *sniffle*
So, today’s blood draw was a little freaky-deaky. One doctor told me my levels had only gone down by 8% and was going to prep me for another shot of methotrexate. Then the little blond doctor I saw last week came by the little corral I was in going “Yay! They went down!” and from there about five minutes of confusion ensued. They went and redid the math, and yeah, I was good to go. Whew! If the second shot didn’t work I would have had the threat of having my right fallopian tube removed, so I really need last Friday’s dose to get ‘er done.
Oddly, on a semi-related note, I had this vision last night (I’m not one to get visions). I wouldn’t call it a dream because I wasn’t asleep yet, but it wasn’t directed thought if you catch my drift. My grandma was there with some guide I didn’t recognize who told me that she hasn’t stopped by because I wouldn’t be able to hear her. Then my grandma smiled at me in that way that she always did and told me that “the baby would be okay.” Don’t ask me what it meant, but it had me a bit shuddery for about five minutes before I fell asleep. Nice to have an image of my grandma smiling in my mind, though.
I don’t think little kids have all that great of a survival instinct. They’re loud and indiscreet. Some of the stuff they do has to be ingrained, but I don’t know what evolutionary function it could possibly serve. Rosco has never, ever seen another child throw a tantrum when they wanted to stay someplace longer, but he’s figured out how to do that. Unfortunately I have a mind like a Jedi and that crap doesn’t work on me. If he starts screaming - that’s fine. I’ll carrying him out screaming. Even easier when we’re outdoors where all the kids are loud.
I’m onto you kid. That stuff may work with Daddy, but not with me.
Yet another update on the never-ending ectopic pregnancy saga. (I know - “yay!”, you’re thinkin’.)
This morning’s blood draw showed that my beta hCG has risen 80 points since Friday, which is expected (supposedly). I’m happy that it was *just* 80 because it relieves my apprehensions that there might have been a viable pregnancy occurring simultaneously due to our preferred method of birth control*. [Just a little info tidbit - once an embryo implants in the uterus the level of hCG in the bloodstream doubles approximately every 48 hours. Mine is rising too slow for there to be any speculation about that.]
So, basically today’s blood draw was just so they’d have something to compare Thursday’s result to. They should just start sending Ana the phlebotomist to the casa de Snark to draw my blood since I see her so much. By the time this is over she’ll know me so well that she’ll be able to accurately guess how often I comb my hair.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering how I’m faring with having what’s actually chemotherapy drug in my system - it’s all right. It’s like I took a bunch of sleepy pills, so Rosco didn’t get so much attention from mom this weekend, but otherwise I’m operating at normal efficiency.
This week my hCG levels had done even worse than plateauing. They increased! By 100! So, this was obviously a problem that wasn’t going to resolve itself.
I went to the hospital at 8:30 for a blood draw, got my lab results at 9:30, got more blood drawn to check my liver, and then got an intramuscular injection (in one of the fattier parts of muh body) at 12:30.
So, I’m a bit sore.
The drug is supposed to start doing what it does on day 4 (Monday) and I have to go back to the hospital then for them to check me over. The doc wrote me a prescription for Vicodin when I told her that I don’t tolerate Percoset and Tylenol 3 well (they make me barf), but I doubt I’ll get it filled. I can’t take ibuprofen because of the methotrexate shot I had today (it does something or other adverse to the function of the injection), so if I get into a really bad state I’m going to have to pull some extra strength Tylenol out of my junk drawer and hope it’s sufficient.
The doc gave me the scuzzy eyeball and a stern lecture about our current birth control method (I’m sure you’ve heard of it - it’s called “marriage”) and told me to lay off the booze for the weekend.
So, that’s about it. More blood draws next week. If by next Thursday my hCG levels have gone down 15% then they consider the treatment to be successful and they won’t whisk me back to the operating room.
Well, it turns out that my OB was looking at her schedule for tomorrow and noted that I was coming in at 4:20 in the afternoon so she called me a few minutes ago.
I have to go back to the lab in the a.m. for a draw and they’re going to run the test stat so they can deal with the situation during normal business hours. If they need to inject me with methotrexate (*shudders*) they’d do it while I’m there since that drug isn’t available at the off-site clinic.
So, if you don’t hear from me tomorrow it’s ‘cause I’m doubled over with cramps. Yay.
I’m a little apprehensive about tomorrow’s OB appointment. I’ve been waiting a full month for some closure on the ectopic situation and it’s turned into this never-ending drag-ass trauma. I mean, yeah, I’m fine from day to day, but every now and then I do get the distinct urge to throw stuff.
The worse-case scenario for tomorrow’s appointment would be that I get more of that “wait and see” line. If I wait anymore my head is going to explode.
I know they’re going to draw blood to see what my beta hcg level is, but I can’t imagine the visit will be much more productive than that. It’s not like they can give me an immediate reading of my level and since the appointment is so late in the day, if the lab sends them information that looks like there’s sketchy shit happening I won’t automatically be informed of it. I’d have to page the on-call doc at the hospital, let them pull the lab result, and then wait for them to acquaint themselves with the case.
If my hormone level hasn’t dropped since last week (and if you recall, last week they had actually ticked up by 2 or 3 from the previous test), then we need to troubleshoot. I’m sick of being a patient at this point. I just want to have a normal pregnancy where I check in every four weeks and don’t have to acquaint myself with every fracking obstetrician in the UNC Healthcare system.
So, I got a jury duty summons in the mail today for someone who used to live at this address. No, I didn’t open it. I just know that’s what it is because the county is cheap and sends summons out on tri-folded copy paper taped at the edge. I’ve received one before as has Scott.
Anyway, good citizen that I am I want to make sure dude gets his summons…you know, so he can suffer just like I had to. I called the jury clerk to see if I should forward it back to them as a bad address so they could take him off their list, but her voicemailbox clicked on. I left her a message, but I doubt I’ll get a callback. Inspector gadget that I am, I went online to see if anyone by the guy’s name has property anywhere else in the county. I couldn’t find his name under any variation (it’s one of those complex two-last-names Spanish names), so I tried checking under our address to see how far back the record went back. Well, it didn’t go back far enough to find this guy *but* I did see something funny on our property listings.
In Durham they list your adopted pets as property and tax you for them. So, under the listing for “CAT A DOMESTIC SH” (domestic short-hair - yer basic unclassifiable kitty cat) under the taxable value column it has itemized: “NO VALUE.”
Considering they’re both lounging around doing not-a-damn-thing that made me laugh uproariously.
You would think that with a nickname like “Snarky Momma” that I’d be pretty high-maintenance, eh? Not so. In fact, it’s the little things in life that make me really happy. Stuff like Slim-Jims and Twizzlers make me happy as a fly on you-know-what. This little piece of mail that showed up today made me really happy:
No more yucky box bins! This change is AWESOME! Now we can dump our recycling in the outdoor bin more frequently and it stays covered so we don’t have to worry about animals messing with it. *AND* no more ants congregating inside the kitchen around the indoor bin! Woo hoo! And it has wheels so we can just push it to the curb rather than haul it and get our pants legs dirty!
They piloted this program last year with some other areas of Durham and I was so jealous. I’m glad it’s going county-wide now.
Our pediatrician’s office asks us to fill out questionnaires before each well-child visit that touch base on milestones they may or may not have achieved. One of the items on the 30-month questionnaire asked whether the child can explain what they’ve created in a picture they’ve drawn. See for yourself (it started out as a structured activity where he was supposed to make an apple tree out of a hand print, but anyway…):
Have you heard of Oldnavyweekly.com? It’s basically Old Navy’s online interactive sales circular that has special coupons hidden. Once per week they reload the site and offer new deal opportunities.
Well. Let me tell you, the damned thing is cutthroat. You have all these people queued up obsessively refreshing (nobody knows the official time the site will reload) trying to get the high value coupons before they run out. It’s like a midnight madness sale on wedding dresses marked down to 25% of the original cost - imagine a virtual stampede of people trying to squeeze through the door.
Well, this week’s deals require you to have mad video gaming skillz because to get a $75 off $100 purchase coupon you have to track a parrot with your cursor and click on it. That may sound elementary, but depending on how coordinated your computer is it might not want to cooperate with your speed-clicking attempts. (I had to try it on the slower computer to get the stupid bird and by then the coupons were gone.) There were also some $50 off $100 coupons but the site was programmed in such a way that only certain people (self NOT included) could see the trigger.
I got a 15% off coupon which isn’t by any means going to send me out to the store. There’s nothing I want bad enough for 15% off, you know? Sure, I could do with some lightweight summer stuff, but I’ll suffer on until the deal is too good to be true. I don’t really need a cute sundress. It’d just be nice to have one ... or six. (ETA: I actually got a 30% off $50 coupon first, but I hate minimum purchase coupons. Anyway, 30% off $50 is $15. Still not giving me the warm-fuzzies.)
Hopefully if I log onto the site again at some random time there may be some *good* coupons available again.
Dusting off some curse words I haven’t used in a while.
Here I go again, putting information out there on the Interwebs. I figure since my Google searches on the subject have yielded Jack Shit that I might as well be that beacon of knowledge for folks to stumble across.
Went for my blood draw bright and early this morning (grumbling all the way, thinking what a waste of time it was). Then I took the kid to a coffee meet-up with my local mommy cult. While we were at the coffee shop I heard my phone buzzing in my tote bag and that tell-tell UNC Hospitals prefix was on the display, so I answered it.
Guess whose beta hCG levels aren’t dropping.
*raises hand*
I couldn’t get all psychotic on the phone since I was in the presence of too many witnesses (I save my crazy for home) so I calmly asked the doc what the worse-case scenario is and what I need to do at this point.
Basically, I’m in “wait and see” mode. I have a follow-up appointment scheduled for next Friday so they’re going to wait until then to draw blood again. If my count hasn’t gone down by then they’ll probably inject me with something-or-other to kill off the rogue cells that are probably hanging around. (Backstory: when I had surgery to remove the ectopic they couldn’t find the embryo so they assumed it had been reabsorbed by my body. Guess not.)
This whole “little bit pregnant” thing is starting to piss me off. I was all calm and shit about it before, but now I’m beginning to turn into crazy raging mommy. I NEED things to have a beginning, middle, and end so for this incident to not have a determinable conclusion is seriously messing with my head. I need to MOVE ON!
One of the docs from the hospital just called and was wondering why they didn’t see me today for my quantitative hCG test. I was like “Ummmm…” I really didn’t have a good answer. What I wanted to say was “Well, since y’all didn’t call me last week like you said you would I assumed I was okie-doke.”
Nope. Last week’s level was 153. So, my count had only dropped by about 50 in the span of one week.
...
...
Dude.
I asked why the crap was falling so slowly and she told me that’s just the way ectopics work.
