Sorrow at Sills Bend: December 2010

Sunday, December 5

Health

I thought I would say some more about the nature of the whining mentioned in the previous post. I am very healthy. I have the same perfect blood pressure I've always had, very low cholesterol, excellent digestion, no illnesses or anatomical problems. But I'm in an extended phase (which I know is a familiar one to many people) of receiving extensive and fairly complex medical treatments, some of which themselves make you physically sick and all of which you get very very tired of, especially perhaps if you've had the luxury of robust good health for most of your life. It feels very stupid and spoilt to have anything complainy to say about all this because, first of all, it's entirely self-inflicted, and secondly because I'm very well aware that it's an immense privilege that I'm able to have this sort of treatment at all - my luck in being born now and not twenty years earlier, my luck at living in a country where universal health care makes it financially possible for most people to access excellent medical care, and everybody who is really ill. Nevertheless, with this good fortune there does come another set of different challenges to negotiate. 'First world problems' - sure. But problems just the same.

Our baby was conceived through IVF and this involved a cocktail of drugs and a regime of appointments and tinkering which I will try to write some more about properly one day soon, in part because I think it might be a good idea to keep a record for future reference of the medications I've received and partly because even while it was mainly pretty horrible to undergo there was a part of me found it all really interesting. The analogy that came to mind often was (don't laugh) the Apollo 11 moon landing - this immense technological achievement - and how that was achieved using what would in only a few years come to be seen as incredibly primitive tools. From my own very limited involvement with it I suspect fertility medicine is in a similar state.

It is now at a point where it can (sometimes) do something that for millennia was so far outside the realm of human possibility as to be the subject of myth. But it is achieving this by a sort of Heath Robinsonesque assemblage of ropes and pulleys. Yet the demand for what it offers is so urgent and the stakes are so high that we're steaming ahead regardless. Maybe - probably - the medicine will refine and streamline in coming years. But I suspect it will have a tough time keeping pace with pressures on fertility coming from elsewhere in the culture. It would be good if they could work on some of the techniques, though: I think the drug Crinone is an unjustifiably dangerous thing to give to women in the vulnerable state brought on by the latter phases of IVF and I'll be happy to hear when its use is discontinued.

All the same, I don't imagine that any improvements in fertility medicine will make much difference to the tendency it appears to foster in fertility specialists to view themselves as modern day Prometheuses set to outdo all the other arrogant doctors in the world. My fertility specialist, a very capable and intelligent woman who I hated deeply, was once in the middle of saying what she planned to do about something or other that my pituitary gland was doing without her permission when she actually said that she would change the treatment after she had 'made me pregnant'. She immediately corrected this to 'after you fall pregnant,' so clearly she knew it wasn't a view of her role in the proceedings that would be appreciated by her patient.

Anyway, after the IVF and some disappointment there I was of course delighted to at last have fallen pregnant with an embryo which seemed interested in sticking around for the long haul, and I thought the endless doctor visits would tail off for a while until we got nearer to the business end of things. But the doctor-visiting been pretty consistent and I accept now that it is going to stay that way. About a month ago my obstetrician diagnosed me with gestational diabetes. This affects about 8% of pregnant women - there is a genetic predisposition, but otherwise one has no control over whether one gets it or not - and is insulin resistance caused by a hormone generated by the placenta, so it tends usually to develop in about week 24 to 28 when the placenta is quite large and to peak around week 35, and to go away entirely once the placenta is gone. Glucose crosses the placenta so if I can't use the glucose I take in the baby cops it all, and grows too big and has health issues later. I am now nearly 19 weeks pregnant and so I have four to five months to go with the diabetes. Usually it is controllable with exercise and diet and I am able to keep my blood glucose levels under control this way when I'm awake. But I have not been able to reduce my pre-breakfast levels to an acceptable condition and so I've begun injecting myself with insulin - before bedtime for now, but it will eventually have to happen at every meal.

Because it's something normally dealt with by diet and exercise, you can imagine there is a significant amount of body-related guilt and failure-feeling associated with having to be treated with insulin, so early on especially. I would, however, be pissweak indeed if, with all my education and so forth, I allowed this to matter to me for very long.

And to be very, very, truthful, I don't think the FAIL part of it does matter to me very much now. Giving myself an injection is still one of my least favourite parts of my day, but when it pays off, as I know it will, and my blood glucose levels return to normal, I'll be happy about it. Nobody wants to have to give birth to a baby who requires a two-person lift. It would be nice not to have to go to the doctor twice a week, but this too shall pass.

Sundayfunday

Last night was the latest night for a long time - got home around about midnight and was so exhausted I actually slept right through till late morning, consequently waking up with a much too full bladder and sore tummy. (Get used to the new, frequently whining Me, by the way. A great many of the silver linings connected with the Miracle of Birth have their own attendant clouds, not usually of the bows and flows of angel hair variety either.)

Dorian took me into the city to see This Is Spinal Tap at the rooftop cinema. I did enjoy it despite having seen the film probably more than ten times now. It was a perfectly lovely evening weather-wise and the roof space on top of Curtin House is nice, but thanks to choosing to sit maybe a little bit too close to the vent pipes it was more often a case of being able to smell the sewage rather than smelling the glove. But it was fun and also educational to discover that so very many people leave their homes on Saturday evenings! Get dressed up and walk around in the city! I don't know what exactly is the matter with them all, but it must be severe.

Friday, December 3

birthday week '10

Well Birthday Week is beginning at the other end than usual this year. Yes it's my birthday today so Week celebrations will continue right through until next Friday. I'm 38. I'm sitting at the kitchen table here on a lovely sultry tropical Melbourne day looking admiringly at the sort-of present which an Australia Post worker just brought to my door: 6m of Marimekko fabric with which to make curtains for the rather dark unoccupied bedroom on the south side of the house. How I will prewash six metres of fabric I don't really know. It's a sort of present because actually I bought it myself, online from the US, a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to sales and the exchange rate it was only $20 a metre.

I just went and draped it over the curtain rod in there to see how it looked:

Nice and bright, yes. Actually the walls, which are off-white, looked a bit grey next to it. That's OK. The room needs some painting done on it too. Not much, but some.

The design dates from 1971. Who'd have thought. Actually the reason I'm putting up new curtains in there is because I'm going to have a baby in a little while and it does seem crucially important to me that a child receives new curtains upon entering the world, most particularly curtains which come very precisely from the childhood of his own parents. I say 'his' because the baby is a boy, as we learned a couple of weeks ago. I haven't written about being pregnant on my blog until now because I would have had to use singular they in alluding to the baby, or called him 'it', which I don't mind personally but which does seem to disturb some people.

The sex of the baby is the thing pertaining to it/him that people have asked me about most of all. They ask me how I'm feeling (OK, but more of that later perhaps) and then they ask me if I know what I'm having. 'A baby' is what I am tempted to say sometimes, or perhaps 'a little Chinese man' or maybe 'we don't know but we are hoping for a gay.' Ultrasounds and genetic testing have confirmed that he is a human baby, interestingly, given the number of times I dreamed early in the pregnancy that I had just given birth to a litter of lovely kittens. For a while I thought this was a dreaming habit specific to ladies who like cats, but I went to a health lecture run by the hospital I'm having the baby in and the midwife said 'you will have strange dreams' and yes, having kittens was the example she gave. She didn't say though whether this is usually the very happy dream it was for me. I suppose if you don't like cats then it wouldn't be that enjoyable.

But why wouldn't you like cats? I go for a walk every evening after dinner and there's always a few cats sitting in their driveways, just at the fence line, waiting for someone to come along and pat them.

I am past the kitten litter dreaming phase though and onto the boring prophetic dream phase. Last week I dreamed Sam and Dave came to visit us - and the next day they did! (not entirely unexpectedly.) On another occasion I dreamed that Optus cut off the phone because we hadn't paid the bill, and guess what, this one came true too.