Posts from — October 2010

Last night, in a dinner out with friends, we had a conversation that I was still mulling over this morning, which was not really how you decide whether or not to friend people on Facebook, but how many.

One woman was nearing 100 friends and she thought 60 was her upper limit.  She wanted her online experience to be a conversation with people she would talk to on a regular basis offline, yet because people use Facebook for different reasons, she had been friended by people who wouldn’t really fit that description over the years and now it became a dilemma of how to keep Facebook filled with only actual friends in a world that also uses Facebook to network.

I could relate — when Josh and I were getting married, I told him I didn’t want more than 114 people there because that was how many students I had in the middle school and I knew that was my upper limit of how many people I could briefly connect with over a multi-hour period.  I didn’t want anyone in the room that didn’t know me fairly well (in other words, the friends that our parents invited had to be people who also knew us).

Yet my Facebook friend list is certainly more than 114.

Once she said it, I was like, “oooh, that is such an interesting concept” because I had never considered putting a cap (at least mentally) on my Facebook friend count.  My number is sort of organic and it will grow to whatever size fits the guideline I use to accept or request a friend.  I don’t look at my interactions there as something special like my wedding — frankly, I’m not on it enough to groom it that well — but more like a boisterous Oscar awards party where you want people close to you there, but you’re also happy to have old friends crawl out of the woodwork and new people connect with you (not that I’ve ever won an Oscar, but this is how I imagine the actresses party that night, a night which is a special party, but not as special as their wedding.  I’m also assuming that wedding would trump Oscar win).

And then there is a third route I’ve seen people take where they admit aloud that they want to grow their friend list.  I once had a friend who asked me to connect them to more people so they could friend them and tack on another 30 people to their “friend” count.  The reason they are on Facebook is for networking, and it made sense because they wanted a fan page vs. a personal page and you need 5000 “friends” in order to have a fan page.

Or even less direct than that, people who would like their friend list to grow because in their experience, more is better.  It’s sort of like the wedding idea — some people want an intimate wedding where they know everyone well in the room and the people there are not just their friends, they are their close friends.  But it can be equally fun to go to a 300+ person wedding where everyone is joyously celebrating the couple.  Sort of like this guy’s experience, which was to turn his Facebook account into what amounted to a giant party that he could jump in and out of, snatching bits of conversation.  It became a well of creativity he could rummage around in, examining society.  Which sort of sounds cool too.

So, for someone who has never thought about her Facebook number, it was interesting that I could relate with either end of the spectrum — understanding the smaller number as well as the larger number — but since I thought both directions made sense, ended up still here at my organic number of whatever.

What is your sweet spot with Facebook friends?  Would you prefer to keep your list small?  Are you fine or even happier as the party grows louder as the list grows longer?  Or have you never considered it and whatever will be will be based on your criteria for accepting or making a friend request?

I went over to Lindsay’s house and on the top step, as if he was waiting for me, was a cricket that was seriously the size of a small dog.  On her top step.  So I leaned forward and knocked on the door with my wimpy little knock and then ran down the steps away from the Hummer-sized cricket.

And she didn’t hear.

So I did the next best thing.  I emailed her while standing on the sidewalk, my eyes trained on the cottage-sized cricket.  20 seconds later, she opened the door, gave me a look, flicked the cricket — which, by this time, was certainly the size of a McMansion — into the bushes WITH HER BARE HANDS.

That’s bravery.

Seriously, how can I be expected to sidestep a cricket the size of Buckingham Palace?

This is just one more reason I love technology.

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I went to the used bookstores to pick up some more Charlaine Harris books, and, understandably, there weren’t any on the shelf.  The man working there noticed me looking disappointingly at the shelf and asked what I was looking for.  When I told him that I wanted vampire smut, he said, “oh, yeah, we’re out of those books at the moment, but I have a really great book about Einstein for you.”

Einstein?  Did Einstein fuck vampires?  No?  Then I’m not sure how that biography could possibly satiate my hunger for vampire sex scenes.

I walked around the store for a bit and then Josh was ready to check out.  The man bit his lower lip as if he was thinking whether or not he should do something and finally he said, “I feel badly.  Wait here one second.  I have something for you.”

So what would you be thinking at this moment?  That he knew that there were some Charlaine Harris books in the backroom that hadn’t been put out yet, but he was going to give me first-dibs on them.  So I waited, excitedly, to see if they were ones I didn’t have, and he comes out with this book that looks nothing like a vampire romance.  There was no blood on the cover, there were no sexy vampires.  There was, in fact, a picture of a gun.  And vampires, everyone knows, do not need guns.

For some reason, the man thought I’d like a book about Jewish gangsters.  Apparently, my Semitic looks coupled with my love of vampire sex = Jewish gangsters.  It turned out that Josh already had the book in the library at work so we thanked him and went on our way.  But seriously, how can people not understand this?  I want vampires.  I want vampires having sex.  I want vampires having messy sex and then taking a bath with their girlfriend afterward.  Is that so wrong?

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The Weekly What If: What if you had to choose one font to use for every document for an entire year.  Which one would it be, and why?

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And now, the blogs…

The Road Less Travelled has a post about Facebook status updates.  The night before October 15th, she posted about her daughter, Katie, explaining that she often keeps her lost daughter close in to her heart.  The story continues with what happened once she sent that status out there and how family reacted.  And beyond that, it’s a rallying cry for more to be done for pregnancy loss, stillbirth, neonatal death, and infant death.  You have got to read this post.  And forward it others.

Nuts in May has a brief, wistful post called “No Kiss Goodnight” in honour of October 15th.  It’s not a post I can describe — it is a tiny post that you need to experience.  And read carefully, especially the last line.

Cloudy with a Chance of Hope has a post about surviving.  She writes: “My heart is beating, albeit it is incredibly broken, but it still beats to let me know … I am here and there is so much more life to live!”  I loved the tie-in to Sylvia Plath as well as the hope within the words.

Lastly, Baby, Boreno or Bust has a post contrasting her life now with her life back then.  It serves as a reminder of how much things can change, even if it doesn’t seem possible when you’re in the middle of darkness.  It is — simply put — a post about living, and I love these lines: “Looking back, it seems impossible that we jumped off that cliff and trusted that we would fly, but we did, and I must say, the views are just amazing. It feels so good to soar.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Lindsay saved my life from a giant, woman-eating cricket.  Strange recommendations in place of vampire sex books.  Answer the Weekly What If.  And lots of great posts to read.

This week, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Clarence Thomas, called Anita Hill (yes, the Anita Hill) and left what may be the most obnoxious voice mail of all time.

Good morning, Anita Hill, it’s Ginni Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day.

Obnoxious and unbelievable, yes, and Anita Hill certainly doesn’t owe the Thomas Family an apology (perhaps the other way around?), but there are plenty of people who should feel sorry out there, and people are missing an opportunity here to demand their own apologies.  I have a long list of people I’ll be calling this weekend at 7 am on a Sunday (because isn’t that when everyone calls people to request an apology?), but I’d like to kick it off by demanding an apology from my first gynecologist who told me my concerns were entirely in my head.  Next, I’ll be tracking down that fellow teacher who told me I was going straight to hell for doing fertility treatments.  And I’d like to complete that set with a little phone call to the technician doing my HSG who hissed at me that it didn’t hurt that much when I gasped an obscenity.

So the phone lines are open and people are anxiously awaiting to hear how much they need to apologize to you.  Who are you calling first?

She’s the news story that will never end — Nadya Sulemnan, otherwise known as Octomum, is back on CNN. Well, more accurately, her doctor, Michael Kamrava, is in the news, though it’s impossible to discuss one without the other. Currently, he is taking part in a hearing that will determine whether or not he should lose his medical license. He has already lost his membership to the non-profit group, ASRM (American Society for Reproductive Medicine).

On one hand, it seems like a no-brainer. Beyond the Suleman case, there are other reasons Kamrava is having this hearing. With Suleman, guidelines state that doctors should transfer “no more than two embryos for women under 35 years old and no more than five for women over 40.” He clearly violated the guidelines, and in doing so, put a patient’s life in grave danger as well as the lives of her unborn children. Just because the story has a happy ending (is it a happy ending?) doesn’t mean that the medical board should forget the statistically much more likely ending which could have included maternal death or neonatal death due to premature birth.

An expert witness inadvertently stated the heart of the matter. Dr. Victor Fujimoto was asked by the deputy attorney about Suleman’s request to transfer 12 embryos.

When Alvarado asked him if it is not a doctor’s responsibility to protect a patient from themselves, he answered “Sometimes.”

There are clearly times when we’d fight just as hard for the right to not accept a doctor’s protection. We can point to plenty of cases where we want the patient’s voice to be heard, even when they are taking a risk with their life. Can we have it both ways?

For instance, VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) is a popular hot topic. The decision for a VBAC should be solely between the patient and doctor since only these two individuals have the woman’s medical information. Yet what about women who rest in that grey zone for VBAC, neither clearly safe to attempt it, nor high risk for a uterine rupture? Is it the doctor’s responsibility to protect the patient from herself and make the call, or is it the patient’s right to decide once they’ve weighed the risks?

Moving up to an even greyer area, the case of Virginia v. Cherrix. Abraham Starchild Cherrix (also called Wolf) refused to continue chemotherapy in order to combat Hodgkin’s disease. In refusing treatment, is the doctor allowing a patient to put themselves in harm’s way, and is it that doctor’s job to protect that patient from themselves?

Clearly, doing something to the body is quite different than withholding something from the body, though the end result may be the same. Still, this is a discussion we need to have because the meeting of religion and medicine could lead to more Suleman-like situations down the road (and for the record, Suleman is not the first person to have 12 embryos transferred. She is simply the first person who had 8 embryos implant and carried and delivered all 8 babies. People never hear about other cases because either none or a lower amount of the embryos implant).

Some religions have made clear statements against the freezing of embryos. But in a medical procedure that is just as much art as science, it is impossible to control how many viable embryos are created in the end. Doctors need to encourage the production of multiple embryos in order to give patients a chance of having one or two viable embryos for transfer. But what about the lucky few who create many viable embryos in a cycle? If they are against freezing embryos or destroying embryos, are religious organizations encouraging them to transfer too many embryos (legally sharing the embryos in this situation becomes almost impossible without freezing the remaining embryos)?

Please remember in thinking about this case, while Dr. Kamvara was negligent, he is not the first doctor to transfer more embryos than the human body can safely carry. While some people who have multiple embryo transfers (MET) end up with twins or higher order multiples, many patients who have a MET end up with a singleton. And while single embryo transfers (SET) would obviously be the ideal, what stops most people from electively opting for a SET is the high cost of IVF, which is often not covered by insurance. Medical ethical dilemmas may seem to have a clear solution until you consider the other pieces of the puzzle.

Fertility procedures have been keeping medical ethicists busy, but the question of whether a doctor should follow the request of a patient isn’t unique to the fertility world. Do you believe a doctor should follow the wishes of his patient if that wish has the potential to harm them?

Cross-posted with BlogHer.

Groucho Marx infamously said, “I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member,” and I get a feeling that when he joked about it, he had his pick of clubs to choose from.  I imagine, like Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert today, that people would have bent over backwards to get any of the Marx Brothers’ attention (even the lesser known Gummo).

I’ve always wanted to be a member of the National Zoo.  I’ll admit that part of the allure was that members were called Fonz (Friends of the National Zoo), and what Happy Days-loving girl with her Fonzie lunch box wouldn’t have wanted to be able to casually drop at school, “oh, yeah, I’m a Fonz.”

I’m sure my parents will deny this, but when I asked to become a Fonz, they wouldn’t buy me a membership.  Life went on and I barely thought about it, though I looked into the membership fee a few times in the last few years, musing that it really wasn’t worth it because the zoo is free.

I’ve been feeling very let down by one club that will have me for its member, feeling that it doesn’t have my best interests at heart.  And that’s a crushing blow; to place your heart into a community and have the response be that the community you trusted takes an enormous dump on that emotional organ.  It has made me curl up on the sofa and cry, and call my friends to rage about it to them more times than they probably care to count.

When I get into something, I get into something with my entire being.  With my entire body and soul and every other crevice of whatever makes me Melissa.  It is hard to join a place, allow it to enter every pore, and then remove yourself from it when you realize that it isn’t a healthy fit.

The twins and I had a free day and we decided to go to the zoo to visit the tree shrews and then go swimming.  The ChickieNob is very single-minded about tree shrews, shutting out all animals to spend the largest chunk of time watching the tree shrews jump from branch to branch.  If there was a job that involved simply watching tree shrews all day long, she would rock that career.

As we walked into the zoo, I told the kids that I had always wanted to be a member.  And damnit, I’m an adult and I was going to buy myself a membership. (Okay, I first called Josh and said, “honey, do you mind if I make myself a Fonz?”)  We went to the membership office and I filled out the paper work and all three of us stood there, grinning like idiots (only partially because the ChickieNob asked the man at the desk if the monthly magazine came with pictures of tree shrews).  I proudly carried around my temporary card and showed it to everyone I saw that day.

It has made me smile since.  I love that I chose it.  That I didn’t need to belong, but I wanted to belong.  That there was no external pressure nor internal pressure.  It was simply following my heart and taking a stand and saying, “I believe in this.  It’s a good place.  I want to be connected.”

It is easier, of course, to become a member than it ever is to walk away.  They are currently doing construction for a seal and sea lion sanctuary that will open in 2012, and I already told the twins that we would need to renew our membership for the next two years so we could be invited to whatever special programs they have connected to the new exhibit.

I wish every club was like the zoo.  I wish every club smiled as someone joined and said, “we’re so happy you’re here.”  And meant it.