Posts from — January 2009

I have been facebooking (my mother likes to use it as a verb). It finally clicked with me; it’s like an LFCA but for your life. I get these small updates about everyone’s life throughout the day without needing to click through two hundred blogs or make two hundred phone calls. My favourite moments are when I see that I have a friend in common with someone and it was totally unexpected. Like the online world and family criss-crossing or a grad school friend and a work friend that know each other.

I got very hung up on the term “friend” when I first joined and sometimes ended up debating for way too long whether I should send a friend request. For instance, someone I thought was swell from college–add or don’t add? I mean, we’re not friends; I wouldn’t ship chicken soup to their San Francisco abode if they were sick. But I’d love to hear what they’ve been up to. What to do, what to do…perhaps not take the term “friend” quite so seriously.

Then I went in the opposite direction, sending out friend requests to people I had crushes on in nursery school. Luckily, I didn’t send the accompanying note: “hey, it’s Melissa from nursery school. I sat near you at circle time and I loved that you smelled like baby powder. I’m still remembering you thirty years later and it will shatter me if you write back that you don’t remember that cool bouquet of tissue paper flowers I made for classroom Shabbat. Accept my friend request; you won’t regret it!”

Er.

So I’m going for the happy medium; sending out requests when I see someone I know and I want to know how they’ve been. And recklessly not keeping track of the friend requests I send out so that some people are probably receiving eight or nine copies. I also do this when I really really really want to be someone’s friend so there’s no way to tell if I’m eager or forgetful. Choose whichever one works better for you if you are one of the recipients of eight friend requests from me.

To make this easy, I am welcoming everyone to friend me. I’ll just send this out there–if I read your blog, I like you and I want to hear that you had a really good meal of sushi. So feel free to friend me or become a fan of the book on Facebook so you can hear when I’m reading in your city. If we don’t usually converse via email and you think I might not know your name, let me know your blog in that “add message” feature once you hit “add as friend.” Because I do tend not to add people that I don’t know or who don’t tell me they’re a reader, etc. It’s that whole “you could be completely normal or you could be a PR person or you could just be someone who is going to update their status with porn links every day that I will accidentally click on each morning.”

So…er…tell me how we know each other if I know you by another name.

Fine, fine, fine, and I’ll send you chicken soup.

I want to thank HUGELY the people who have voted for me in the Weblog Awards. I want to thank even more and therefore it deserves a larger font–THANK YOU–to those who vote and emailed out a call to vote to their friends or turned to the person in the cubicle next to them and said, “hey, could you vote for Stirrup Queens? Um, could you also ignore the strange name of her blog and not ask me any further questions?”

I want to say THANK YOU (in large font) to those who have Twittered it, Facebooked it (there’s that verb again), or blogged it. This means more to me than I can express. You find out during these things who has your back in the non-emergency situation sense (which, of course, is different from the crisis sense of the word). And frankly, I am sometimes more interested in who is there for me regardless of what is happening vs. those who show up when all is going to hell. I want both, I guess. No, wait, I don’t “guess.” I want both. I want people there when it’s shitty and people there when it’s good, but mostly, I want people there in between.

Voting goes through Tuesday which means please don’t stop voting over the weekend if you can get to a computer. Please don’t stop Twittering it and putting it on Facebook. In fact, if you haven’t voted yet today, please click over and vote for Stirrup Queens and then come back and read some of the cool posts I read this week. It’s a small thing to ask, right?

The roundup to the Roundup: You know where to find me on Facebook and become a fan of the book’s page if you want to know when I read in your city. Please keep voting. And lots of good posts to read. Catch you here for a very dark Show and Tell on Saturday night.

Before you hear about the doctor’s appointment that earned my smooth legginess, I need to ask you: have you voted today? Well, have ya? You do know that voting goes for the Weblog Awards goes from now until the 13th (next Tuesday) and you can vote daily by clicking here and then clicking on Stirrup Queens (two clicks; that’s all I’m asking of you). It would make me happier than Pippi Longstockings (she was happy, right?) if you took one minute out of your night/day and voted and then came back here to read this excellent tale o’ the stirrups. Oh, and Twittered it. Or Facebooked it. Twittering is very Pippi. Peppy. Pippi.

Back in graduate school, one of my roommates had a horoscope book that we would drag out during parties. This is where I learned that Geminis are not good at going to the doctor. I held this as proof that my irresponsibility was out of my hands. It was as good as written in the stars.

I am actually terrible at making it to the doctor. I’ve had one or two physicals in my adult life. I go more than a year between pap smears. I have been eating my way through a bottle of Tums and commenting nightly to Josh that “it would seem as if I have an ulcer.” And yet I haven’t made an appointment to get this checked out.

I didn’t even go to the hospital when I went into labour. I was at the movie theater watching Fahrenheit 911 and I went to pee midway through the movie. I ended up sitting on the bathroom floor, holding my belly as it tightened. A woman came into the bathroom to pee (for DCites, I’m talking about those lovely, tiny restrooms inside the main theater at the Avalon–just to give you the mise en scene) and I remember her voice quavering with uncertainty, “um…do you want me to get someone?” And I debated for a moment–I was in a lot of pain, but this certainly couldn’t be labour because I thought I’d be sweating like a chazar when it was actually time to push the twins out and beyond that, I just flat out didn’t want to go to the hospital–and then told her that I was going to take a few more minutes on the bathroom floor. And could she tell me what I missed so far?

A day later, I went to the hospital to be induced because it was determined the twins were IUGR and the doctor on call told me that I didn’t need induction because I was already four centimeters dilated. “This is labour?” I asked. “But I’m not sweating. I thought I was supposed to come in when my hair was plastered to my face and scalp and I was grunting and panting.”

Turns out you’re supposed to pay more attention to the spacing of the contractions and not the sweat factor. See, not great with getting to the doctor. But, again, it’s not my fault. It’s just my birth date.

I received a card to return to the doctor for my yearly pap smear about ten months ago. For a long time, it was next to the coffeemaker, collecting the coffee grounds that spilled onto it whenever Josh made the morning pot. Sometimes I would look at it and think about making the appointment. Then I would think about how much I don’t want to go to his office and I would forget about it again.

Remember–birthday.

A few weeks ago, I read In Search of Biscuit 2.0’s post about her visit for her yearly pap and I realized that I was nearing on two years since my last one. So I put on my big girl panties and made the call. The nurse asked if I was positive that I’m an existing patient. I kept promising her that I had seen the doctor before. She finally set down the phone and went to search through another database and returned to inform me that they did have my file but they had removed me from the main system since I hadn’t been back in almost two years. I apologized and promised that I was going to get better about my gynecological health–my health in general–and could I please be let back in the main system because if you leave me to wander the streets searching for a new gynecologist, I will never get my cervix swabbed.

I was given an official pardon.

My brother is several years younger than I am so I was in graduate school when he was still in high school. This meant that I often went back to shows or award ceremonies at the high school and walked through the same halls that I had walked through as a student and saw my old locker and the bathroom where I liked to hide when I was having a bad day. And every time I did so, I had the same anxious reaction as if I was stuck in a nightmare where I was forced to repeat high school for all eternity. Maybe it was Post Traumatic High School Stress Syndome, but I literally got the same queasy feeling I got every single day I had to attend school from 14 to 17.

And walking up the stairs to his office (since I knew he was already going to point out the obvious weight gain and I wanted the nurse to observe me through the glass door coming up the steps rather than taking the elevator because I truly believe this is the type of information she’s going to pass along to him after she takes my weight. “Yes, doctor, she has gotten a bit tubby, but she did take the stairs”), I had that same feeling of dread I used to feel during high school or visiting the high school. It is that feeling you get where you are so profoundly emotionally uncomfortable. I was profoundly uncomfortable walking into that office.

And not just because I was the only non-pregnant woman in the waiting room. Not just because I’m a delinquent patient or because I hate the speculum with a passion. Not just because we are going to have to have a conversation about my fertility history or treatments. But because no one wants to visit a place they hated, even if they’re beyond the original experience and you don’t need to navigate it daily anymore.

I sat in my paper robe, my paper sheet across my lap, my head cocked to the side as I stared at the air freshener.

I told you that I’m a terrible patient.

I found myself crying as I walked to the car in the rain. I don’t even know why. Relief that the appointment was over? Sadness remembering everything else about that space? I made a promise that I’d do better, come back next January, take my baby aspirin for the rest of my life. But the entire time he was speaking, I was thinking about the cover of the horoscope book. And how much fun it had seemed every time we dragged it out to the crowd in the living room.

I’m a finalist for the Weblog Awards under best medical/health blog. Voting goes from now until the 13th (next Tuesday) and you can vote daily by clicking here and then clicking on Stirrup Queens (two clicks; that’s all I’m asking of you). Please support me and show your deep, unending love by voting daily and passing along the link to friends and family and ask them to vote too.

This is the 22nd installment of Barren Advice. You can ask questions that are fertility or non-fertility related.

Barren Advice is posted each Tuesday-ish. If you have your own question for Barren Advice, click here to learn how to submit. Please weigh in with your own thoughts in the comment section and indicate which question you’re addressing if there are multiple questions in the post.

Dear Mel:

When dealing with comment trolls, how do you get over the frustration and sense of guilt? If I delete a comment I feel guilty; if I leave it there it bothers me every time I see it. I know I SHOULD just delete it and forget about it, but I always take their words to heart when I know I shouldn’t. I know I have a right to my opinion on my own blog, and I know that not everyone is going to agree with me. But seeing such negativity directed at me just weighs me down. I spend days wondering if maybe I was in the wrong. How can I stop carrying around so much baggage?

– Lead Feet

Here is the funny part; you’re asking me what to do, but I just asked another blogger what to do for this very same situation. Which, I know, must inspire confidence in you as I attempt to answer this, but it is always nicer to fumble through trying to figure out an answer together and it’s always easier to speak about it long after the experience than when you’ve just had someone bash your thoughts as if they’re Gillooly and you’re Nancy Kerrigan.

That analogy may be cringe-worthy, but I think it best describes what the other person is doing. They see you’ve made a fine point (or turned a fine double axel) and they know they’re not going to compete with you by matching word to word so they instead try to halt your flow of thoughts by hurting you.

It’s the equivalent of telling the pretty girl that she’s ugly, only, in this case, with words being the only element of you to address, they’ve told you that your words, your ideas, your emotions are shit. They know they don’t have the power to write well and therefore get others to read their blog, so instead they go into the comment sections of others who do attract an audience and bash them.

And, in your particular case, the commenter really had to stretch in order to find something to bash. That should be your first indication that this is not about you, not about your writing, not about your emotions, but about them.

I wrote about deleting hurtful comments a while back and I think this example clearly follows a good rule of whether you should write off a comment or whether you should take the words to heart. If the comment attacks you personally (“you’re a crappy writer!”), I’d delete it. If the comment is a comparison between their brilliance and your stupidity (“I can’t believe you would do that! No wonder all this shit is happening to you.”), I’d delete it.

In your case, a single person chose to speak for a whole group, explaining how your experience is completely wrong because they believe it reflected poorly on their group as a whole rather than seeing your post for what it is–commentary on a single experience. To me, that sounds like their problem, their lack of careful reading.

The larger issue is not whether or not to delete but how one goes about not thinking about the crappy comments left. The same question applies to the crappy things one hears throughout the day. I think denying that it affected you slows down the process of getting past it. Personally, I would tell yourself that you’re allowed to sit with it for a given amount of time. Remove the comment from your blog and place them somewhere else. Set the timer for five minutes and have a good cry. Stare at the words and feel them completely. Then erase the email or word document where you pasted the words and leave them behind.

Once that is done, turn towards a small file that you start keeping of comments that make you feel good. This is not to say that we should all ignore the negative commentary we receive and think that we’re perfect (ignore the bad and only embrace the good), but you need a balance. Think of this as the equivalent to brushing your teeth. When you have crud on your teeth, you brush it off and when you have crud on your heart, you need to clean it too. You can have this file on paper–notes that your partner has left you, old birthday cards, thank you notes–or you can keep a few old emails and comments from your blog easily accessible for these occasions.

Just in case you don’t have an emails saved right now, I’ll give you a few words to get started:

Lead Feet:

I’ve read you for a long time. And by a long time, I mean that I remember old posts where you were just thinking about going to the RE and scanning other’s BBT charts for hope. We’re talking years and years and years.

Which is a huge statement. I mean, if you didn’t write sound thoughts, would someone have stayed with you for that long? You’re an amazing writer, an amazing person, a deeply thoughtful and inquisitive person who has been through a lot in a short period of time. And the fact that you are still standing shows your deep wells of strength. And that is more important and more true than anyone else’s agenda.

Keep writing.

Love,
Mel

Read through these words and find your balance. You’re not perfect or terrible–you’re somewhere in between and very human. You have big emotions because you’ve been through a lot and you have every right to voice your experience. It is what helps the woman behind you who may be navigating the same path down the line.

And now, after giving yourself an equal amount of time to celebrate yourself, see if you feel differently about deleting that comment. Your house (or your blog) = your rules. If you don’t allow people to leave garbage in your home, don’t allow them to leave garbage on your blog. It’s much easier to clean it up–the true work is wondering why someone would leave garbage in the first place. But 9 times out of 10, it is their own lack of manners, their own lack of common decency, their own short-comings in the face of your accomplishments (even if it is as basic as not being able to express themselves well vs. your eloquence).

No really, the beauty o
f a blog advice column is that you get to weigh in with your two cents too. Let the questioner know if you support the advice, add to the response, or dispute it completely.

Leave a comment in the reaction box below–only keep in mind that conflicting advice is embraced and rudeness is not. Want to ask your own question? Click here to see what you need to send in order to be included in a future Tuesday’s installment of Barren Advice.

If you’re here for the Creme de la Creme, it’s below this post. I also have a hotlinked icon on the right sidebar with the date and time of the last update. Entries are still coming in and the list will continue to be updated as new ones are added. Check back frequently…

Short Version:

Yay! I’m a finalist for the Weblog Awards under best medical/health blog. Voting goes from January 5th–13th and you can vote daily by clicking here and then clicking on Stirrup Queens (two clicks; that’s all I’m asking of you). Please support me and show your deep, unending love by voting daily (I will leave the link in the top permanent post for easy access and add it to the LFCA during the voting period) and passing along the link to friends and family and ask them to vote too.

Longer Version:

Because of and not despite my prowess on the Irish penny whistle (which, apparently, according to Josh, is not the same thing as a pan flute and a quick Google image search confirmed this), I have been named a finalist for the Weblog Awards under best medical/health blog. Of course, my musical talent doesn’t really factor into the whole science thing, but I do think that it shows my multifaceted nature. I can play Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” on the penny whistle AND I can write about cervical fluid. That is practically the dictionary definition of a Renaissance woman.

5000 blogs were nominated across all the categories so it’s a huge honour to be one of the ten on the medical slate. Over a half a million votes were cast last year. Why does it matter to me? Because the winner gets attention to their cause, introduces the greater public to their corner of the blogosphere. My corner of the blogosphere is a well-organized, highly-articulate, emotional, intelligent group of 1600+ men and women on the blogroll. We are a corner of the blogosphere that deserves attention.

So, I am asking people to vote for me. You can vote daily (I will leave the link in the top permanent post for easy access and add it to the LFCA during the voting period) and pass along the link to friends and family and ask them to vote. Turn to the person in the cubicle next to you and ask them to vote too. Post it on Facebook or Twitter it. Make an icon and slap it on your blog. And I will serenade you with the sweet, sweet notes of the Irish penny whistle. I am getting quite good. Josh is getting a migraine. But I can help him with his pains because I am a medical writer.

The Longest Version:

I was going to make you sit through a story, another song on the penny whistle (I have also gotten quite good with a somewhat off-key version of “Ki Va Moed.” I felt like I needed to balance out that rendition of “Noel” on Saturday), a video of my one-woman show, Jazz Hands. But instead, I’ll say this:

I am really proud to be part of this community. I don’t want to be quiet about it. Just as I want to talk about my uterine lining with everyone in the food store (including the elderly men buying lettuce over in produce), I want to talk about our corner of the blogosphere with the general public. I want people to know that there is this whole world out there–at least 1600 men and women–writing about their experience and if they want to know what it is like to be infertile, all they have to do is click down the blogroll and read a few blogs. We’re setting it all out there if anyone cares to learn.

Please remember that I didn’t subject you to a story, “Ki Va Moed,” OR Jazz Hands. As a thank you, I ask that you vote for me. You can vote daily (I will leave the link in the top permanent post for easy access and add it to the LFCA during the voting period) and pass along the link to friends and family and ask them to vote. Turn to the person in the cubicle next to you and ask them to vote too. Post it on Facebook or Twitter it. Stumble it and Kirtsy it. Make an icon and slap it on your blog.

I am asking that if you are reading this right now, that you return to your own space and help me gather votes. It is excellent advice that you can’t get what you want if you don’t tell people so I am doing just that.

Thank you.

By the way, I asked Josh before I posted this if it made me sound like a freak. He responded, “but you are a freak.” Which is true, but still.

I’m a freak with a penny whistle.

And a finalist for the Weblog Awards.

If you’re here for the Creme de la Creme, it’s the post below this one. I also have a hotlinked icon on the right sidebar with the date and time of the last update. Entries are still coming in and the list will continue to be updated as new ones are added. Check back frequently…

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

What is the most delightful sound known to man? Yes, you guessed correctly, the Irish Penny Whistle.

I ended up with this beauty of an instrument because I had to live up to my moniker at school which was “the teacher who teases too much.” While in Galway on a school field trip (just in case you did a double take with that sentence, it was an experiential education school that had field trips each spring for everywhere from Ireland to Morocco to even Cuba, boycott be damned!), I told the children that I was going to treat them to a true Irish experience.

While they excitedly debated what this experience would be (remembering fondly the day I took them to tea at Bewley’s and promised the host my life if they so much as dropped a crumb on the floor and begged and begged and begged until he allowed me to bring 18 middle schoolers in to suck down clotted cream until their heart’s content), I picked up the whistle at a music store and tucked it into my bag.

Once back on the bus, I told them that I was now going to treat them to a live show of Irish music. Someone commented that they didn’t know that I played an instrument and I responded, “I don’t.” They were trapped on a bus with this for a solid hour. One of the high points of my trip.

For those who saw my earlier Facebook crowing about playing Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” and thought they were going to get to hear that treat, I apologize. That was a special on-command performance for Josh and the dryer repairman. But I’m happy to take requests for future installments of my new online show–The Irish Penny Whistle Hour.

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (hint: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s
name, not your name). The list is open from now until late Tuesday night and a new one is posted every week.