Truman got worse after the trip to the vet.  The slight head tilt that had been present at the doctor was now an exaggerated head tilt, and he dragged his right ear on the ground as he stumbled in circles.  It reminded me of Cozy’s last day.

Our vet went out of town after the appointment, and she left me with the phone number of an emergency backup vet.  We called her animal hospital, but she was also unfortunately out of town.  We tried the place they offered as their backup, but that doctor was out at that hospital, too.  We kept getting passed along from animal hospital to animal hospital in search of a veterinarian that specialized in rodents.  I ended up speaking to five different doctors along the way.

Each one gave different advice.

All said that the most likely scenario was that the upper respiratory infection spread to his inner ear or brain.  One said they would have never treated the infection as aggressively as our vet, and another said they would have treated the infection more aggressively than our vet.  One thought that we should add ear drops, and another said that ear drops could be toxic.  They each had different opinions on how long we should give the current antibiotic before switching it.

I added in the opinions of every commenter on every guinea pig website that listed a similar situation, making lists of possible solutions as well as lists of dangerous solutions.  The two lists often overlapped, with one site stating it was the only way to cure wry neck and the other stating it was a surefire way to kill your guinea pig.

I spent most of Friday a complete wreck.

I didn’t know if I should stick with my vet’s advice, especially since I hadn’t seen her since he took a turn for the worse, or if I should take the advice of a different vet who could only see us early Saturday morning.  He wanted to switch the antibiotic to something much more aggressive.  It felt like there was no good solution.  Either I would have regrets that I didn’t follow my vet’s advice, or I would have regrets that I stupidly waited and wasn’t aggressive enough.

It made me wonder the intelligence of internet research and second opinions.  These things that were supposed to be empowering me were only making me feel like shit as I doubted myself.

We couldn’t make a decision, so our lack of decision became our decision.  We hand-fed him yesterday, and used a syringe to give him water every few hours.  We let him have as many alfalfa cookies as he wanted.  He mostly didn’t move, but would lift his head from time to time to eat.  We have another appointment set up with our normal veterinarian on Monday morning.  All we can do for the next day is give him love and beg him to get better.

He’s my baby; my furry companion.  My office mate and daytime friend.  He’s my banana-sharer and alfalfa cookie begger.  I need him to be well.

Thank you for the birthday wishes.  My birthday, for the most part, was wonderful.  I got woken up with cards, cashed in a massage gift card I’ve held onto for 10 years, and picked up my free Starbucks drink.

And then Truman started acting weird.

He had actually been acting weird for about two days.  He was very quiet.  He would eat if I brought him food, but he wouldn’t wheek for food when I opened the refrigerator.  He wasn’t responding to his name.  He wasn’t greeting me with squeaks in the morning.

In the afternoon, he started to wheeze, so we called the vet.  She was heading out of town and trying to finish up appointments, but she told me to bring him over immediately.  He has an upper respiratory infection that we caught early, and I think he also has an ear infection.  We currently have him on antibiotics, so he’ll hopefully be better soon.

But I’m really scared this time.  I don’t like the way he is tilting his head and hobbling around.  This is what Cozy did right before he died.  Granted, Truman clearly has an infection and mucous in his nose and ears, and Cozy had a brain tumour and his eyes were popping out.  But it’s hard to watch him stumbling as he walks and trust that all will be fine in a few weeks.

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Life from Scratch has been chosen for an Amazon promotion.  It’s currently only 99 cents — a fraction of a cup of coffee.  So… pick up a copy for yourself or gift to a friend and get your beach reading set?

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “This Dream Stands Before Me” (Inconceivable!)
• “Seeds” (A+ Effort)
• “Mind Your Own Womb” (Nadirah Angail)
• “Truth, Death, and Mother’s Day” (Infertilityhonesty)
• “Politics, Babies, and My Body” (The Barreness)
• “I Want to See My Story” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Empty Cookie has a fantastic post about the recent Captain America controversy.  Not exactly infertility-related, but I loved this post because she sums up so well the problem with dismissing history (or, really, pretending that origin stories aren’t important in the present time period).  Captain America, like many comic superheroes, was created by Jewish writers using art to respond to anti-Semitism.  Comic books have always been a home for power fantasies, where the disenfranchised could fight back.  To make Captain America part of Hydra shows a lack of understanding on the part of current writers as well as a complete insensitivity to the current rise in anti-Semitism.  She writes, “It’s piss poor writing from someone who obviously needs to check his privilege. It’s gross and dishonoring to the people who created him and the millions of people murdered by Nazis.”  It’s something we talk about often in this community — do you always keep the origin story front and center in your mind, or do you rewrite family building history and pretend the current situation is the only situation?  And what do we lose when we sweep history under the rug, and how does it affect the people around us?

A Half Baked Life also has a non-infertility-related post that I think has a powerful message that also ties into our community and the greater world.  She writes about the shooting at UCLA, both as a former UCLA student and as a current administrator on a college campus.  She asks such an important question: “With all of our social media voyeurism and instantaneous sharing of news, why do we do so much ‘looking out,’ instead of looking out for each other, from the moment we understand what empathy means?”

Lastly, Bent Not Broken has a post about the move and her new home, and I love the idea of fresh starts.  She writes, “This house will be a house for healing.  This house will be a house for us to grow, not in number, but in love.  This will be the house where we put infertility behind us.”  I love that so much.

The roundup to the Roundup: Truman is sick again.  Life from Scratch is on sale.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 27th and June 3rd) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I have been waiting to turn 42 since I was in middle school and read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Deep Thought, the computer in the book, works on the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, and after many millions of years returns the answer: 42.  The problem is that we don’t know the question.

Get it?

It’s impossible to know the question AND the answer.  We don’t get our cake AND get to eat it, too.  We don’t get to have all mysteries solved and know how to steer our lives toward fulfillment.  We just get this one chance, here on earth, to not muck up things too badly, enjoy our experience, and be okay with the fact that all will not be revealed while simultaneously still trying to reveal it.

And one time — one time only — we (hopefully) get a chance to actually be 42 for 365 days.  I’m about to start that journey.

It’s the first time in a long time that I don’t mind aging a year.  I’m not really great about my birthday and turning older, and I generally get melancholy before, during, and after.  But I’m really looking forward to being 42*.

This past weekend, we celebrated my birthday early at the beach with ski ball and amusement park rides.  I read 9 comic books while sitting on the sand, listening to the waves.  We ate French fries and Nic-o-bolis.  A birthday well-marked.

The day itself will be a chance to just step back and marvel at the fact that I am here at all.  That 42 years ago, anything could have happened.  But I did.  Isn’t that so weird?

*Luckily, I am also looking forward to being 44 for the symmetry of that number, so it’s not as if it’s all downhill from here.

It’s not as if Lena Dunham is the first person to point out that women have a problem with apologizing too much (“I am a woman who is sometimes right, sometimes wrong but somehow always sorry.”), but she is the most recent person to bring it up and push it back into my mind.  Every time I hear it, I start noting how often I say “sorry” in conversation.  Not changing anything; just noting it.

I tried searching my email account for the term “sorry,” and thousands of emails popped up, though the apologies were sometimes real and sometimes not mine.  It was easier to do a search on my blog for the term because it only brought up my own posts.  215.  I didn’t look at all 215 cases, but I did notice in the handful that I looked at that I often apologize for my opinion.  Sorry that I feel this way on my own blog.  So 216 cases in about 3,200.

It’s interesting; it’s something I notice a lot in other women, but miss that I’m doing it, too.  I know I am because when I read articles about it, it feels very familiar, like slipping on a well-worn hoodie.  I’m an apologizer; it’s how I pave my way through life.  I apologize for not understanding and needing to ask follow up questions.  I apologize for interruptions.  I apologize for asking anything of anyone.  And I apologize for stating how I view the world.

Unlike Lena Dunham, I’m not going to say that I’ll stop doing it because writing those words would necessitate another apology when I inevitably fail.  Because I know myself.  I mean, could I if I dedicated my entire being to the endeavour?  Probably.  But it’s not worth the energy expended.

Still, it’s an interesting exercise.  Go to your blog dashboard.  Do a search for the words “I’m sorry.”  Record how many times you’ve written that on your blog and note your total number of posts.  It’s eye-opening.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I am not an optimistic person, so I clicked over to Mental Floss to learn the one simple thing I can do to change almost 42 years of the same, pessimistic mindset.

It turned out to be a simple exercise you can do while brushing your teeth (click over to read it).  I haven’t tried it yet, mostly because I have a terrible feeling that my lists would devolve into super specific things like: It makes me happy when Daredevil does a back flip, when Daredevil does that thing where he kicks off the wall before slamming into someone, when Daredevil parkours up the side of a building.

And then I would think, “Oh, I should stay up and read some Daredevil!”  And then be overtired the next day, which probably just makes me even more Eyeore-ish.  In all seriousness, there are a lot of things that make me happy, but I’m not sure I could come up with 3 new ones each day.

What do you think of advice like this?  Can committing to tricks like this really change the way you process the world?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.