My old yoga teacher used to talk about the monkey mind, which jumps from thought to thought, never settling down to tune in to the moment.  My brain has gone totally simian.

In a 20-second period, I jumped from “I feel like a sad blob” to “maybe I should pick up the kids early from school so we can read Harry Potter” to “I think I’m getting my period” to “let’s go to the Faroe Islands.”

I’m not entirely sure why the Faroe Islands.  It was one of those things where an article mentioned the place and my monkey mind made me Google it.  And then I saw pictures.  No, wait, I saw these pictures.  And then I watched the video made by a travel service.

And then my monkey mind went wild, like a golden lion tamarin who has found an untapped treasure trove of unblemished fruit.  How could I focus on anything like… work… when the Faroe Islands existed?  And for that matter, how could I focus when I had to think about all the other places I’d love to visit: how I want to get to Mingulay one day.  And ever since I saw a pictures of the Azores in my National Geographic Kids book when I was eight, I’ve wanted to go there too.  And Iceland — I need to get to Iceland at some point.

Then I Googled airfare to the Faroe Islands and came back to earth like a sad monkey.

There are a lot of places we want to go, and a few places we should go to before we go to all of those places.  Israel, for instance, trumps the Faroe Islands.  I have a feeling I will get there at some point if I want to put it at the top of my wishlist.  But not now.

Where would you love to go?

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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:

• “Time Out” (Two Adults, One Child)
• “He’s a Watcher” (The Little Grape)
• “Little Red Hen” (AndMom)
• “Childfree – the Life for Me” (a guest post)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Here We Go Again has the most brilliant, simple idea in her post.  I’m not going to ruin it by telling you it here, but suffice to say, when you read her post, your mouth with drop open and you’ll say, “daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn, that is really really smart.”  Feel free to tell her that in a comment.

The Medicated Momma has a tale of two baby showers.  She writes, “I hate that I can’t get a baby shower invitation in the mail and not just stick it on my fridge and move on with my life without weighing my options with best case and worst case scenarios about the state of my uterus.”  Sending her a lot of good thoughts that today brings her good news.

Mellow in the Midwest has a post unpacking everything on her mind before her second baby arrives.  While she rationally knows that it will all work out since things have a tendency to work themselves out, she also admits that “All of this physical stuff I’ve checked off the list, but I still feel utterly unprepared emotionally and know that there’s no way to feel differently. There’s no way to prepare for the change that’s coming.”  It’s a great post about feeling off-kilter, not knowing what to expect, but also knowing that cool things are about to happen.

Lastly, Searching for Our Silver Lining has an incredibly helpful post about the NICU that you should bookmark and pass along to any friend or family member who ends up with a child who remains behind at the hospital.  This advice would have been invaluable during our NICU stay.  It’s a must-read.

The roundup to the Roundup: Where do you want to go?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 6th and September 13th) 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.

Updated at the Bottom

I was so inspired by the New York Times’s article today about the “fertility industry” that I thought I’d apply that keen eye to other aspects of the medical world.  So yes, cancer industry, I’m looking at you.  I mean, aren’t ALL medical practices making money off our medical issues, churning us through protocols without any regard to how much the patient can take emotionally?  If reproductive endocrinologists are selling us the fantasy of fertility, aren’t oncologists just selling us the fantasy of cancer survival?

No?

I am being sarcastic, but it is frustrating that no other area of health care is labeled an industry and condemned.  We don’t blame the medications or doctors when people die from cancer; we blame the cancer.  In that situation, we understand that our bodies are not under our control as much as we’d like to believe, though we do hold out hope that what has worked for others will work for us.  But yet when infertility treatments don’t go according to plan — and anyone who believes they’re a sure shot hasn’t done due diligence as a patient to explore success rates (and yes, exploring success rates applies to every area of the medical world as well along with second opinions) — we blame the “industry.”

We’ve been promised something that it hasn’t been able to deliver.

Except no one promised it.  Or, if they did, they didn’t promise it any moreso than oncologists make similar claims when trying to assuage the feelings of very anxious patients.  Have hope.  Focus on the success rates not the failure rates.  It’s worth a try.

Miriam Zoll writes,

Medical science has achieved great feats, improved and saved the lives of many. But when it comes to assisted reproductive technologies, science fails far more often than is generally believed.

But isn’t that true for ALL areas of medical science, at least the ones that have high emotional stakes?  When it comes to cancer technologies, science fails far more often than is generally believed if you only focus on all the people wearing “survivor” shirts as they cross the finish line on a fundraising walk.  But even knowing the failure rate, would anyone not try reproductive technologies or cancer technologies within reason, hoping they’ll become part of those success statistics?

Individual doctors who are treating individual patients need to do a better job at talking through the risks, success rates, and counseling patients out of treatments when they don’t make sense financially.  And the good ones do.  If your doctor isn’t doing those things, that is the fault of that doctor, not the fault of all doctors.

I am all for regulations.  I do believe that patients need to be better informed, and the media needs to stop holding out IVF as a panacea for all fertility problems.  I think it’s disgusting when I see the quarterly reports for a fertility clinic and see just how much money they’re making because I have a medical issue.  Though the reality is that I’d probably say the same thing if I looked at the quarterly reports for medical practices focused on treating other diseases, AND I also know that I am looking at numbers without any understanding of how much of that money goes back into running the office so those doctors can keep providing treatment.  I have no clue how much of my doctor’s annual salary goes into paying his insurance; how much of it is actual, usable take-home.

But above all of that, doctors need to do a better job educating AND supporting patients who choose to resolve their infertility by leaving treatments and pursuing another path including adoption and living child-free.  I would be all for doctors being required to help patients explore those other options before starting any treatments; just mentally help them through the decision process.  I think if there was more support for it, there would be people who would look at the success rates and say, “for me, it’s not worth the gamble.”

Because sometimes it isn’t.  Though sometimes it is.

What I’m not for is skewing the story in the opposite direction.  I don’t think that actually solves the problem with the way the general population understands infertility and the limits of treatments.  Zoll quotes what she presents as eye-opening statistics such as the fact that “In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the overall failure rate at almost 70 percent.”  And yes, that is true if we look at the number of IVFs performed yearly vs. the number of times it is successful.  But Zoll’s number doesn’t tell us anything about the individual success rates of IVF.  The percentage of people who get pregnant after two or three tries.  When you look at it that way, the success rates of IVF mimic the success rates of an unassisted pregnancy.  In other words, just as fertile people often take a few cycles to get pregnant, the same goes for treatment cycles, and a lot of that is dependent on the age and diagnosis of the patient.

To hold doctors or technologies to a standard that even the healthiest of bodies can’t achieve feels like it’s picking the wrong fight.

Oh, because there is a fight here to be had.  But this isn’t it.

I don’t blame the author.  I think she did a fine job presenting a facet of the infertility world, and she has a personal story that deserves to be heard and considered.  I do blame the New York Times for that title and the lens it put on the article.  Because they have a big agenda when it comes to infertility and we’ve seen it over and over again.

Update:

I own Pamela Jeanne an enormous apology.  I missed until right now that she worked on the op-ed too.

As I said before, Zoll has a personal story that deserves to be heard and considered, and that goes for Pamela Jeanne too.  I think both women have stories that are worthy of attention on their own, and I think it detracts from their personal stories to lay blame on the medical community or the media, both of whom didn’t create infertility.

I mean yes, we can argue that McDonald’s creates a product that creates a health crisis in people, but we can’t really argue that reproductive endocrinologist created infertility.  Nor can they provide a perfect solution to a disease they didn’t create.  If we want infertility to be defined as a disease, we need to treat it as a disease; one that has a wide range of severity within the diagnosis and one in which a single protocol or a single path doesn’t fit all.  I’m glad that both women ultimately found a solution that worked for them and wish they had been given more support along the way.

This question is part of the GRAB(ook) Club, an online book club open to anyone and everyone.  It contains a few spoilers for The Hunger Games and the Harry Potter series, so read at your own peril.

This is the first time that I can remember where I left a book in a series feeling as if I couldn’t understand major points in the current book until I read the next book.  And I’m not sure how much I liked that despite being very interested in The Hunger Games and prepared to read Catching Fire soon.

All series leave plot elements unfinished that are developed in the next book, but none that I can think of left this many questions unanswered by the last page.  Why did Cinna choose District 12? (This needs to be answered because a big deal was made about the fact that he chose her district.)  What role does the Avox play in the larger story? (I’m assuming something about that relationship will come back to haunt Katniss down the road or else why draw so much attention to that character?)  Why did Madge give Katniss a mockingjay pin specifically, and really, why did Madge get involved at all?  And beyond that, why did Katniss take Madge’s item vs. something from Prim or Gale?

See, a lot of questions.

I’m not sure how much of it was sloppy writing, leaving frayed edges to the story (as opposed to something like JK Rowling’s incredibly tight storytelling in Harry Potter) vs. untied threads that will be knotted in future books.  If those questions aren’t answered by the end of the third book, it’s sloppy storytelling because the reader was asked to focus on the wrong things.  If those questions are answered by the end of the third book, they better be really mind-blowing answers because the reader has been asked to wait additional books to discover their meaning.  The general rule is that anything that the author drags the reader’s attention to purposefully needs to be well-explained (or for the reader to believe that it was well-explained) by the end of that book; somewhat an extension of Chekhov’s gun.

I prefer books where I don’t know what I don’t know.  I mean, take the Harry Potter series: I didn’t even question that Voldemort didn’t technically die when the spell bounced back on him.  I figured the weakness of the spell in secondary form was enough to damage him beyond human recognition but not enough to kill him entirely.  Which meant that when the horcruxes came around, my mind was blown because I got the answer before my brain even realized there was a question.  Can you imagine if JK Rowling had dropped horcruxes into the first book and asked you to wait for their purpose to be revealed until the sixth?  But that’s sort of what Collins did with The Hunger Games.  She drew our attention to these moments or characters in a big way.  And then didn’t wrap up the book so it could stand firmly on its own.

Do you prefer books in a series to be capable of standing alone while working together with the other books, or do you like books like the Hunger Games trilogy, which is truly just one long book cut down into three equal parts?

After you answer my question, please click over to read the rest of the book club questions for The Hunger Games.  You can get your own copy of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins at bookstores including Amazon.

This is a post for the GRAB(ook) Club. Like the idea of a book club where you don’t have to leave your living room? Then read more about the GRAB(ook) Club which holds the book discussion on blogs, a Facebook group, and a GoodReads group.

Why does time feel as if it’s moving at warp speed?  That all of us — myself, the twins, Josh — are aging so rapidly that I can’t keep up.  That soon I’ll be 40 and then 50… The twins: they’ll be in middle school soon and then high school and then college and beyond.  Why does it feel that way, like I am on a roller coaster, hurtling downward through time and space, when it actuality, aging is like this video.  Subtle.  Slow.

Danielle from Anthony Cerniello on Vimeo.