For the past few days, my computer has been grunting at me while I’m trying to sleep. The first time it happened, I assumed that I hadn’t shut it properly therefore, it wasn’t going into the usual dormant mode. The second time it happened, I assumed my computer was trying to tell me to write. The third time it happened, I decided to update my Norton anti-virus software that I had allowed to lapse.

And, for the love, I had the skankiest computer in the world.

Norton couldn’t stop telling me about the viruses it was finding. It was practically gleeful, yanking out Trojan after Trojan. But my computer still wouldn’t stop grunting so I loaded Ad Aware and it found about 80 more pieces of malware on my computer. Every time we ran it, it would find more and more tracking cookies and viruses. It took my father all day to clean up my computer (thank you, Daddy). Finally, at night, I closed the cover and went to sleep. And my computer didn’t grunt.

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.

Let’s begin.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the mystery gift I received in the mail. Last weekend, we threw it in my purse and hit the road. Before we departed for Shepherdstown, I gleefully left a status message on Facebook crowing about going out for afternoon tea. That didn’t happen.

You see, I really missed the point of the book which was to travel outside my personal norm and not pack expectations. And while I claimed I didn’t have any plans in place once we got to Shepherdstown, the truth was that I assumed we’d have a light lunch at the Thai place and then go down to the river for a bit and then end the outing with tea and cakes. But when we got to the town, almost every business was closed because it was a holiday. The one coffee shop that was open didn’t have anything I wanted to eat. I ended up trying not to cry because we rarely get out there and we finally had this chance and the trip was ruined.

Sadly eating a chocolate croissant at the coffee shop when my heart was really set on tea and cakes

I left Josh and the twins in the coffee shop and went over to the public library where I googled surrounding towns and jotted down some directions.

Before we left, we tried to get down to the river, but a few wrong turns brought us to this bizarre little memorial for the inventor of the steamboat. While looking at this view of the river…

We found this tiny path behind the memorial. We decided to see where it led. At the end there was a message.

Not entirely sure what it means, but as we stood there, Josh reminded me that so few people in the world know about this tiny spray painted sign and that was surely more special than tea and cakes.

Also, mysteriously spray painted on an adjacent fence were inexplicably the words “Only in America.” It felt like another clue to a puzzle.

We got in the car and took the long back roads to another favourite town in West Virginia, Berkeley Springs. The Wolvog fell asleep on the ride, so when we got to the town, Josh and Wolvog remained back in the car while the ChickieNob and I walked over to a little store on the corner. “There is something in here for the mystery gifter,” I told her.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because, I can just sense it.”

We walked through the store and picked up many items and we both kept shaking our heads. Finally, we were about to leave when we both spotted the same box at the same time. We ended up purchasing three of the same item and there is a little story behind that too, but that will have to be a different Show and Tell.

I never got my cup of tea until I got home, though I ended the trip on a much happier note.

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.

I think I found So Close somewhere around July 22, 2006. This was the first post I read. Which, of course, made me wildly scroll back through her archives, reading her whole story. Who was this crazy woman who could make me laugh and cry and nod and yelp all in one blog entry? Her book came out around the same time and I was so frustrated that it was not sold initially in the US. Hopefully, Tertia will not unearth the long stream of emails of me saying, “what about now? Or now? Is it out now? Or now?”

Um…it’s out now.

Yes, Americans and Canadians had to wait a long time, but in honour of the book coming to America, I am throwing Tertia a book shower. A book shower is half online book tour, half book and author celebration. Anyone can participate, in fact, everyone should participate. Even if you read her book two years ago and have already written about it, please participate. I promise the format will make it a whole new post.

Now I need to convince you why you should join along: (1) Tertia is one of the pillars of the ALI community and one of the friendliest and warmest people to boot. (2) While she will most certainly make you cry–9 IVF cycles and death will do that–she will also make you laugh. (3) Lastly, one of the sentences on the book’s description rings so incredibly true: “If you are struggling with infertility, have triumphed over infertility or have felt empathy with someone who is going through this experience, you will find a friend in Tertia.”

I hope you will support one of our own by celebrating her accomplishment in writing this book as well as honour the life of her sons, Ben (who lived for ten days after being delivered at 25 weeks) and Luke (who was born still), who are written about in the book. If you’d like to join along on the book tour, here’s how it works:

• Sign up by clicking here and filling out the information needed to get on the list before March 20.
• Read the book–as in, don’t wait to order it, go get it immediately and start reading. In the US, it is available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble (but not brick and mortar stores).
• On April 16th, I will send you a list of ten questions based on the book. You will choose one to answer in a blog post that goes up April 20th.
• On April 20th, I will post the master list and people will be able to jump from blog to blog, reading wonderful things about Tertia’s book and leaving smooches and chardonnay.

It’s as easy as that. It will be like a giant, online party. In addition, I have two copies of the book to giveaway. The form has a space where you can indicate whether or not you want your name put in the drawing (I can, unfortunately, only mail the book in the US). If you already have a copy of the book, please hold off so someone else can get a chance. The only catch is that the two winners of the two books cannot drop out of the book tour once the books are sent to them. The drawing will be done on February 24th, so the giveaway closes February 23rd at 11 p.m. EST. Just to be clear–you can keep signing up to participate in the tour/shower after that, but you can’t win the books.

So sign up–it is a wonderful way to celebrate our community, celebrate a writer, honour a life, and meet other bloggers online. Please spread word about the book tour on your blog, via Twitter, or Facebook. We may not be able to bring Tertia to America for a face-to-face book tour, but we can certainly pretend she is here, calling us whore and blowing kisses.

I loved the what if game so much last week that I think we should do this every Friday. So here is my what if. Add your own in the comment section below and answer mine as well as the others you find there.

The Weekly What If: What if, in order to keep all of the photographs you’ve ever taken, you needed to eat three live crickets? As in, they would be jumping around in your mouth before they went down. Eating live crickets or keeping your photographs?

Though single embryo transfer has been a hot topic debated in the infertility world for quite some time, it has been thrust into the spotlight by Nadya Suleman’s octuplets, the result of a six embryo transfer. Slate had an article this week asking “Pregnant Pause: Who Should Pay for In Vitro Fertilization” that doesn’t truly answer that question, but instead discusses the pros–but not the cons–of a single embryo transfer. If Slate is taking a pregnant pause, I’d like to fill the silence.

The author, Darshak Sanghavi, starts with a great argument in favour of eSET (elective single embryo transfer) but muddles it by contradicting himself and simplifying medicine with a one-size-fits-all approach. Is eSET a good idea when it is no longer elective but instead becomes mandated? No, just as we wouldn’t set a single protocol to deal with any other medical condition. Medicine should have guidelines that doctors use to tailor medicine to fit their patient and not expect patients to fit their medical conditions to protocols set absent of all possibilities.

On the first page of the article, Sanghavi states that the reason doctors choose to transfer (yes, they transfer, not implant. You’ll notice the term is eSET, not eSEI) is that “Implanting just one embryo leads to pregnancy roughly 40 percent to 50 percent of the time; two embryos are 75 percent successful; and three embryos are 87 percent successful. ” Yet his argument in favour of eSET quotes a study: “In 2004, Scandinavian doctors reported that implanting one embryo at a time, repeatedly if necessary, resulted in the same final pregnancy rates as implanting several at once.”

Which is it? Is a single embryo transfer just as successful as a multi-embryo transfer? Or is it ultimately successful if you do it 4 times rather than 2? I think the problem with boiling down people to numbers is that we are receiving no information on who was included in calculating the figure.

It all depends on the person and using statistics is reductive in a situation where every body responds uniquely to medication and procedures. Transfer of a single embryo in which woman? The one who also has a 28-day cycle a la the reproductive health books or the one with a luteal phase defect? A woman who is 25, 30, 35, or 40? A woman who has a uterine anomaly? A woman who still has her tubes? A woman who has had a previous pregnancy or a woman who has never carried to term? Sanghavi states these arbitrary numbers, but they are just that–arbitrary numbers. Without information about the people included in the study, we cannot possibly use these numbers against our own life to calculate out our chance for success.

That said, I do agree with Sanghavi that it would help reduce the rate of multiples overall by having fertility treatments covered by insurance. By which I mean, all fertility treatments; not just IVF (it disturbs me that people don’t realize that there are more options than IVF and that most of these options are not covered by insurance and need to be). It would steer more people towards eSET when eSET is the best choice in their situation. Of course, eSET is not the best choice for everyone. There will always be cases where time is of the essence or where the doctor weighs the risks of repeated exposure to fertility drugs against the risks of a multiple birth from a multi-embryo transfer.

I think when a doctor can soundly explain their reasoning–and I don’t think Nadya Suleman’s doctor can soundly explain his reasoning for transferring six embryos in a woman who has had a successful cycle every time she has had a transfer–they should be able to make decisions that are in the best interests of their patients and even with feedback from their patient in terms of what they can handle physically and emotionally.

So, yes, I ultimately agree with Sanghavi, but can’t follow the road he took to reach the same spot.

Lastly, it really makes me cranky when doctors do not push online journals to use correct terminology. Yes, it may be Slate’s practice to improperly use implant rather than transfer when discussing IVF in an article, but when doctors write for online journals perpetuating the wrong terminology, it is detrimental to me trusting their argument or taking them seriously. Dr. Sanghavi knows as well as I that embryos cannot be implanted. They can be transferred, but implantation is up to the body. Hence why IVF does not have a 100% success rate.

Cross-posted with BlogHer.

This thought occurred to me when we were driving home from Berkeley Springs this weekend:

Can you get maple syrup outside North America?

In other words, do other countries beyond the US and Canada have sugar maple trees and produce maple syrup or is it always an import or is it not imported at all? Do you have real maple syrup, or do you only have pancake syrup made with sugar or corn syrup?

It literally occurred to me that I’ve never noticed it when traveling because I’ve never eaten anything that would necessitate using maple syrup while traveling.

And what about root beer?

I asked this a year or two ago and received only a few answers so I’ll try again. A camp counselor once told me that if you haven’t had root beer by a certain age, it is a taste that you can never enjoy. Why? I’m not entirely what the scientific process is behind this possible-fact. But it was his explanation for why non-Americans rarely like root beer–because it is a drink pretty much only found in the US and therefore, most non-Americans do not encounter it until they are beyond the magical age line. Is this true?

There actually is a point in wondering what you can’t get outside the US.

What products have you wondered about in terms of foods you associate with your own country? I’ll tell you if we can find it here.

As always, it has been about a month since we met, bitched, cried, comforted, and caught up each other on our cycles and lives. Pull up a seat and I’ll pour you a drink. Let everyone know what is happening in your life. The good, the bad, the ugly. My only request is that if a story catches your eye, you follow it back to the person’s blog and start reading their posts. Give some love, give some support, or laugh with someone until your drink comes out of your nose.

I have a ton of assvice in my back pocket and as a virtual bartender, I will give it to you unless you specifically tell me that this is simply a vent and you do not want to receive anything more than a hug.

So if you have been a lurker for a while (or if this is your first open bar as someone who found this space through IComLeavWe), sit down and tell us about yourself. Remember to provide a link or a way for people to continue reading your story (or if you don’t have a blog–gasp!–you can always leave an email address if you’re looking for advice or support. If not, people can leave messages for that person here in the comments section too). If you’re a regular at the bar, I’ll get out your engraved martini glass while you make yourself comfortable. And anyone new, welcome. I’m glad you found this virtual bar.

For those who have no clue what I’m talking about when I say that the bar is open, click here to catch up and then jump into the conversation back on this current post.

So have an imaginary cocktail and tell us what is up with your life.