Confessions of a Starbucks addict

Heat is good

2009-07-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

But not when it's mixed with humidity. Ugh. I'm hot, like most people my body is trying to produce sweat. Mix that with humidity and you get sticky.

Being sticky is gross. I hate being sticky. It makes me want to live in the shower, which I can't do unfortunately. I have a baby to feed. Babies don't like cold showers. Okay, I can't technically say that since I haven't brought Quin into a cold shower with me, yet. :D I may try it though! He's making me stickier too... I swear he's a little furnace all on his own. What's the deal with that? Itty bitty baby ... HUGE heat producer.

Isn't there a place to live that's ideal? Like a constant 70F and no humidity? I'd like to move there if anyone has any suggestions...

Quin's 4 week update

2009-07-21T18:55:00.000-07:00

Quin is 4 weeks-old tomorrow, so I thought I'd do a little update while he's napping.

In his first two weeks of life he lost a little more weight than was expected, but with lots of skin-to-skin time and on-demand nursing, he's gained back a bit and is growing. His weight check today showed him to be 6#2oz., which is just 8oz. shy of his birth weight. His ped was pleased, said no supplements were necessary still, so all is good.

He's grown 2 inches since birth and has also grown his brain...I don't remember the circumference, but I do remember it was in the 60th %ile.

Yesterday I thought I was going to go crazy a bit. He nursed pretty much the entire 24 hours of the day. Now I'm seeing why. Today he's napping a lot, nursing efficiently while awake...duh, he's having a growth spurt. I forgot about babies doing that!

He's still in newborn sized clothes, but this is something that's typical for my kids. They pretty much stay true-to-size for clothing/age.

I guess that's about it!

Announcing the birth of Denis Quinlan Morrison!

2009-06-27T17:31:00.000-07:00

I call him Quin. :)

Quin never came on his own, so as planned, I went in to the hospital to be induced on Wednesday the 24th. Troy, Chris, Tani and I arrived at around 9AM and at around 10AM Troy went back home to pick up my mom and Kaycee to bring them to the hospital.

Around 11AM my OB came into the room to start the induction. I'd been hoping to have a waterbirth but then some old birth fears overcame me... I'd been vacillating between the waterbirth experience and just getting an epidural for awhile, so when I asked my nurse about getting an epidural *before* the induction was started, I was shocked to learn that they do that all the time at this hospital! So, I quickly decided that I wanted a pain-free birth experience and asked for the epidural post-haste. (Yes, I know, not a popular decision around here...not one that I thought that I would make, at least.) My OB was fine with the epidural and my reasoning, she was also very willing to do the induction the way that I wanted, starting pitocin and breaking my water *after* the epidural was in place.

Unfortunately, the epidural took THREE tries before it started working. The anesthesiologist was great and apologized for having to stick me like crazy. Once the epidural was working, it was quite funny having no way to actually move my own legs. Since I'd never experienced an epidural, it was not what I'd expected. That heaviness was intense.

By the time my OB came back from her office hours around 6PM, I'd dilated to 4cm. This induction was something unexpected for sure. All of my previous labors were intensely quick, so the slowness of the induction was frustrating. It was also maddening since Troy, my mom and three of my kids were there, and were all looking quite bored.

Around 10PM started the craziness. Quin's heart started to decelerate severely during contractions. His head wasn't placed properly on my cervix and so I wasn't dilating well. His heart kept decelerating and though it was only deceling during contractions, it was worrying. At one point, around 10:30PM, his heart deceled so much that the nurse tried to get a better monitor placement on me...and then she couldn't find his heart beat. Quin was then placed on an internal scalp monitor. They noted that I was still 4cm, maybe stretchy to 6cm, but that even then his heart was deceling too much for my liking. Even at 6cm, the way this induction was going, I was worried that Quin wasn't going to tolerate labor for much longer.

I asked for a c-section. I knew it was something that I didn't ever want to do, especially after having had 5 kids, all naturally. However, I'd been having a running nightmare that basically showed me that he wasn't going to make it through labor. It's a dream that I hadn't had in awhile, but it was still there and recurrent. I had all the nurses and my OB flitting in and out of my room then, getting prepped for the surgery. I also asked my OB if since she was already going to be in there, could she please do a tubal ligation while she was at it. Luckily we'd discussed this before, otherwise it'd have been an immediate "no", but since we had it was no problem.

They wheeled me into the OR, got Troy dressed in scrubs, my camera batteries died so I borrowed my mom's. Troy grabbed the video camera and off we went. The anesthesiologist took pics while Troy recorded.

When they finally got into me, they found that Quin's cord was wrapped twice, tightly, around his neck. It was also wrapped down around his legs and around his right knee. No wonder the poor kid wasn't coming out on his own! I'm glad I made the decision for the section since I don't think he'd have tolerated much more labor the way he was tangled up... After his cord was clamped and cut, he started crying right away and they whisked him and Troy back to my labor room to measure, weigh, and do all the other newborn procedures they'd have normally delayed but since I was still in the OR they went ahead and did with my okay.

I don't really remember much after the section. I think I was so exhausted that they let me sleep for quite some time. I remember Troy taking the older kids home and leaving my mom and Kaycee with me until he came back to get them. Kaycee fell asleep on the labor bed with me and Quin, my mom fell asleep on one of the uncomfortable chairs. After they left, I was at some point taken to the post-partum room. I kind of remember being shown where the bathroom was and where the diapers were for Quin...I'm kind of stuck on what else happened, it's a blur. I was exhausted still.

We stayed in the hospital until Friday afternoon. On Thursday they had me drugged up pretty well and I know I wasn't quite coherent, especially when I was on the phone with Troy. I kept falling asleep while talking to him, and I'd have these weird dreams, then wake up telling him whatever I was telling him in the dreams...ugh. I think he was really worried about me, so he called the nurse and had her check on me. Sweetheart. I did finally get some real sleep when Quin slept for 4 hours straight. He then went back to sleep after nursing and slept for another 4 hours. What a good baby!

The induction is tomorrow

2009-06-23T14:28:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I will be heading to St. Joseph's Medical Center in Tacoma, WA, to have labor induced. I honestly didn't think that the baby would stay in past his due date, but what the heck do I know? LOL.

My mom and her younger sister, my aunt Diane, flew up last night from California. I was still furiously cleaning when Troy went to pick them up from the airport... My mom is one of those people who has to have a clean house, whereas mine is more of a "lived-in, well-worn shoe", IYKWIM. So yeah cleaning all day, all week really, to get ready for them to arrive. It's funny though. I wasn't quite done and my mom didn't say much other than I hadn't gotten to the little kitten shits that were under the table where I couldn't reach them (we've since moved the kittens and am having Tani litter train them, albeit a little early but so much the better).

I'm trying to figure out what to pack for the hospital. I'd planned all along for a homebirth, so I haven't a thing packed. Obviously some toiletries, clothes to wear home (I don't mind wearing the hospital garb), the Boppy pillow, my laptop (duh!), camera, baby clothes, baby carseat, cell phone...ugh. The list is already too long...

Because inductions are extremely painful for me, I may consider asking for the epidural instead of doing the waterbirth. I don't know yet. I'd like a waterbirth experience, but I really would rather not do the pain thing again! Never having had an epidural, I might like to experience a pain-free (ha ha) childbirth. :P

In other news, the brakes on my Saab went out. Apparently they went out *badly*. Like $1800 worth of *badly*. I knew they were grinding for the last week, but sheesh, that much?!? So we're having them save the parts for us so that we can see for sure that the work really needs to be done. Not only were the pads worn, but all four wheels need new rotors (which can be machined in Saabs) *and* new calipers... I *do not* need this kind of stress! No wonder the baby hasn't made his appearance yet, he knows mama's too stressed out!

Okay, baby's poking me in the cervix now. That hurts, so I'm gonna sign off. :) Obviously there will be an update tomorrow!

I'm 39w6d today...

2009-06-20T20:54:00.000-07:00

...and I'm *still* pregnant! Sheesh.

At least I am getting time to get a lot accomplished. Last night I cleaned up the kitchen and put some things away. Chris's girlfriend's parents were here and put in the living room floor...it looks *so* nice. :)

Today I've been doing laundry, running errands, and cleaning up Shayna and PJ's room (which I didn't do most of, the above mentioned parent (the mom) did most of it). Now she and Chris are disassembling Chris's bed so it can go to PJ and become a bunk bed again. Our neighbors remodeled their house over the last year and gave us their old full-size bed, so that's going to Chris now. Shayna and PJ will have a bunk bed and I'm washing the sheets for the bottom bunk as I type.

Tomorrow I need to Swiffer Wet Jet the kitchen floor and set up a litter box for the new kittens. They are starting to think that the bathroom floor is the ideal place to do their business and I'm getting irritated over that! I'm also running up to Bellevue since they just got The Container Store. When I lived in GA that was one of my favorite stores, so I have to go see it. I'm going to pick up some containers for cereal and probably find something useless but cool to buy too. :P

Troy and Marc (Chris's g/f's dad) put the cabinet doors and handles on today. The kitchen looks much nicer with the doors on the cabinets. :)

I'm really hoping that something will happen tonight with this baby. I'm so done being pregnant!

39 week appointment

2009-06-17T17:12:00.000-07:00

Everything's fine. Moving slowly. :( I'm only a fingertip dilated and the cervical position is anterior, hiding behind my pubic bone. Oh yay.

Now, how do I know this? Well my lovely OB went and pushed on the top of my uterus, from the outside - duh!, and as she did that she was checking the cervical placement... and OUCH!!! she rebroke my pubic bone. Anyone who knows about my pregnancies with Kaycee and Shayna knows about my pubic bone breaking. PAIN!

So I actually called the office after I got home and asked if I could be induced this Friday, since my OB's on call that day. If I go when she's on call I can definitely have my waterbirth. Unfortunately though my OB was fine with that, the hospital is booked solid! Damn.

I have some percocet, but it's not touching the pain at all. I'm now, officially, miserable. :( I haven't been miserable, except for our weather, the entire pregnancy!

In other news, my mom and her younger sister are coming up on Monday night. Yet another reason to try and get this baby out before they get here! I don't want to have to wait until Wednesday now since they only have a limited time here, but oh well, can't rush the baby too much!

We're getting a lot of work done around the house too... New floors are going in and I'm doing laundry like a madwoman. I never realized how many pieces of clothing we have in this house. It's quite insane!

That's it for now. More updating later. :)

38 week appointment

2009-06-10T15:36:00.000-07:00

Boring appointment. As usual. The NST was fine. OB says that everything looks good, baby is happy inside, moving well, in a good position for delivery, etc. However, I'm still only 1 cm. dilated and my cervix is hiding behind my pubic bone. Who knew?

My OB keeps commenting on how she can't believe that I've pushed babies out instead of had sections because my pubic bone is not in a "normal" location. I had to explain to her about the fall I had when I was pregnant with Kaycee and how that broke the bone itself. It wasn't able to heal properly because of the pregnancy and has been stuck in its current position since then. And yes, I pushed Kaycee and the two following through anyway. Whatever. I'll show her I guess!

The only other news is that we've scheduled the induction for 40w3d. That's as far out as she'll "let" me go because of the diabetes. I guess I'm okay with that. Maybe pray for some labor vibes for me so that I can have the baby early, at home, in the tub. Thanks much!

I'll have one more appointment before the induction date. That'll be next week on Wednesday at 3. I'll try and update soon after it. :)

The waiting game and other ramblings

2009-06-01T17:50:00.000-07:00

So I'm at 37w1d today. Three of my kids were born at a later time, two were earlier (much earlier). Now I wait. And wait. And wait some more.

The kitchen remodel is almost done. I have to put the cabinet doors on as well as the handles/pulls. Then, of course, I have to prime and paint the dining room. On Wednesday I'm heading to Ikea to buy the flooring for the living room and office... hopefully baby will wait until the flooring is done.

But still, I'm done with being pregnant. It's funny, I usually get this feeling much earlier, but this time around I'm conflicted. Really, I want the baby to wait until the house remodeling is complete...but then again, I'm done with constipation, puking, weirdly spaced contractions/prodromal labor, and walking like a duck.

Oh and it's 85°F today. I love heat. I love hot days. It's going to be this way all week... So then why is it that my convertible has to sit in the body shop all week instead of tooling me around all heck and back to get my mind off of the heat? This one, I can truly blame Troy for! :) He backed out of our driveway in the Expedition...right into my Saab. The poor thing needs over $2500 in repairs. *Thank you* insurance company and my $250 deductible. So I'm driving a rental Chevy Impala, provided by the insurance company, until my car is fixed. Boohoo. Not even a sun roof! :p

I guess that's about it. It's time for a nap.

36 week appointment

2009-05-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

Everything is fine! Baby is doing well and other than a cough that causes me to vomit my meals, I'm doing well too. (Heh, so I've lost 9 pounds in the last two weeks...nice weight loss plan?)

I had an ultrasound yesterday. Baby has turned to vertex, which is great. He was sprawled like crazy, but unfortunately no pictures because of that. Then I had an NST where he hiccupped for a full 5 minutes. They thought that was hilarious. His heart rate was perfect and reactive, so he's -in my OB's words- "a very happy baby".

No internal check for dilation. That's okay, I'd rather not know. I told baby that he needs to wait until the kitchen remodel is finished and the new flooring is in, so at least another 2 weeks. Also, my OB is willing to wait to induce until my due date by u/s, so June 24th. If I haven't had him by then, that will be his birthday.

All is good now. :)

35 week appointment

2009-05-21T10:57:00.000-07:00

Tuesday was my 35 week appointment. Sorry I didn't post about my 34 week appointment, we've been in the middle of renovating our kitchen and computer time has been limited for me. I'm just too tired to get online!

So my appointment was uneventful. The NST was done and baby passed with flying colors. I must say those stupid NSTs stress me out, I've said it before I know, but I just hate them! I saw one of the midwives since my OB is on vacation this week. It was quite a different appointment than with my OB since the midwife seemed in a hurry. No big deal, I don't need a rapport with someone else at this point in the pregnancy...

Other than that, I've lost another 4 pounds. I'm just not eating as much because of the horrible nausea I've been getting. Oh well, it's not like I can't stand to lose any weight!

33 week appointment

2009-05-06T20:34:00.000-07:00

So today started my weekly appointments, including getting an NST done before seeing my OB. If you don't know what an NST is, it's a Non-Stress Test. Basically they put two straps onto you, each with a monitor attached. One is for the baby's heartbeat and the other monitors for contractions. They want to make sure that the placenta is doing its job, so that's why the need for the weekly NSTs now. Blah. I hate those stupid monitors.

Baby's heartbeat was fine, accelerated like it was supposed to, decelerated when it was supposed to. Yadda yadda.

The OB check was fine. Baby's measuring perfectly on time, heart rate fine (again)... but oops, I've lost 4 pounds. Well, there's a reason... I've had some gastro issues the last couple of days. Not pretty. The good news is that the suggestion I got from a friend to up my iron to two pills a day helped. My hemoglobin was 11.7!

That's it til next week!

32 week appointment

2009-04-29T20:42:00.000-07:00

What a long day! Today's appointments were rather long. I say appointments because I had a 32 week ultrasound, the regular OB appointment, and then I had to drive to another facility and get that follow-up fetal echocardiogram. Whew! I'm exhausted from all the driving.

I guess I'll start with the ultrasound, since it was first. Baby is measuring perfectly, on time, and at a great weight (4#4oz.). I got a blurry picture of one of his feet, but I haven't scanned it in yet. He's too big in there to get any good pictures. The other problem with getting a good picture...he turned breech! Ugh. He's been head down since 20 weeks and now he decides to turn? Geeze kid! Yes, I know that he can turn several more times before he's due, but sheesh! All my kids are stubborn. :) Oh, his heart rate was a nice 144bpm.

The OB appointment was uneventful. We went over the ultrasound and I got my lab results. I'm still anemic, but wasn't told to up my iron pill. I am going to go ahead and do that anyway. My A1c was 5.5%!!! This I wasn't expecting. I'm thinking I'm having a lot of nighttime lows that I'm not waking up for. I'm going to have to be more careful about that. Other than that we didn't really talk about much, except our kids. It's nice to have an OB who has kids that are older like I do. My last OB didn't understand teenagers...this one does!

Then it was off to the children's cardiology clinic. This was for the fetal echocardiogram. Baby's heart looks good, though there's a bit of thickening in the interior part of his heart wall. They think that was an artifact, since his position wasn't cooperating with them... so their advice was that when he's born I should ask for one of the cardiologists to come and do a quick echo on the baby, or when we're discharged just run over to the cardio clinic and have them do it there. No big deal, they just want to make sure that what they saw was an artifact. Really the only thing that the thickening could be is showing a murmur, which I guess is quite common in T1 mom's children. So that's all they'd be looking for. There's nothing really wrong with the baby's heart at all. :)

All in all a good appointment. I'm now going to have weekly non-stress tests along with my OB appointments. I can't believe it's so close! My house is *totally* not ready for a new baby. It's a pig sty and I don't have the nesting-urge going on, which sucks!

30 week appointment

2009-04-15T23:24:00.000-07:00

My goodness... this appointment took FOREVER. Most of it was the waiting...and waiting...and waiting. PJ had a good time in the lobby, making friends, watching Veggie Tales, finding the hidden objects inside the Highlights magazine, having me read a book to her, looking at the pictures of babies in the exam room, etc. It was mostly waiting.

I got approval from my OB to go back to injecting heparin, instead of pumping it. The bruises that I get from the pump are just awful. I'm looking a lot like someone who lost a punching contest in my abdomen area. It's just gross. Plus the bleeding from the sites is just insane. So, I'm done with the heparin pump. I'll be returning that sucker tomorrow!

The baby's heart rate was 158bpm. Doing well there. Also, she finally measured fundal height...it was 33cm! So, either baby is big, I have a lot of fluid, or I'm just fat! I'm going for the latter. I also lost weight from my last appointment. Stupid nausea! I just don't want to eat.

I also gave my OB the preliminary birth plan form that I'd filled out (in the case of hospital birth, i.e., induction). She didn't like that I will refuse Cytotec. Sorry, I'm not going through that crap again (Shayna was a Cytotec induction). I'll let her break my water, I think that's about it. I don't want to be on continuous monitoring which this hospital requires if you get pitocin. So, break my water, baby will probably fall out within an hour. :p I hate inductions, so everyone pray that the baby will come on his own at around 38w6d!

My next appointment is in two weeks. I'll be getting another ultrasound, then I'll see my OB, then I have to rush to the other side of Tacoma to see the fetal echo specialist...so I'll be getting two ultrasounds that day. Woohoo. Let's hope for more pictures this time!

That's it... no more cleaning for me!

2009-04-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

Somehow I think I started having some nesting urges a bit early here... On Thursday I decided it was time to clean the downstairs bathroom. It's the one that pretty much everyone uses, mostly because it's easiest access, and it's also where the washer/dryer are. There was probably a foot of dirty clothing piled up, and the tops of both the washer and dryer were full of clean clothes that needed to be folded.

The trash was overflowing, I think mainly because everyone forgets that on garbage night, you're actually supposed to go around the house and get *all* of the garbage cans emptied and out to the big can... whatever. It was a mess.

So I cleaned. I scrubbed. I inhaled so many chemicals that I got dizzy and had to open the window (should've done that first, duh!) The only thing I couldn't do was was scrub the floor...the hands and knees thing is quite difficult these days.

I got the place cleaned, and it felt goooooood! However...

Friday I got up and started on laundry, continuing on from the day before, having done about five loads in between the scrubbing. One thing I noted though. Baby wasn't moving. No big deal I thought, I mean all the work must have put him to sleep or something. I went to bed, a little freaked out that I still hadn't felt him move, but knew that everything was probably fine.

So I wake up this morning and still don't feel him moving. So what do I do? I eat a jelly donut. :) He still doesn't move. So I poke him and I shake him (well as best as you can through your belly), poke him some more. I *finally* get a response. A light tap. Not good enough! I poke more, prod more, shake more. Then I wait. I figure that the donut's sugar hasn't hit him yet...meanwhile I'm panicking about maybe I need to go to the ER and get a doppler check on his heart rate.

Fast forward about an hour... this kid won't quit moving! He's hyper in there. All is well. Jelly donut to the rescue! Bad for blood sugars, good for baby moving.

I'm not cleaning anymore!

28 week appointment

2009-04-01T18:18:00.000-07:00

I'm so very upset! Baby is in the perfect position for birthing, which means that I can't get a good ultrasound picture to save my life! His face is toward my back and he's sitting cross-legged. Bad boy! Doesn't want mama to see him! :p

He's looking good. Measuring ahead now, at 29w1d (I'm 28w3d today) and is weighing in at 2#11oz. Fluid levels are perfect too. Woohoo!

I got the paperwork for preregistration at the hospital. My OB says that if I haven't gone into labor on my own by 39w1d then we'll induce so that I can definitely get my water birth. I don't like inductions, so I'm going to have a long talk with this little one...hopefully he'll listen! The other reason for induction is my T1, which I discount a bit since I've had full term babies before who weren't huge. We'll see. I may be ready to induce...it'll be June afterall. I'd much rather stay at home and have him in the bathtub, you know?

My OB appointments are now set up for the rest of the pregnancy too. Two weeks apart for the next month, then weekly appointments along with an NST (a requirement for T1 moms). My blood pressure was great, no protein spilling, sugar is good, so all is well.

A rather boring appointment indeed. :)

I blame Kaycee!

2009-03-19T11:53:00.000-07:00

Not really, but it's an eye-catching title, isn't it? The story...

Thursday Kaycee came home from school and said she felt sick. Immediately upon entering the house, she threw up. She was sick for the next 24 hours.

Saturday I became sick. I threw up multiple times all day and had stomach cramps that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy....okay, well maybe *her*. :p That night, Shayna got sick and a few hours later so did PJ. I was swimming in vomit. Nice picture, yes?

Sunday morning finally comes around and I'm *still* sick. Shayna and PJ are over their troubles, but I'M STILL SICK! At around 11AM Troy tells me to call my OB since I said to him the night before that if I was still sick I'd call my doc in the morning. So fine, I call my OB.

A midwife calls me back and tells me to get to the hospital since I must be dehydrated. Plus they can give me anti-nausea meds that will help my stomach cramping. So off we go. Instead of going all the way to St. Joe's, I decided I wanted to be close so we went to St. Francis. In the ER, they sent me to L&D so the baby could be checked. His heart rate was tachy so I needed fluids before they'd send me back to the ER for the anti-nausea meds. I didn't think I'd be in the hospital long, so I let the nurse put the IV in my left hand. OUCH! After 3 hours in the L&D, I was finally sent back to the ER.

Of course, I had to wait in the ER waiting room until they could get a bed for me...ugh. Picture a woman in a hospital gown, sitting in a wheelchair, thin blanket, shivering and cramping. I'm sure that made the other people in the ER waiting room feel safe! They did quickly get me back there though.

So, I'm in ER10...a room with sad memories for me. It's the ER room I passed out in from blood loss when I miscarried once. I also know it's the only ER room where the remote for the TV doesn't work! I would have liked to watch something on TV to take my mind off the cramping, but oh well... Anyhow, after another 2 liters of fluids, this time potassium bags (not banana bags, to distinguish), some IV Reglan, 8mLs of Morphine, and another 4mLs of dilaudid, they realized that the stomach cramps weren't going away and that I was still puking up everything I drank (they let me have ice chips and water). So I was admitted to the hospital. Fun stuff figuring out where they were going to put me too...

First they took me to the L&D "recovery" section. I got all settled in a nice, private room. It was heaven, except I was sweating like no tomorrow. Then the nurse came in and told me that they put me in the wrong room, on the *wrong* floor. Apparently the L&D people don't know how to take care of sick preggo people, just healthy ones. Duh! I get transported, yet again, to the 3rd floor. That's the "medical" floor. Where I don't get the window bed and my roommate is an 80 year-old complainer. If there were awards given for the most complaintent, she'd win for sure! Especially if anyone "stole" on of the 4 chairs on her side of the room! I mean holy hell, how many chairs do you need when you have one visitor at a time, who only stays long enough for you to lodge half of a complaint to them and then leaves? And I want to know whose smart idea it was to put vomiting me into the same room with a woman who can't keep her heart rate up? I swear my little bugs were gonna be the end of this woman!

Anyhow, I was drugged up most of the time, except when the nurses were too busy chatting with each other to remember that one of their patients actually "needed" those pain meds or they'd get royally ill with the pain... Would you rather give pain meds on a schedule and not have me remind you, or do you just like cleaning up all the vomit all over the place? I did have some great nurses though. One was a guy. I think he was the one who really liked cleaning up the vomit. I wanted Katie to be my nurse all the time. Of course, that can't happen in a hospital where there are shifts...no! They took her off my side of the floor and put her on the other side the next day...that was so unfair. She was great! She never forgot a time for dosings, blood sugar checks, meals, etc. I'll get to it in the next paragraph, but she stayed up with me all night when I had to have a blood transfusion. I'm so mad that she was switched to the other side of the floor when she came back to work. :(

So some of my labs came back funky. Apparently there's this thing called an H&H...hemoglobin and hematocrit. Hemoglobin has a normal value of 12-16 gm/dL in women, and hematocrit has a normal value of 37-48% in women. Mine were well below normal. I've put a call in to my doctor to find out the exact number since I don't remember, but as I said, they were well below. I needed a blood transfusion. 2 units. Thank you blood donors. :) The type and cross match on blood was funny since I know my blood type, MedicAlert knows my blood type, the Red Cross knows my blood type, but apparently the hospital can't take any of our words for it. Yet another 3 vials of blood gone, like I could spare any! Sheesh!

Getting someone else's blood pumped into you is an eery feeling. Really, you don't feel anything, but it makes your blood pressure drop. Who knew. So while they're pumping in the new blood, your vitals have to be tested every 15 minutes. There's this whole protocol. They have to have three nurses sign off that the blood you're getting is the blood that was sent to you. Then they have to sign off that they've inspected the blood. Like they have little microscopes to make sure that the tags were sewn into the cells properly...hahah. A little bloody humor.

Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention the best part! The hospital made me take off my insulin pump! Which was comical for them when I nearly went into DKA the next morning. If I recall correctly, I was +3 ketones and my sugar was 600+. I guess they forgot that if you need a pump and they take you off of it, then you *need* a basal insulin to replace what you're missing from your pump. Idiots. I got to put my pump back on after that. Yes, I did remind them about giving me a basal insulin, but they didn't get it ordered by a doctor. Stupid doctors.

All this, and I'm still dehydrated! Ugh. My mouth is dry, my eyes are dry, my skin is dry. I was released from the hospital last night. Guess what was the first thing I did as we drove away? I made Troy pull over so I could puke. Don't want that on my new car, you know? Also, my set for my heparin pump came out while I was getting dressed at the hospital, so I put a couple of gauze pieces on it and taped it pretty well. By the time I got home, I'd bled through that onto my clothes. As I write this, it's still bleeding and it's nearing 1PM! I look like I've been stabbed again, so does my bed. :( But hey, the baby is fine. :D

ETA: Finally got a call from my OB's office... my hemoglobin was 26% and my hematocrit was 9.1 gm/dL. As of yesterday at 8AM it was 31% and 10.3 mg/dL. I still feel like crap. :( Oh, it's 4:57PM on 3/19.

25 week appointment

2009-03-11T18:42:00.000-07:00

My blood pressure was great, which I was surprised about because I left my house late and got to my appointment about one minute before it was scheduled. Whew!

I have to say, I just love my OB. I'm totally comfortable with her if my plan of having an unassisted homebirth goes down the tubes... She told me today that she'd definitely be there for me if I want a waterbirth in the hospital, that if I go into labor and make it to the hospital in-time, that even if she's not on call, she'll come in. Woohoo! Of course, she'd prefer to induce me just after 39 weeks, but we'll see how everything goes. For now, I'm good with doing a UC.

The baby is looking great. He's still head down, starting to kick me in the ribs every now and again. His heart rate was 155bpm and strong.

I've gained 2 pounds, so that means I'm now at -4 pounds for this pregnancy. I'm expecting I'll gain another 10 by the time he comes. At my next appointment (on our 11th wedding anniversary!) I'll be getting an ultrasound done before my OB appointment. They like to start checking the fluid level and baby measurements monthly at 28 weeks. I believe that I'll have one more 3 week appointment after that and then it'll go to every 2 weeks.

Also at the next appointment she'll give me all the information for the hospital, getting pre-registered and taking a tour and such. I think I'll do all of that, just in case I don't end up UCing.

Stupid preggo dream...this one has me angry!

2009-03-08T13:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I know that dreams are all about the fears that you may have or things that are going on, but this dream started out great and ended badly. So much so that I need to write it out!

The dream started out with me waking up in labor. We weren't in our house, I don't know whose house we were in, but it did "feel" like our house. (Which would be cool, since I liked that house and am sick of living in Seattle!) It was a very warm morning. There was another couple at our house, but I have no idea who they were, I'm assuming they were neighbors.

So I start laboring pretty hard in the living room and I end up giving birth on the floor of the room. Funnily enough, there was no time to fill our enormous garden tub, so I didn't get in there. (We don't have one of those in our current home.) The baby came out strong and healthy, it hurt but no too badly. I was on one knee and the other leg was kinda stretched out with my foot on the floor. I don't know what you'd call this position, but it worked out well.

I sat down and cuddled the baby, cleared off his face and just marveled at him. Soon it was time for me to birth the placenta, so I handed the baby off to DH. Apparently right after that I wanted to shower so DH and the neighbor guy got the baby cleaned up and dressed while I was showering. I went back downstairs and saw the neighbor guy with my baby, DH nowhere in sight. He had the baby in a bouncy seat and looking good, except that he had a bottle in his mouth!

I immediately took the baby away from him and took the bottle out of his mouth and tried to latch him on. He wouldn't nurse. I was so sad. :( Then I woke up.

The thing that bothers me the most about this is that my last two kids didn't nurse well after they were born. Shayna was actually hospitalized at 9 days-old because she was losing way too much weight. We learned later that she lost her suck reflex at her traumatic (cytotec induced) birth. Luckily a speech therapist happened in to our room at the hospital and showed me how to "exercise" her while she was nursing, and she quickly learned. She didn't quit nursing until she was 6.

PJ was born at 32 weeks. She had a slight suck reflex, but was quickly frustrated with nursing. People told me to pump for her and that when she was around what would be 40 weeks, she'd magically learn how to nurse. They were right, but that whole day (the day she was due), we went out shopping and I didn't bring bottles with me. She slept most of the day and when we got home she nursed like a champ. But that first 8 weeks was depressing for me... She ended up nursing until she was almost 4.

I really want to have the "magical" baby-knows-how-to-nurse-from-birth thing again. My first three were like that...I've had my hard to nurse kids, I want this one to be fine.

So I guess that's maybe my biggest fear - nursing. Not the birth, just the nursing.

You know you're pregnant when...

2009-02-28T19:12:00.000-08:00

So I went out to lunch with Troy, Chris and PJ the other day. At the end of our lunch someone from the heparin pump company called me on my cell. Troy and the kids got up as we were getting ready to leave the restaurant. I'm there, talking on the phone, gathering all of my stuff to put back in my purse and I'm searching crazily for... MY CELL PHONE!

Can I just say that I totally feel like my mom now?

Naps and an oopsie

2009-02-25T11:10:00.000-08:00

I've been taking a nap in the afternoon lately. It's so nice that Troy works from home so that I can do that and not worry that PJ is getting into trouble... If he didn't work from home I might just make her take a nap with me. I don't know if it's the pregnancy that's taking a toll or if I'm not getting enough sleep at night. Either way, it's really nice to take a nap in the afternoon. :)

Unless... you have a set accident like I did during yesterday's nap. Whoops! It wasn't my insulin pump set, it was the heparin pump set. It seems that I must have scratched at it while I was sleeping or pulled on the tubing, something must have happened. I woke up from the nap with this cold and wet spot on my shirt. I looked down and it was like someone had stabbed me or something! A huge amount of blood was all over my shirt, and I don't even want to talk about the mess on my skin. Ick. I knew there was a reason they told me to keep the old set in for at least 12 hours after a set change. Sheesh, I'll make sure to definitely do that.

So my first set change for the heparin pump was a day early. Such is life, I guess. Also, the site is now a hard, huge lump. I'm kind of disappointed about that. I don't tend to get lumps under my skin with my insulin sets, and if I do it's because I left the set in for more than 4 days (you're only supposed to keep it in for 3 days). The site is also bruised like crazy. I thought the whole point of the pump was that the site wouldn't bruise. I'm going to have to yell at my OB about that one...

Double pumping now!

2009-02-20T20:49:00.000-08:00

As of noon today, I'm a double pumper. :p I have my insulin pump and now I have a heparin pump.

The pump is the same case as my Cozmo, made by Smith's Medical. The thing I don't like is the sets... the sets are *awful*. They are the Orbit 90s. I suppose they're supposed to be like the Cleo's but the tubing is the real problem. The Luer-Lok connector comes up out of the cap, so it's scraping my side up. Ugh. The tubing is blue, so at least I can tell through the tangled mess of 42" tubing which has a bubble and which doesn't.

Another interesting difference is that heparin sets are allowed to stay in for 5 days. Yippee! My rate for the heparin is 0.024mL/hr. The 3mL cartridge lasts almost the full five days. I'm also glad that I have the clear holster from my Cozmo that I'm not using (because I'm pumping with my MM722 right now), so I have that instead of the stupid carrying case they gave me for the pump. It's like a big wallet that you clip on to your belt. No thanks.

I also now have to check my first morning urine for Glucose, Protein, Blood and Leukocytes. Oh yay!

For what it's worth though, I think these Orbit sets might have a smaller gauge than the Cleos. I could feel those going in and with the Orbit's I can't. Which is kind of strange since I was told heparin is a larger molecule than insulin, but if it's working through a smaller gauged set, it does make me wonder...?

22 week appointment

2009-02-18T21:54:00.000-08:00

My OB and I get along so well. We chatted about everything today...mostly to do with how women who are diagnosed with gestational diabetes should just immediately be put on insulin instead of trying to do the quite limited ADA diet for GD. I gave her my email address and phone number so that I could be kind of a "friend" to anyone newly diagnosed in her practice. What prompted this was the patient who left the office as I was coming in... I could have sworn that this woman was just told her baby had died inside her, she was carrying on so badly. I felt really sorry for her. But no, that's not what happened...she was told she needed to be on insulin because the diet just wasn't working for her. I do kind of feel badly for people who are dxed while pregnant, but you know, at least it ends with the birth of your baby!

So, I'm hoping to help convince these women that having to take shots isn't the end of the world...those needles are itty-bitty, they don't hurt, and honestly look at it this way: with insulin you can still eat whatever you want to! I guess the previous patient had told my OB that she was trying to kill this lady's baby... with what? Insulin? You're kidding me, right? IT''S A HORMONE PEOPLE! It's not like it's really a medication, it's something your body isn't producing properly (or it's producing it but your cells aren't using it right so you need some more injected). It's not going to cause cancer, it's not going to kill anyone (well, okay if you give yourself too much and don't eat to cover the insulin you took I guess it'd kill you, but come on don't be stupid!)

I don't mind being a support person, but my OB knows, I'm going to tell it like it is.

So, in other talks at the OB's, she mentioned that she'd like me on a heparin pump. I guess because I was complaining about the enormous bruises on my hips from the 25-guage heparin needles. To give you an idea of the size of that needle, it's the same size they use for the flu shot. A normal insulin syringe is 29-gauge. What they draw your blood with is 21-gauge (the green-topped needle, that is...the butterflies ~light blue~ are 23-gauge). Okay, so it's about middle-sized for things that have been stuck into me (I'm not counting IVs or the needles they use for pheresis), but the heparin was leaving enormous bruises. So, I'm being referred for a heparin pump.

Baby's heart rate was a little low today (152 BPM), but my OB noticed that I was dehydrated so that's probably the cause. She made me drink 32 oz. of water before I left the office. :p

Natural Birthing Awards?

2009-02-17T15:17:00.000-08:00

So I was perusing the boards over at MDC and I came across this post, hijacked from another board. I thought the humor was stellar and the subject so incredibly needed sometimes. :)

My DH got sick of EVERYONE telling me, "You know, you don't get a medal for going natural!" in their own snobbish way. So what does he do? He gets me a MEDAL! LOL! I got a Copper one for birth #1 (In hospital, pitocin, no other drugs) and a Silver one for birth #2 (in hospital, drug-free). One of the family found out about our little gag gift and asked me if it offended me that he "rates your performance in labor". I was like, "No, if he started out giving me gold medals I could have never strive to do better." Then they asked how he "rated" me. Keep in mind that this is our GAG gift and is purely in a joking manner between my DH and I only but his rating system goes something like this:

Platinum- Home Unassisted birth (as long as it's perfectly safe), vaginal breech delivery (home or in hospital) or vaginal multiples delivery (home or in hospital).

Gold- Home birth with traditional midwife, drug-free.

Silver- Hospital birth drug-free.

Copper- Hospital birth with some kind of drug(s).

And then she asked, "Well what if you have to have a c-section?" and my DH goes, "She'll get a participation ribbon." LMAO! He was COMPLETELY joking but the look on that woman's face was priceless!

I must say that I totally agree with this! I want medals too. :D Hey, after having five kids I think I deserve it! So I'm giving myself medals here... I get two Silver and three Copper.

Chris's was a Silver... I labored for 8 hours and because of my scoliosis they couldn't place an epidural. No other pain meds were offered, so it was a drug-free hospital birth.

Tani's was a Copper... My water broke at 34 weeks. I drove myself to the hospital while my dad went and retrieved my XH from work and brought him to the hospital. By the time they all got there, the OB had decided to give me pitocin. I had no epidural and no other pain meds. She was born after 3.5 hours of actual labor.

Kaycee's was a Silver... Only 1hr23min of labor and when I got to the hospital I was completely dilated. They had enough time to line an IV but not hook it up to anything.

Shayna's was a Copper... She was induced due to post-dates. Only 45 mins of labor, induced with the dreaded Cytotec. As I was pushing her out, they put 1cc of Stadol into my IV. It didn't help and instantly put me on another planet so bonding wasn't immediate like it should have been. :(

PJ's was a Copper... Induced due to PIH, she was 32 weeks. The induction was done with Cervadil. They had to insert it at 6AM then put another one in at 6PM. I didn't feel any contractions until 2:30AM. She was born at 2:53AM. Yep, that was 23 minutes total of labor. No pain meds, but they offered Stadol and Troy reminded me that I hated that stuff. :)

For baby #6, I'm going for a Platinum medal... plans may change, of course, but if all goes well I'm making Troy run to an awards shop and get me an engraved one!

He came back... :)

2009-02-16T16:04:00.000-08:00

I figure that since I posted about Troy leaving me, I should post that he came back. :) His plane arrived about a half and hour early, so that was nice. The little girls had wanted to stay awake to greet him when he got home, but I saw that they were all falling asleep standing up. So I told them that I'd have him wake them up when he came in, so they'd be able to greet him then. I think Shayna was the only one who really stirred and uttered a sleepy, "I love you daddy."

Since he's been home, he's been working just as much as he was while out in NH. Funny, I don't ever *see* him working so much, but he's kinda set himself up in our room and is hanging out with me. That's been nice, except when he's on the phone...he's got a newly acquired loud phone voice. He doesn't seem to use it when he's on the phone with me, since I can barely ever hear him, but you'd almost think he was trying to shout his way to NH! It's quite comical. :)

All is back to normal now. The kids are off school for mid-winter break. What a stupid break. I swear it's for the teachers more than the kids (sorry mom!), but seriously why can't we just have a week-earlier end-of-school release instead of this stupid mid-winter break? It's ridiculous!

Troy left me today

2009-02-08T13:14:00.000-08:00

Not for real! Sheesh... :) He went off to NH for the week. Nice timing of his company, I think. Today is Tani's birthday (17th!), and he won't be back until Chris's birthday (19th!), which is Friday. Technically, I think with the flight and the drive from the airport he'll be back the day after Chris's birthday but Chris probably won't know that since he's probably going to spend the night out with his friends... :p

So I'm all alone, with the kids, for a week. I see major headaches in my future... Big ones. Ones that don't go away with Tylenol. Actually, it probably won't be too bad, I'm just trying to make Troy feel badly for leaving me a single mother for a week!

I wanted to paint Shayna and PJ's room this weekend. That didn't happen. I wanted to clean my room this weekend, that didn't happen either. I'm finding that when Troy leaves I drop into a bit of a depression...of course, maybe it the weather. Yeah, I'll blame that. The weather sucks here. It's gray, wet, cold. Yeah, I pretty much hate it here. Can you tell?

I have a friend who lives in Australia. I hear that it's somewhere around 114°F these days. I'd be in total love! Except for the power outages, where I'd have to just have to go spend the day at the pool or something. Comparing that temp to our crappy 45°F rainy, overcast weather...yeah, I'd jump a plane to the land of Oz if I could. Of course, I guess it could be worse... I could be living where and auntie of mine does, near Anchorage, AK, which is currently at 14°F. Brrrr! But hey, it's sunny there too! :D Gotta find that gold at the end of the rainbow, no?

I think I'll be okay this week. It's not like I haven't done this before. At least I'm not ready to push a baby out while he's on a trip this time... he's got a few months for that left yet.

Prenatal check-up at the Peri's today

2009-02-05T22:47:00.000-08:00

It's so funny... every time I think that my appointment is all set and going to go smoothly, something crops up that makes it end up not-so-smooth.

Today's appointment was the 20 week check-up with the peri as well as the 20 week u/s scan. At least, that's what I *thought* it was. Apparently when I was there a month ago and the receptionist was making all the appointments for this one as well as the one for last Monday with the fetal echo people, she got confused and forgot to book today's appointment as the check-up *and* u/s. Whoops!

After talking with the peri, she went out and said that they'd be able to move things around and go ahead and do the u/s if I could just wait a few more minutes. That was fine, since I'd brought Troy and PJ along so they could see the baby. :) It did put us over-time to get home and let Kaycee and Shayna in the house, but I guess Kaycee had her key and got themselves in just fine...

The check-up was good, Troy reminded me of a few things to talk to the peri about, and all was good. The peri didn't even say she needed to see me again, so I guess they're done with me and I'm cleared for full OB stuff now... For the u/s we had the crappy technician again, I didn't see the good one there so we were stuck with the crappy one. At least this time she didn't try to force Troy to take PJ out of the room. That drove me crazy the last time... PJ was good, just needed to not ask questions during one part of the scan, other than that all was good.

I love the pictures that I got. :) One is a full profile of baby's face, and the other is a between the legs shot lol. I wish that this tech would have printed out more pictures, there were some great shots of his hands and feet too. Ah well. At least now, we can *really* tell that he's a boy!

Good appointment today

2009-02-02T18:24:00.000-08:00

Today's appointment was interesting. I had to get a fetal echocardiogram, which is done at a children's cardio group... So, other than the parents in the waiting room, I was surrounded by kids wondering why a mommy was there without her kid.

Anyhow, the little man is *still* a little man. Other than that, he was moving around so much the the sonographer was getting a little irritated that he wouldn't hold still so she could capture his heart really well. I guess I shouldn't have eaten that banana on the way there?

Eventually she got good tracings and afterward I spoke with the cardiologist. He says that the little man's heart looks perfect, the walls are the right thickness, and he wants to repeat the echo at 32 weeks, just to be sure that the walls of the heart don't get thick (apparently this is something that can happen to babies of diabetics and it's easily treatable during pregnancy but can be a problem after pregnancy).

So, we're good.

I have the detailed 20 week u/s at the perinatologist's office on Thursday. I'm sure I'll get a plethora of pics from there... no pics were available from the cardiologist's office since that's just a temp office and they only have portable equipment there until they move.

Foiled again

2009-01-23T12:29:00.000-08:00

So seriously, why does every medical professional think that having T1 diabetes makes you some sort of high risk patient when you're pregnant? Ugh!

I went to the new clinic that I talked about in a previous blog entry. During the intake appointment everything was going fine, until the intake nurse asked what provider there I would like. I told her that I wanted a midwife, that I planned on having a waterbirth and that's why I was there. I let her know that one of my MDC friends told me about her rotation there and that they have great waterbirthing facilities. I guess that's when she checked my chart and realized that I'm a T1.

Her response, "Oh you're a T1... we don't allow people with T1 to have waterbirths." Um, what??? I explained that the friend of mine had told me that being a T1 wouldn't risk me out of having a waterbirth with them and that I would love the care I receive with these midwives/OBs. She was very adamant that I must be mistaken and that no diabetic had ever had been allowed a waterbirth. They've been allowed to labor in the water but *must* get out to birth.

I am sadly discouraged now. I think it's now time to take a serious look at unassisted homebirth. I can go and get my OB and perinatologist care, but just have the baby at home. My labors are so easy and fast, so unless there's anything showing on a test from the peri, I may just try to coax the baby out around 39 weeks... I don't think Troy will have a problem with trying the "natural induction methods" like, um, sex and nipple stimulation...! After the baby is born, I'd probably have Troy drive us to the hospital just to get checked out. Sometimes babies of diabetics have low blood sugars, I can check that at home, but I think I'd feel comfortable with having a doc check us out. That would also make it easier to get a birth certificate and social security card. :p

Why can't doctors stay out of the birthing process? Maybe I should fight the OBs on waterbirthing, making it easier for T1s to do so if they want. I dunno...

So my OB called me this morning

2009-01-16T22:24:00.000-08:00

What an interesting conversation. She had apparently gotten a note from the front desk staff letting her know that I requested copies of my records to take with me to the midwifery office next Wednesday. I had arranged with the OB's staff to pick up the records next Tuesday.

Anyhow, Dr. S starts talking about how she doesn't want to lose me as a patient, she wants to make sure I'll be in a good OB's hands, etc. I told her that I'm planning on going to St. Joe's since they allow waterbirths. She seemed okay with that, but really didn't want me to leave her practice. Interesting, since she wouldn't "take" me as a patient until a perinatologist told her it was okay. Sheesh.

I think OBs are getting scared here in WA. Lots of malpractice claims going on, lots of interventions done, tons of c-sections. None of them want you to go into labor on your own, they all want to induce. It's total craziness.

Of course, in order to guarantee myself a waterbirth, I'll probably have to be induced. I hate that, but as long as they only use pit, I'll be fine. Pit works on me, I had it with Tania. I don't want to be induced before 39 weeks though, as I think that's when my babies are best cooked. :)

A small victory

2009-01-13T22:46:00.000-08:00

I had asked around MDC if any of the birth professionals there knew of any water birth friendly hospitals near where we live. For a few responses I got mostly the standard response that there are none. All of them will let you labor in the jacuzzis, but none will actually allow you to give birth in one of the tub itself. All of a sudden I got a response from someone who did a rotation at St. Joseph's in Tacoma. She told me that they have two "spa suites" where they allow you to birth in the jacuzzis. OMG! Seriously?

So I called our insurance company this morning and asked them if the midwifery clinic attached to the hospital is covered as an in-network provider with our insurance. They sure are! I called the clinic then and asked if they would take a patient who is already 17 weeks along...as long as I had documented proof of prenatal care, then yes they would! I asked if they'd take a T1 patient, and yes they will! I asked if there's any way for a T1 to have a water birth at St. Joe's, and yes as long as my A1c is in check! A1c is in check, definitely. Documented proof, check. Take a T1, check. YAY!

I do still have to go to an intake appointment to establish as a patient there, so that's on the 21st. Not too far away, thank goodness.

The only thing that may make me a little leery of Tacoma is that if I go into labor spontaneously, then I won't make it to the hospital at all. I may end up needing to be induced a little early, or on my due date, in order to be sure I'm at the hospital already. I really wanted a home birth, but obviously that may not happen. Then next best thing for me is to be in a hospital, birthing in a tub. The peri's won't let me go past 40 weeks, so as long as everything is good with the baby and my bgs, then I'll be okay with a small push of an induction. Pit yes, Cytotec no. Membranes swept yes, breaking the water no. You get the idea.

It's a...

2009-01-05T21:25:00.000-08:00

BOY!!!

Can you tell???

Oh, my goodness! I really had no idea that I could even have a boy anymore... It's been 18 years since my last boy was born. I never in a million years thought that I could have another boy. I mean, all my doctors and I had this theory that Chris (the 18 year-old) made me allergic to testosterone, so all of my miscarriages must have been boys. Guess that theory has now been blown out of the water. Oh, and the baby has caught up in size. He's now only measuring 1 day behind instead of 4-6 days behind.

This is quite exciting, I must say. I get a reason to shop! I don't have anything for a boy... I have some cloth diapers that would work for a boy, but only for infant times, since all my larger cloth diapers are girlie. Though admittedly, I might go back to 'sposies, since they are so much easier (less laundry, really). I have absolutely *no* boy clothes. Even if I still had PJ's infant carrier/car seat, I couldn't use it anymore since it's "expired". Who knew they put expiration dates on car seats?

In other news, my perinatologist is not going to sign off on my shoulder surgery while I'm pregnant. So, it's cortisone shots for me until the baby is about six months old. Then I figure he'll be able to utilize different nursing positions so he doesn't kill my shoulder while it's recovering... of course who am I kidding, I'll probably finally get the surgery when he's in kindergarten! My sugars are doing great. My peri was very impressed! He even said that I can now fax in my numbers instead of coming in to see him every two weeks.

My next appointment with the peri is Feb. 2nd. Then I will be getting a fetal echocardiogram, just to make sure none of those "advanced maternal age" things are hurting the baby's heart. According to the ultrasound today, the heart is beating well, the four chambers look like they're supposed to, and the cord insertion is perfect.

Just heard from a friend that I'm getting a lot of name suggestions for the baby already... I'm going to have to write a list of the greatest here sometime. :)

"Finally" had our GraphOn Christmas Party

2009-01-03T15:27:00.000-08:00

Since Troy and one other guy work for GraphOn from WA, he and his wife and Troy and I try to get together for dinner around Christmastime. Last year we didn't end up getting together and I was sad about that. I look forward to going out with Rob and TJ, they're way cool people. :)

Last night we met up at the Snoqualmie Casino. We ate at the buffet, which was good, but not worth the price in my opinion. Though Friday nights are crab legs nights, I can't eat seafood so the choices were limited for me. Maybe it's worth the price for seafood lovers... Afterward we sat in the lounge and talked abuot quite a lot of different things. Troy got to play with TJ's iPhone, Rob and I talked properties.

Troy and I decided to split from the Currey's and go play some slots while they played blackjack. After two hours, we came home with $53 more than we came with. Not bad for just playing slots!

Happy New Year!

Prenatal check-up today

2008-12-30T12:51:00.000-08:00

Today was my 15w2d appointment. Everything went well. The baby's heart tones are good, though I forgot to ask what the heart rate was. My OB has cleared me for the shoulder surgery that I need. She would like it to happen in the next month. The only caveat she had was that there needs to be an OB around before and after the surgery to monitor the baby. I will be seeing my perinatologist on Monday (I think) and will ask if he'll be around, or has someone he can recommend. The only reason my OB can't do it is because the surgery is going to be at Valley Medical instead of Highline. My OB doesn't have privileges at Valley.

My BGs have all been in the range that they want... less than 95 mg/dL fasting, and less than 120 mg/dL 2 hrs. post-prandial. I'm thinking my A1c is going to be in the low 5s this time around. :)

We talked a bit about this new progesterone shot that's out, that seems to help out with preventing preterm labor. My insurance covers it, so my OB wants me to do it. I'll be calling my "case manager" at UHC to let her know that my OB ok's the shot. Basically from 24w to 34w a nurse will come to my house and give me a shot once a week. My OB doesn't believe I'll need it, but because of the clotting issues that I have inherited, it's a good thing anyhow. Since my insurance happens to be one of the only who cover it, my OB says that it won't hurt so I might as well get it.

I am frustrated that no midwives will care for me here in WA. They're all scared of T1s. I'd really like to have a homebirth this time around...

The cat is out of the bag...

2008-12-30T00:04:00.000-08:00

Troy and I let our families know at Christmastime that we are expecting baby #6. The reception from my mother was less-than-enthusiastic, but gotta love my mother-in-law since you could hear her congratulations all the way from Denver!

Today I am 15 weeks and 2 days along. Due by my count on June 21st. The ultrasound at 6 weeks showed an EDD of June 26th. I'm counting by my date, but going with their EDD since that gives me a few extra days before the dreaded word "induction" passes my OB's lips. :) I've already seen a perinatologist to make sure that having diabetes isn't affecting this pregnancy (it's not, my A1c is stellar), and for an early ultrasound to determine the nuchal transparancy for an early risk assessment of Down's syndrome (NT was 1.3mm, so exactly perfect), and also to find out if being "advanced maternal age" is going to be a problem (it seems not to be). I have to say, I really wish that I could just transfer care to the perinatologist...he's awesome! He is going to tell my OB not to induce before 40 weeks, since he sees no problem with going to term, though he's leery of going over 40 weeks because of the possible placental degradation in T1 diabetics. So yay! Here's the most recent 12 week pic of the baby:

In other news, Tani switched to an Academy school, where the instruction is more catered toward the individual student and their success. For her this means a more focused artistic slant to her education, they bring in mentors to help the kids in their chosen profession, as well as help them with scholarship applications for the colleges they want to attend.

Chris is starting his first term of college next week, so it should be nice with him actually doing something for awhile. :) Kaycee and Shayna are already ready to go back to school... PJ is PJ. She loves to hang out with us all day.

I have an OB appointment later this morning, so I'll update after I get home. :)

Holy cow! It's been forever...

2008-12-29T12:48:00.000-08:00

I can't believe I've gone this long since my last post! Lots to catch up on, but no time to do it, so I'll just start anew today. :)

Whew! He graduated...!

2008-06-14T22:29:00.000-07:00

Today was Chris's High School Graduation ceremony. It was really nice. :) Of the three cameras I brought, two had batteries that died right before and during the ceremony. The video camera's batteries were good though, however I need a cable before I can upload those pictures. :( Luckily, my mom brought her camera with fully charged batteries.

Here are a couple of the pictures:

Above L-R: Me, Chris, Shayna, Kaycee

The picture above is all of the kids, my mom, and me.

The ceremony was beautiful, the day was beautiful, the after party was fun! :D I'll blog that in a few days.

PJ on the town

2008-05-08T09:28:00.000-07:00

PJ got to ride on her first city bus the other day. She had a lot of fun!

Picture 1 is PJ waiting for our bus. Picture 2 is her running toward some flowers. Picture 3 is showing the pretty landscaping in front of the school, where the bus stop is located. Picture 4 is PJ on the bus.

We're going to do it all again today, since I'm taking the car to get its brakes done. The other day we were getting new tires on the car. I don't think we'll be doing the bus again, unless PJ wants to go back to IHOP, which is a couple miles away from the Firestone...

RHPS Pictures!

2008-05-07T22:53:00.000-07:00

Patrick, Kyle, Josh, and Tani... right before heading out to Rocky!

This is Josh. Tani helped him dress for the event!

These two refused to dress up. On the left is Donald, Chris is on the right.

So Tani and Kyle like to dance. Who knew?!

So we're going again this weekend. To the Tacoma show. Donald's mom is going to join us, as well as Troy. Should be a good time!

Lips-Lips-Lips-Lips...Michael Rennie was ill....

2008-05-04T05:47:00.001-07:00

If you know that line, then you know where I was at midnight! :D If you don't, well here's the explaination.

Some things just never change... and others do.I took Chris and Tani to RHPS...and one of Chris's friends, and three of Tani's friends. They were all virgins. Well, technically Chris wasn't a virgin, since I took him when he was 5 days old...but seriously does that count? I think not. So he was re-deflowered. :)

I'll tell ya, the AP lines up here (in WA) are way different than they were 15 years ago in CA. Some are the same...the standard ones, you know, Janet's still a slut, Brad's still and asshole, Chuckie still has no fucking neck, etc.

Then there are the fun, new (to me), lines that I learned. Like when Rocky flips the switches down at the start of the dance show... "Rocky flips red, Rocky flips blue, Rocky plays football at Wazoo!" (Wazoo is the nickname for Washington State University, which is the rival to Seattle's U-Dub, the University of Washington.)

The thing that I didn't like about the show this evening was that there was a guest cast from Tacoma. Don't get me wrong, their cast was great. The problem was that they brought their audience with them...and they have some really different lines than Seattle. So in some of the parts you really couldn't understand what anyone was saying. Another problem was that the theater plays the soundtrack for the movie *incredibly* loud. Half of the AP lines you couldn't hear because they were drowned out by the soundtrack. That sucked. I was really hoping to hear some new ones that I hadn't heard before, especially in places that I had forgotten the lines. Ah well... there's always next Saturday (in Tacoma, Seattle only performs once a month).

I let Tani tag along home with her friends for their after-party. I took Chris and Donald over to Safeway to get me some Excedrin (I'm really getting too old for this shit!), and then we went to Denny's. Back when I was their age, our after Rocky breakfasts were at Carrow's in Union City, but since there are no Carrow's up here...and hell I don't even know if there are any Carrow's in existence anymore...we decided Denny's was good enough. We made the wait staff laugh their asses off with the rude and obnoxious comments. Apparently I must be some kind of sinful parent allowing my children to talk they way they do (technically I am only the mother of one of the kids that was with me, the other was Donald - Chris's best friend...like OMG his BFF DYK! inside joke, you had to be there). After Donald and Chris played 13 over and over with the loser taking Tabasco shots, we left.

A fun night all around. I met another mom there, taking her 16 year-old step-daughter to be deflowered. She gave me her card and asked me to send some of the pics I took to her. :) Yes, I have some really raunchy pics of my dd and her bff's...

I'm going to bed now. It's only 5:45 AM. :P

Yay! He's going to graduate!!!

2008-04-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

It was a rough couple of weeks on me. Long story short, as of two weeks ago the high school wasn't going to allow Chris to graduate because they thought he was credit deficient. Grrr. After numerous calls to the old school district, the new district, the homeschooling people, I finally realized that maybe all the school needed was his homeschooling transcript and that might suffice.

I emailed back and forth with the principal, since the counselor wasn't much help... We made an appointment for this morning, I went in ready for battle. I have now learned that going directly to the top of the food chain is best. The principal looked at the transcript, accepted every credit on there, told the counselor to add everything to Chris's transcript, have Chris take an online 12th grade English (a 3 week task that he needs to meet grad. requirements), and he'll graduate! Woohoo!

Persistence pays off. I swear if the counselor had his way, Chris wouldn't be graduating this year, and that would just suck!

Rikki needs...

2008-04-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

So my friend Christine stole this from someone, and I'm stealing it from her. :D What you do is Google your name and the word "needs" together. Here's my interesting commentary...

1. Rikki needs to repost with the EXACT error message if we are to better aid her/him.
I am always very specific with error message posts. Usually though I can find the error with Google, so I don't need to post on a board about an error I see... of course I rarely have errors, so I probably wouldn't need to do that anyway!

2. Rikki needs a hug.
Well sure, who doesn't? Seriously though, I do need one today after the crap I've gone through to make sure my son will graduate with his class this June!

3. Rikki needs a home.
Well, no I don't. I own a home. Though I do want to move, so if you find me a home with at least 5 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, at least 2500 sq. ft., and a fenced-in yard for less than $200k, I might consider it... The weather has to be exceptionally good wherever this house is, I'm tired of rain, snow, and sleet. Give me 70 degree weather year-round and I'm a happy camper. :)

4. Rikki needs help in the gardening then.
Aside from the bad grammar, I probably do need help in gardening. In fact I hate, loathe, and totally despise gardening. There is something to be said for being one with nature, but if it's my own yard, forget it. There are way too many wasps, hornets, bees, moles, squirrels, crane flies (piss ants, my daddy calls 'em!), and dirt in my yard. I'd be happy to cement in the entire place, but I think that might bring the property value down. It might also piss off my neighbors.

5. Rikki needs to quit living in such a deep-rooted state of denial.
Trust me on this, I'm not in denial about anything. Everything is on the surface here. Wait I thought of something! I know that I'm fat but my mind tells me I'm not. For some reason my mind thinks I'm still that skinny little gymnast that I once was. The scale says different. :P

6. Rikki needs to catch up in comments.
Hmm, that's quite accurate actually. I know that I haven't been the best at posting on DF lately. I rarely post comments on my friends' blogs. Sheesh, I'm a miserable person aren't I?

7.Rikki needs to stop eating at McDonalds.
Well actually, I have. When I started Weight Watchers, I quit McDonalds food. I still will stop by occasionally for an iced tea, but that's it. :D

8. Rikki needs to disappear and never come back.
OUCH! Reading further on that link, you will realize that the person was talking about a character on CSI:NY. Ha! I do think it would be fun to disappear for a few hours. I'd love to see if the kids even notice if I'm gone.

9. Rikki needs surgery to correct a very painful eye condition.
This, I know, is untrue. For me anyway. I may be needing a surgery for a possible rotator cuff injury though. Finding out this week...

10. Rikki needs to take responsibility for her actions and accept the blame for what she did.
Jeez! What did I do?!? I think I'm a pretty accountable person anyway. The only thing I can think of right now is that I probably not fighting hard enough with two school districts right now. I may end up caving and having to pay close to $1,000 to have my son repeat classes that he already made up while homeschooling. Grrrr...

Well, that was fun. I tried doing it with Aurica and only came up with three things. I guess it's not such a popular name...

Another insulin pump journey

2008-04-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I haven't talked about it a lot in this blog. I've been losing weight. I joined a gym. I'm getting healthy after an entire year of inactivity... The one thing that I can't figure out is why my bgs drop like hotcakes while I'm exercising. I've turned my pump down with temp. basals, up to two hours ahead of time, still no luck. I've started just eating one or two Nature Valley Granola Bars, in the peanut butter flavor, on the drive to the gym...without bolusing. That seems to keep me pretty well for my sessions at the gym. I still drop, like crazy, but it's not 911-worthy.

The other day I went to the gym, had only one granola bar, ended up at 37mg/dL after only 20 minutes on a bike... now I started at 113, which is lower than I'd like to start exercising at, but it was better than nothing.

Because of this new phenomena I'm having, my doctor said she'd do whatever she could do get me on a CGMS. We immediately contacted Medtronic to inquire about the Paradigm system. They gathered my insurance info and three days later (okay 5 days because of the weekend), they called and said I was approved. They went over the payment schedule (since my stupid insurance changed last year and they cap DME at $2500 per year...eek!), and today I emailed all the forms back with Troy's (he's the primary insurance holder) and my signatures. The insurance person at Medtronic emailed me back saying that he just needed the script back from my doctor. Unfortunately that news was emailed to me after 5 this evening, so I emailed my doctor to ask if she'd faxed it back to them. I'm waiting to hear, but she's usually not in the office on Thursdays, so we'll see if I get a response before Friday...

So, a new pump to learn... and a CGMS to learn... I'm really hoping that I'm not stupid! :D

Six Words ... Meme

2008-03-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

I was tagged by Overcompliance. Six Word Memoir Rules:

Write your own 6 word memoir.
Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you'd like.
Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere.
Tag 5 more blogs with links.
And don't forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

Loves Music. Hates snow. Lotsa kids.

So that's me in six words! I'm tagging Tiffany, Colleen, Kit, Tani, and Ros.

Angie! I gave you the wrong blog addy!

2008-03-21T18:07:00.000-07:00

Hi Angie, if you're reading this you found me! I gave you the wrong blog addy though... the one you'll want to see is this one. :)

The rest of you readers out there...just ignore this post! Or don't, be nosy, like I'm sure that you are. :D Angie is my personal trainer. I met with her today to go over my fitness goals and new food plan/exercise plan. She wants to see my food journals. Now you nosy people are satisfied, you found out about Angie... life a little better now?!

I'm just getting over being sick. I hate being sick. God forgive me if I'm ever sick like I have been again... I just know that someone in my house will die if I do! :D Probably not Troy...probably one of the kids. Or maybe the cat. Stupid cat is in heat while I'm sick. See cat. See cat splattered on my wall from clawing my foot one too many times...

I'm just kidding. Or am I????

I need to live where it's sunny

2008-03-10T13:05:00.000-07:00

I can't stand living in Seattle anymore. I hate it here. I really have had this pounded into me the last few days. Today it's overcast and rainy. Yesterday started that way but got nice and sunny. The two days before were nice and sunny. Those two days I was really happy, ready to get up and out of the house. Yesterday, it started crappy, so I felt crappy all day. Today is a repeat of yesterday, feelings-wise. I hate the weather here. I don't know how people stand it. It sucks! Never, ever move to Seattle if you grew up in California. It'll mess with your mind, I swear.

It's been 7 weeks since I had my last Starbucks. I'm proud of myself over it. I felt myself slip a little today when Troy got a mocha for himself. I really craved one just then. I drank water instead of going out and getting myself one. Yay me! He has the points to get one, I don't, unless I don't want to eat food for lunch. I'm not stupid, I want lunch! :D

I stole Tani!

2008-02-22T08:25:00.000-08:00

So I decided that since the kids have this week off of school (weird mid-winter break), I went and stole Tani away from the house and we road tripped it (Greyhound, leave the driving to them!) down to Portland, OR, yesterday. It was a great ride down, and getting around on Portland's transit system is really easy.

Today we're going to Oregon's biggest mall, Lloyd's Center Mall. It's supposed to be huge and have a ton of stores for anyone's tastes. I'm sure we'll have fun spending all of Troy's hard-earned money! :P We had Olive Garden for dinner last night...can you say, "Not on WW program!"?!? Oy, it was difficult to figure out what to eat, but I had a lot of the salad and mostly protein for dinner. The "Mixed Grill" they call it. It was skewers of steak and chicken. Half of the plate was steamed veggies. Yum! I ate half of the meat, none of the potatoes, a lot of the veggies too. I was stuffed!

A surprising coincidence, Tani's BFF is here in Portland this week, visiting her grandma. We're going to meet them at the mall today. It's just so funny. Tani didn't know we were coming here, and I had no idea that her BFF was here... It should be fun seeing how Ash acts when we're not around her "normal" life. :) I thought I'd take the girls to a movie too, so we'll see what her grandma says. It'll take us about 30 mins. to get to the mall from our hotel, the public transit here is great!

Tomorrow we're going to the Portland Diabetes Expo. Troy and I went to it last year and got a ton of freebie pens and a couple of pedometers. I'm hoping that Tani will grab a bunch of freebies for me too. :D

A milestone reached

2008-02-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

My son, my first-born baby, turned 18 today. I'm so proud of the man he's become. He's really pulled himself together in the last year, and he seems to be happy. He's got a nice girlfriend, he's in college (getting credit for high school and college through Running Start), he's got his head on straight.

Happy Birthday, Chris. I'm sad that you're 18 already. I miss cuddling you in my arms. Give your mom a hug occasionally, okay? <3

Another poor little girl

2008-02-12T18:51:00.000-08:00

Now it's PJ's turn. She's got a fever, though not as high as Shay's was. She's also got aching ears. I'm sure I'll be taking her in to see her doctor tomorrow. I'm sure she'll be put on amoxicillin too. Poor thing is just miserable. :(

Troy and I have been trying to make her as comfortable as possible, but it seems she's fine for awhile and then gets upset when she remembers that her ears hurt. As long as a TV show is on that she likes, she's fine. She especially hates the early morning, she came into our room just bawling this morning. She quickly went back to sleep after snuggling in with me, but she didn't sleep too well. She napped a little on my lap this afternoon, didn't like it when I moved her, so I made sure to cuddle with her when I got back from the bathroom. :)

I'm hoping that after a day of abx she'll be fine. I'm going to try and get her an early appointment, after my physical therapy appointment preferably, since I already had to reschedule that appointment.

I can't wait for summer to begin! All this sickness in my house is really getting me angry.

My poor little girl, continued

2008-02-07T21:05:00.000-08:00

Shayna's appointment was at 2:40 today. She saw a nurse practitioner instead of her doctor because the office was completely overwhelmed with kids.

After giving the history of her illness, I told the nurse that I was quite sure it was an ear infection, but it couldn't be a big one since she wasn't really playing with her ears, nor were they red. Boy was I wrong! The verdict, a double ear infection...and not just a mild, run-of-the-mill infection, no. This one is oozing fluid and very angry red in both ears. My poor baby. No wonder her temps never stayed down.

So, she's on twice a day amoxicillin for the next 10 days. I feel awful. :(

The nurse told me not to feel guilty. At least I wasn't her, she said. Once, her 15 year-old had double pneumonia for two weeks before she figured out that it wasn't just her daughter complaining about her asthma meds not working. I guess letting an ear infection go for a few days is okay... I did tell her that I really don't like giving antibiotics for ear infections since most of them go away on their own. She told me that the reason Shayna's fever hasn't gotten any better is probably because the infection is so bad. I asked if I let it go so long that her hearing could be compromised and she said no, that's a relief!

As for school, Shayna will be out tomorrow too. That's a total of 6 days out sick. Shayna's teacher sent her homework packets home with Kaycee today, so I'll get Shayna to do them over the weekend. She's been itching for something to do, so hopefully that will make her happy. (The kid loves homework, what can I say?)

As for everyone else in the family, we're all good. I still have a bit of sinus congestion from my bout of the cold and PJ is sniffling a little too. Hopefully this is the end of the rounds, yes I said *rounds* of illnesses that keep going around our little family.

My poor little girl

2008-02-06T22:59:00.000-08:00

My little Shayna is sick. She stayed home from school on Friday because of a severe cold. Her teacher told her to tell me (on Thursday) that she should probably stay home because of all the sneezing. I kept her home and she seemed fine. She played all weekend, I just kept dosing her with children's Robitussin for the awful coughing and runny nose she had. When Monday morning came, she really wasn't looking any better, so I kept her home again. That day she stayed on the couch all day and didn't really have an appetite. I figured she'd be fine the next day.

Boy was I wrong. I was awaken by Kaycee looking for the thermometer. Kaycee came back in and told me that Shayna's temp was 106 degrees. I quickly wake out of my twilight sleep and freak out. A few minutes later Troy checked her temp again and it was 103.9. Not 106 but almost 104. Not too much to worry about, but I knew that a fever meant she'd have to stay home.

I called in to the attendance office at her school and asked the attendance secretary to call me back. When we were in the Federal Way school district, if your child was out of school three or more days you had to take them to the doctor for a note. Apparently the attendance secretary wasn't up on the rules for the Kent district, so she said she thought it was five days. She and I worked it out that I wouldn't need to take Shayna to the doctor's unless she was going to be out another two days. She told me to keep Shayna home on Wednesday too, since the policy is that the child must be fever free for 24 hours before returning to school.

Today Shayna seemed fine all day. She got up and drew a little bit, she watched TV, ate a smidgen of food, and tried to force herself to drink water. We gave her unlimited sugar-free popsicle privileges. For most of the day her fever was gone. All of a sudden, it came back with a vengeance around 4 PM. Ugh...

I've decided to go ahead and take Shayna in to her doctor tomorrow. No amount of children's Tylenol or children's Motrin is keeping her fever at bay for more than a few hours at a time. I feel so badly for her. She looks miserable. She sleeps constantly. Poor thing. I worry about dehydration in her, so I've been trying to get her to sip some water at least once every half-hour, unless she's asleep. I'm hoping that this is just an ear infection or something equally simple. Unfortunately if it is an ear infection and she keeps her high fever, they still won't let her back into school...

Ah, kids...

Can I be called an addict still?

2008-01-30T10:38:00.000-08:00

It's been 4 days since I've had a mocha frap from Starbucks. I don't really miss them. How bizarre. I never thought I'd go more than a day without a mocha. Those were my passion, I couldn't go without them. My mom would be so proud. :)

Today is report card day in the Kent School District. This means that the kids get the day off so that the teachers can work all day on report cards. I just don't get this... I mean they have online grading, so you can go in and see what grades your child is getting throughout the semester, which means that the teachers pretty well keep up with their grade books. So, why do they need a whole day to do report cards? Some things just confound me.

It's a cold day in Washington today. It's snowing in the mountains, luckily not here in the valley areas. It's still cold though. 38 degrees today. I'd really like to have central heat in my house, unfortunately almost no one has central heat, unless you put it in yourself. We've got electric baseboard heat. People think that's so great because it costs less. I find that to be untrue. Our power bills during the winter are insane. I'm sitting next to a heater right now and I'm freezing. I hate Washington. Okay, I don't hate Washington, but I do hate the weather here. I guess I'll always be a California girl. I like warm, temperate weather. Not too cold, not too hot. If I could find somewhere that was 70 degrees year round, I'd be in Heaven!

Back to my addiction... I don't know if it's from not having mochas for the last four days or now, but my blood glucose has been so even and steady it's scary! On the new "lifestyle" I'm eating fruits and veggies, some complex carbs, etc. and wow my bgs are super! I'm waking up in the 70s and usually don't waver by more than 30 points in a day. I have had a few lows...54 yesterday. Ugh. I was so tired after that. I'm still trying to learn bolusing splits with the new foods. Seems to be around 27% up front and the rest over an hour or two, depending on what it is. An hour seems to be the best. I'm going to have to basal test though, since I am dropping overnight. I just don't like staying up all night for basal testing. :) Who does, really?

I'm thinking of taking the little girls to the "Bouncy Place" today. Their school's PTA is sponsoring the get together. Only 125 kids will be let in, so we may have to get there early. We'll see. It starts at 4:30 this afternoon and goes for a bit under 2 hours. They'll have a blast... I told Kaycee I wouldn't take her if she didn't help clean the front room. Nothing's been done in there yet, so I may end up going back on what I said and taking them anyway. I guess it will depend on how I feel around that time. :)

I lead quite a boring life, don't I?

A new blog for the weight loss journey

2008-01-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

I decided that I needed a new blog to keep track of my journey to "lifetime" weight loss. Please read it if you want to know all about how good, bad, and ugly my journey has started.

Of course, I will still be writing in this blog, since I'm prone to rambling about my life and the lives of my children. You really don't need to read that in my weight loss blog. :)

Click here to see the new place!

I've decided to lose weight (or try anyway)

2008-01-22T12:39:00.000-08:00

I have started to feel better. My lungs aren't attacking me nearly as much as a month ago. My doctor took me off of Atenolol, which is a beta-blocker, because the pulmonologist looked back over my history and decided that maybe, just maybe, the Atenolol was causing my shortness of breath. So, I decided to look into it. Did you know that Atenolol has a sulfa-derivative in it? Not many people do...nor do many doctors. Oh, and Cipro, that has sulfa too. By the way, I'm allergic to sulfa drugs. How nice. So I've been slowly poisoned for a year. Neat-o. Thanks.

Now, because of my year of inactivity, I've gained weight. A lot of weight. Not that I was skinny before last year, but I've never gained this much weight in a year, unless I was pregnant! I can't do a lot of exercise yet, as my lungs are still scarred, but I can reduce my intake, that's for sure.

I joined Weight Watchers. Troy joined with me. Our weigh-in/meeting day is Sunday. We allowed ourselves to eat whatever we wanted on Sunday, but we counted everything. Monday turned into a similar thing, though we tried being as low in Points as possible. For the week I'm -16 Flex points. Hey, I got really hungry after combing out Tani's hair for 8 hours... I did do pretty well yesterday though. Troy and I went to Denny's for lunch. I had a chef's salad and a bowl of veggie beef soup. Total Points for that was 14. I ate the soup first, with a couple of saltines crumbled and mixed in. When the salad came I dug in with gusto. I normally hate salads. I have to say, this was a really good salad. I didn't eat all of it, so was able to take the rest home and have it during a "resting" break while combing out Tani.

Today has been difficult. I've so far had 7 Points worth of food. 2 Lean Pockets (3 Points each), a WW Yogurt (1 Point), and an apple (1 Point). I had Troy buy some low-fat tortillas, ham, turkey, and fat free cream cheese when he was at the store today. I also had him get some salad makings and some fruit. It's weird going from excessively processed, overly messed with foods to raw, make-your-own foods. I'm lazy, I don't want to cook. This is going to be a struggle!

By the way, Weight Watchers is in no way low-carb. I thought that they might have some skew on the whole "low-carb" fad. Nope. Which makes my life doubly hard, since I have to count *all* carbs and input them into my insulin pump. This is also not helpful because a lot of the low fat items are really carb heavy. A normal diabetic should have about half of their insulin come from basal and the other half from bolus. So far, I'm changing to 1/3 to 2/3. Which doesn't help me in losing weight well, since insulin supposedly makes you gain weight. Ugh.

Today is my birthday

2008-01-14T17:21:00.000-08:00

Isn't it funny how as you age you don't look forward to your birthday anymore? As much as I've told my kids to just forget that today is my birthday, I really would have liked at least one of them to remember that it is... The one time they listen to me. :)

My dad called me. He doesn't like people who drive and talk on their cell phones. He was driving when he called me. Silly guy...

My husband wished me a happy birthday and he got me a mocha and lunch. :D He got himself a mocha and lunch too... Good thing it's his birthday as well, otherwise I might feel cheated! Not. :D

I'm really testing to see when/if the kids remember my birthday. By the time they go to bed they had better say happy birthday to me or else they are scrubbing the toilets. :D

My brain has stagnated

2008-01-12T13:49:00.000-08:00

I used to be really smart. I used to have rather high-thinking jobs. In the last 10 years, I've not done a thing to keep up with the times. I'm a mom. I'm a stay-at-home-mom. What's worse is that I'm a stay-at-home-mom that literally stays at home. I don't go anywhere and I don't do anything. I stay. That's my life.

I've come to realize that I've really let technology pass me by. I used to be the person that everyone came to when they didn't know how to use some new program at work. I once taught an entire division (of a company I worked for) how to use PCs, since the company decided to migrate away from Macs. I knew how to use the entire MS Office suite. I knew Lotus inside and out. I kept up with stuff like that because I *had* to, or they'd find someone else to hire who knew more than me.

I guess I haven't totally let technology pass me by. I mean, I know how to use a DVR with the best of them. I know how do download mp3s and how to load them onto an mp3 player (never mind that I don't actually own an mp3 player, but my kids and my parents do). I can figure out a new cell phone within minutes of powering it on.

I once worked for IBM. This was back in the day, pre-MS Office, pre-OS/2 Warp. Heh, we were lucky if the computer we were given was actually a computer and not a terminal. Back then, when I first started there, I was unlucky and had a terminal. This wasn't so bad because for two weeks before actually starting work there, they put me in a class to learn Script. I learned two other programs while I was in that class, but Script is the one I used most. Script was what we used to type up simple letters and documents. Think of it as HTML for the MS-DOS generation. Scary! No, not really. It was just a ton of tags to put in front of your words. Make sure you close out the tags and your document will look fine. Like I said, it was HTML...sort of. It didn't have commands that didn't make sense.

My point is, I knew Script. It was coding for secretaries. Years later I moved beyond being *just* a secretary. I kept up with the times. MS Word made my life much easier. Give me a GUI over anything else, thanks.

When I left the workforce, I was working for Visa. I was in the international fraud department. I helped track perpetrators of fraud. I also helped everyone in the department with their computer issues, because I knew how to fix them, and I did it quickly and efficiently.

Then I became a stay-at-home-mom. I used to keep current with the new releases of MS Office, only because my husband's company used to buy the Developer's Suite from Microsoft, and he got one of the licenses. I used to get all the new MS stuff. The last MS Office I had was 2003. It's just too expensive to buy anymore.

All of this stagnation became quite obvious when I was trying to "freshen up" my blog by changing its template. I wanted to find something that someone else had done, tweak a few things, and have a nice, new, pretty page. This did not work out so well. What the heck is CSS? Who decided that HTML wasn't enough? Why would someone make it so that I cannot resize the column widths by making the header have part of the columns start in the header? Who decided to make my life difficult?

I'm sitting here, pondering going to the community college to learn all this *new* stuff. I know, CSS has been around awhile...but I didn't pay attention. I'm thinking that I'm about 10 years behind everyone because I've been at home. I haven't been a tax-paying member of society for that long (in case you're worried, I don't pay taxes but my husband sure does!) I'm almost afraid to admit that I have become exactly like my parents, calling on my husband to figure things out for me because I just don't get it anymore.

Do I really need all this stress over a blog?

...and the results are in

2008-01-01T16:07:00.000-08:00

So back at the beginning of December, I posted about the consequences of taking a D break, saying that I was going to ask my doctor to order an A1c. I did just that...asked. Then, I put it off...for quite awhile. Instead of just fasting that night and going in the next morning, no I decided to wait a little bit. See if I could fake my A1c into a good number. Note to self: this concept does not work. Well, it may work a bit, but I don't think the A1c test at my doctor's office weighs the previous 12 weeks differently than anyone else's A1c test.

So I finally bit the bullet and fasted (I actually had to get my lipid panel done as well, since you may be scratching your head as to why I needed to fast for an A1c), and went in last Friday for the blood draw. She emailed me my results today.

6.3! How did I manage that? No, I'm not in the 5s, but I'll take low 6s to be sure. Honestly I was expecting near 8 or 9 with as many highs as I've been having. And come on, I mean this was after our Christmas feast...just 3 days after.

My meter had no where near that average. I think it's time to get a new meter. Or maybe my doctor needs to get a new A1c machine... Until then, I'll work a little harder at testing and matching my boluses.

2008 begins

2008-01-01T00:47:00.000-08:00

So it's 12:43 AM, January 1, 2008. I missed the time changing from 2007 to 2008. I was in the shower. It's cold here and I needed to warm up.

Sad. Really sad.

No party, no champagne. I live such a boring life. A couple of my kids are spending the night at a friend's house...they came over to wish us a happy new year. I was in the shower. They didn't say it to me. I'm glad. They would have walked in on a horrible sight... Probably would have ruined their whole year! :D

Happy New Year!

2007 ends

2007-12-31T11:03:00.000-08:00

It's been an interesting year. The kids all went to public school in September. We moved everyone from the room they were in to a different room in the house. Chris started his senior year and enrolled in college. Troy's company told us they wanted us to move to NH, then they told us that they may be closing the NH office. Except for a couple of colds, PJ has been extremely healthy. Kaycee became an allergy sufferer. Tani started a new high school. Shayna entered kindergarten. We looked at possibly selling our house and moving closer to family. We decided against it because of the repairs needed.

It's been a busy year. I'm obviously not listing everything...I'm not the "long, dragging on, Christmas letter" type. I'll just say, "It's been interesting!"

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!

A worthy cause...?

2007-12-19T21:15:00.001-08:00

So I have a friend who has been going through breast cancer treatment. She is one of the strongest people I know, puts up with more shit than a lot of people, and still has a stellar attitude. E, you rock! :-D Anyhow, I get this email from her on one of my lists:

"So, I will admit that I didn't feel much like taking part in Breast Cancer Awareness Month last October. I did notice that this year was more heavily marketed. I saw vacuum cleaners in pink.. paper towels... cereal.. It was the plethora of pink boxes in aisle nine of the grocery store that made my daughter look at me and ask if I was going to die or what my odds were.

When I first heard of the "Think before you pink" movement, I shrugged it off as a bunch of crab-asses who want to poo-poo a worthy cause. I have taken sometime think about it and I am afraid that Breast Cancer Barbie pushed me over the edge. I realize that it is now December but perhaps you can keep this in mind next year as you make your shopping selection. If you really want to help in breast cancer research and awareness, write a tax deductable check next year.

Mattell's Breast Cancer Barbie is over the top. Susan G Komen's foundation must have completely been off their rocker to partner up with them. I am lucky. I get to keep my breast. Many women do not have that choice and to have perfect body Barbie sold at a premium (This Breast Cancer Barbie is a premium 25 dollar Barbie.. not one of the 15 dollar Barbies...) They are donating a whopping 2.50 for each Breast Cancer Barbie sold. Yep. This means that they get a nice profit for "supporting Breast Cancer Research". They are guaranteeing 25000. A whole 25K which is tax deductable from Mattel. If they wanted to support a worthy cause, then why not just write a check? Why buy a big titted perfect body doll? The only thing she has in common with women with mastectomies is that they both don't have nipples. See here for how some view Breast Cancer Barbie:
http://www.feministpeacenetwork.org/2007/10/04/breast-cancer-barbie-benign-girl-and-prostate-cancer-ken/

To show how silly this is... they want to know why Prostrate Ken isn't out?

For more on why you should think before you pink:
http://www.assertivepatient.com/2006/10/gag_me_with_a_p.html

:-)

I am not crabby.. really... but these companies are trying to increase
profits before they are really trying to raise money. Think on it for next October. :-)"

I have thought about this...so much so that I wrote back a response to the list. Here it is:

"I already don't buy anything when it is sold as "part of our profits go to so-and-so". Why should a huge company get a huge tax deduction off of my already-been-taxed money?

I hate it when companies do that... This morning I was yelling at the local news channel (Q13/FOX) because of their annual Children's Holiday Campaign. I'm for most things "children" related, but why should I donate money that they'll match up to 50% when they'll then turn around and get the entire 150% written off? That's not fair. Can we say easy way to make money off of other people's kindness?

I realize how cynical I've gotten. I don't buy Girl Scout Cookies because the troop gets all of 40 cents from the $4 box. In fact, we've completely dropped Girl Scouts in this household, even though I'm a lifetime member. I'd rather write a check to my local troop and not get a tax break from it than to make the girls stand outside in an electrical storm again, or the snowstorms either (much less freeze my considerable ass off because I'm the only parent who will supervise the girls).

I noticed the other day that a car dealer here is advertising that if you buy a new car from them they'll take your $3000 rebate and donate it to the local food bank. No thanks, I'd rather have my rebate...! Not that I begrudge the people who need the food, but seriously I'd rather take my $3000 and donate it myself, to my favorite charity...does Starbucks count?

I guess not. :("

36 hours of hell

2007-12-19T10:43:00.000-08:00

Normally I've got a stomach that can handle any amount of bodily fluid that comes out of my kids. I guess I should warn you that this is a post that may be a touch of TMI...

So first goes PJ. She scared herself. It was sad but funny at the same time. It's around 9pm and she doesn't look well. She didn't make it to the potty, poor thing. Troy gets her cleaned up and she lies down in bed with me. We get her a bowl, in case she can't make it to the bathroom again. Unfortunately, the bowl was on the floor and she was on the bed...the freshly laundered sheets got to be freshly laundered again. PJ doesn't like puking. I agree with her, I don't like it either.

Two hours later, Kaycee shows up in our room. She puked on the ladder to her bunkbed. Whoops. Troy gets up to help her, I go in to clean up the puke...apparently my stomach can't handle the smell of puke anymore. I had to leave and make Troy clean it up. Poor guy. What I didn't know at that time was that Troy was about to spew too...

Bed's stripped down, Kaycee and PJ are now lying in my bed. Troy's been relegated to the couch, since PJ's earlier bowl miss was on his side... I'm tossing and turning because every little move the girls make I think it's them getting ready to puke again. At some point overnight, Chris wakes up and is sick as well.

The theory was that PJ, Troy and I had Taco Bell for lunch. Until Chris got sick, we figured it was something in PJ's burrito since Kaycee and Shayna had bites of it after school. I wasn't sick though and Troy was doing a good job of holding it off... When Chris got it, we were worried that something in our house was bad, maybe the milk or butter or something...we didn't know.

I then realized that I was the only one that got a flu shot this year. Tani had the FluMist stuff at school...Chris decided against it. Shayna didn't get a flu shot but she's got a pretty strong immune system. During this 36 hours of hell, Tani, Shayna and I were the only ones not puking. I did get a touch of it, but I never puked. I was just extremely cold and tired, as I did sleep almost all day yesterday and slept well last night.

We seem to be all over it now. Kaycee and Chris stayed home from school since mom always said to keep the kids home a day longer because they tend to get reinfected going out too quickly. Tomorrow starts their 2 week Christmas break. I guess they get to party early. :)

I'm now almost two days behind on my "get the house ready for visitors" task list. I don't know if I'll be able to make up the time.

There's something seriously wrong here

2007-12-10T21:50:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I just noticed something. Take a look at my weatherunderground sticker on the side over there...

Notice when the sun rises. Notice when the moon rises. Now, notice when the sun sets...and when the moon sets.

There's something seriously wrong with this picture. Just in case you're reading this sometime other than today, I'm going to put it in this blog entry...

Do you see what I mean? The moon is rising 2 hours after the sun... and the moon sets all of ~30 minutes after the sun. Um, what?!?

Isn't the moon supposed to come out after the sun has set? Is the world flat? What in the heck happened here?

I'm too tired to figure it out now. Suffice it to say that something is just not right here... What's up with that?

I want to decorate for Christmas

2007-12-10T11:55:00.000-08:00

I want to decorate for Christmas. My house is a disaster area, but getting better. I can't decorate until the house is clean.

We finally got Tania moved up to her new room this weekend. I'm still doing laundry, since all last week I took a break and didn't do any (since I'd already done close to 30 loads the previous week, I figured everyone had enough clothing to last them a week), now I've got all I had to do plus another week's worth. Oh why did I think that was a good idea?!?

Troy's got computers coming out of every corner of the house. This is not a complaint (because he reads this, I don't want him to think I'm complaining!) Actually I find it quite funny. I mean some people collect dolls, some collect trading cards, some collect miniatures, etc. He collects computers, and their parts. He doesn't mean to, and it's really okay. You know how you upgrade something in your computer? What do you do with the parts that you have upgraded? Do you hold onto them? Do you throw them away? Do you try and sell them on craigslist? Nobody really wants your old computer parts, and in our town you're not allowed to throw them away... So, he collects them. A kid needs a computer, I'll betcha that he could throw one (or ten) together with the old parts he has laying around.

I'm not one to talk. I collect stuff too. I collect crap that's useless to the normal population. I mean, how many glucometers does one person need? You want any given model from the last 5 years and I've probably got one. Don't need any of those? Well, I collect mail. Apparently I have a real problem with throwing out all those stupid ads that come in the mail. I let it pile up wherever I read it. I've got piles of paper in places no one needs to have paper in. I'm working on that one. So far, it's not working too well. I think I either need to read the mail right when it comes in the door and toss everything into the recycle bin, or I just need recycle bins in every room of the house. I'm leaning towards the latter, since I'm lazy and don't want to go downstairs when Kaycee brings me the mail and I happen to be upstairs. Since I've been using my laptop, I don't really use my desk anymore. My desk is nice and clean since I'm not at it anymore... Heh.

Can we now talk about kitchen appliances? I collect those too. Why? I have no idea. I don't use half of the ones that I have. It's ridiculous. I just bought a counter-top microwave. Our "above the range" one just blew. We tried living two weeks without it. That was painful. Gourmets we are not. The new microwave came with a free toaster. Cool, eh? Except that I already have a toaster. Well, technically I don't. I have a toaster oven. Now I have a toaster oven and a counter-top toaster. The toaster oven is mounted under a cabinet. The toaster is under the toaster oven. Strange. I know. I can't help it.

Today I will be cleaning out the garden window in the kitchen. I hate that window. It's above the sink. Since people don't know how to keep water and various foods/liquids from splashing out of the sink when depositing the dirty dishes into said sink, the garden window gets sloppy with crumbs, said food/liquid items. It's really disgusting. I want to clean it so that I can dress it for Christmas. I need to contort myself around the sink to actually clean that window...it usually involves almost doing the splits over the sink so that my knees lie on either side of the sink, on the counter. Actually if you put a Twister mat under me while I'm cleaning the sink and wrap it around to the ceiling, well you get the idea of how much of a contortionist one has to be to clean that window.

Troy says that his job for after work today is going to be moving the living room into the front room so that he can then set up the living room as his office. I wouldn't blame him if it doesn't get done though, since I've already made a mess in the living room with all the mail I've been reading. I could be nice and pick it up, since it is my mess. :)

Once the living room and office have been done, then it's on to moving our bedroom downstairs. That's a scary thought. I haven't thought about how much crap there is in my room. I think that Tani's window overlooks the garbage can. I think I'll work with that window open. :) First though, I think I'm going to steam clean the carpet that's in the room we're moving to. Our little dog seems to think that's the perfect place to leave us presents. Damn dog! Hope I can get that smell out...

If all goes according to plan, I should be able to decorate before my mom gets here, after Christmas...

The consequences of taking a D break

2007-12-02T11:45:00.000-08:00

I've been bad. I haven't been testing my bgs lately like I'm supposed to. I've been lucky to test my morning number and maybe one pre-meal bg. Bad, bad, bad me.

Around this time of year, pretty much every year, I get into all of the fun and delicious treats that the season brings forth... Lots of hot cocoa, cookies, brownies, warm toast and jelly.

Because I have an insulin pump, I should be testing more often than someone on MDI (multiple daily injections). Normally I test up to 15 times a day. More likely it's just around 10 times a day. This keeps my A1c in a good range (they say below 7% is good, I say between 5% and 6% is best for me), and it keeps me from feeling like I'm suffering from narcolepsy.

That narcoleptic feeling has started to creep in. Maybe it's just the season (rainy and overcast daily), maybe it's that my house is a mess and the thought of cleaning overwhelms me... more likely it's that my bgs are high and I haven't been good about keeping after myself. I'm the hypo queen. I go low looking at something with no carbs in it. I haven't had a hypo since the day I had my cath done. I have realized that it's because of that cath that I haven't been good keeping at my numbers.

This doesn't mean I haven't been bolusing for my foods. It just means I haven't been checking. I haven't done any corrections, I haven't matched my insulin completely to my foods, I'm sure. I am so totally screwed when I go in to see my doc this Thursday and ask for an A1c. It'll smack me back into reality, I'm sure...

And once again, I will get better with my checking. I will tell myself I'll never again falter during the holiday season.

Yeah, right.

Old body, bad posture

2007-11-29T10:05:00.000-08:00

My mother was right. If you don't sit up straight, stand straight and tall, you'll be hunched over and have back problems for the rest of your life.

Doing all the laundry over the past few days, I've learned that she was extremely brilliant. I have never stood straight, never sat any way but slouched, and oy! I'm paying for it now... After not having done housework in nearly a year, the laundry I'm doing has amounted to not only a mountain to traverse, but back problems so painful that I feel the only way I'll get any relief is to put myself into some sort of traction! I'm talking the old, torturous kind of traction. The kind where you lie down and have your wrists and ankles bound and the table slowly pulls you apart. I don't know why, but that sort of traction has a certain appeal right now. I must be sick in the head!

I think I've knocked half of my tailbone out of whack. I know that my upper back is permanently out of alignment...my mid-back (opposite the side of the tailbone misplacement) feels like someone is stabbing me with a hot poker. I'm a mess.

I know that our insurance covers chiropractic. I wonder if they cover massage therapy... I could really use a hot tub right about now.

If you've not learned anything from this post, remember that your mother knows everything and she's always right!

Traversing a mountain...

2007-11-26T11:42:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not really... It's the laundry mountain.

I used to love doing laundry. It is the most relaxing chore in the world. At one time if I were given a choice of cleaning the kitchen or doing the laundry, I'd choose laundry. Yes, laundry takes hours to get done, but you have lots of break time in between each load. There's a break between setting the clothes in the washer, putting them in the dryer and starting a new load in the wash, pulling out the clothes from the dryer and folding them, switching the wash to the dryer, etc., ad nauseam. There's something special about that routine that I used to love.

My love affair has officially ended.

I would much rather be cleaning a kitchen where I get to see the results of my labor rather instantly. Give me an hour in the kitchen and it looks as good as new! Unfortunately, in a family of seven, the laundry never ends. God help you if you skip a day of your laundry routine. Suddenly you've no longer got a manageable few loads of laundry, no... You end up with not only the few loads you should have done yesterday, but you've got the few loads for today, along with their children. Where do these children come from? Seriously, instead of the maybe six loads you'd assume you'd have....a few plus a few equals six, right? I was always told a few equaled three. Three plus three is six, right? Apparently not. In the world of laundry three plus three equals ten to fifteen!

Granted, I've been sick. I have been expressly told by my doctors, "No housework." So the procreating laundry demons have been running amok in my house. I don't have a specific "laundry room" in my house. Most houses in Washington seem to have those. I seriously think the architect of this house was unmarried or somehow disenchanted with his wife. He made the main bathroom of my house the "laundry room". Imagine if you will: a 7' by 9' room, a small vanity, a normal commode, a shower/bath combo... add in a 70 gallon water heater and a full-sized, front-loading washer/dryer set. What psycho thought this was a good setup for a laundry room? In a five-bedroom, two-story house no less? Me thinks the architect was on drugs or something!

Of course there is no central laundry sorting area, since this room is also a bathroom. There's also no place to fold and pile the clothes when they're done. The job of clothing pile-upon is the dining room table's. He's not too happy with me right now. He knows that he's better than a place to dump clothes on. He's looking very angry at me right now...I think he knows that secretly I do want to put out nice spread of the china, scrumptious food, and tantalizing desserts, but he's still not happy that he's relegated to "laundry workhorse" today. Poor table. I'll have to treat him to a rub down with Murphy's Oil or something.

Do you think that anyone would notice if I stuffed our vehicle full of clothing and took it to the Goodwill? I think Tani would notice her clothing missing, but I think I could fool the rest of them. Unfortunately I'm also one of those people who likes to wash the clothes before I send them to charity...so it means I still have to do all this laundry.

Wish me luck with traversing this mountain. It's a big one!

Hoiday breaks

2007-11-25T12:14:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not talking how holidays break... I'm talking about holiday breaks, the kind that you get when you're in school. The kind that you sometimes get when you work (if your company is nice enough to be closed on holidays and not open the next day), where you get a nice, long weekend.

We had plans for this weekend. We had planned to move rooms around in the house. No, we weren't going to demolish walls and build new ones. We were going to move people into different rooms. If you know me well, you know that I don't like things to stay the same too long. In the seven years we've owned our house, we've probably moved things around twenty times. When I say "we", I really mean "Troy and the kids"... I supervise. It's a perk. I'm the Mom.

Because I've been sick for the last eleven months, I haven't felt the need to move things around. However, this weekend I found out that my parents are coming up for Christmas. To me, this means I need to have a spotless house. I haven't cleaned in eleven months. I have children who haven't cleaned in that amount of time either...well, they probably have, in fact I know they have, but you couldn't tell by looking right now. One thing about moving things around in the house is that it's an easy way to purge all the crap that's collected in the time since thing were moved last.

I let everyone know on Friday that this was the plan for the holiday break. Meaning we had three days to get what I wanted done, done.

Here I sit. It's Sunday. No one has done a thing. Not true, Troy got rid of some of the trash in his office. The kids, nothing.

I. hate. holiday. breaks.

Heart caths are painful

2007-11-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

So last Friday I had my appointment for the right heart catheterization procedure. It was quite an eventful day. The day before I had called the nurse to make sure of my appointment time, go over my medications, and we talked about when I needed to stop eating. I asked about setting my basal to a reduced amount because of having to fast (this ended up being a teaching lesson for the nurse, since she had no idea of what an insulin pump was). Lastly, I asked her about my ability to ride public transit after the procedure. I wanted to make sure that it would be okay, as I have a huge aversion to driving in Seattle. She assured me that it would be no problem at all.

I get up early and rush to the bus stop. Because Troy had to get the girls ready for school, I decided to forgo his offer to drive me to Kent Station, and I just walked to the bus stop close to our house. I learned that it takes me longer than 10 minutes to walk to that stop, which is all of four blocks away. The reason I learned this is that I missed the bus that I wanted to take. I had to wait at the stop for the next one. Luckily, this particular stop is serviced by two bus routes, running about 15 minutes apart. This was good because that meant that I didn't miss the express bus up to Bellevue. If I had, I would have been an entire hour late for my appointment!

It turns out that I could have missed the next four buses to Bellevue... When I got to the medical center I had to register, go get lab work done, then go down a floor and find the cath lab. This room is mysteriously hidden. It looks nothing like the rest of the offices on level 2. I walked past it about four times before a hospital volunteer helped me find it. Even with my excruciatingly long walk around level 2, I was still on time. I get settled in to the waiting room, waiting to be called. The tech at the front desk asked me if I had someone there to drive me home. I stated that I didn't, as the nurse said it would be perfectly fine for me to take the bus home. This caused some controversy... you see, apparently you can have a heart cath done with sedation. I wanted the sedation if I could have it. They won't give it if you don't have a ride home. Apparently they don't trust that you'll tell the bus driver where you need to get off the bus, and you'll end up in Siberia or somewhere...now, I don't know of any buses that run from Seattle to Siberia, but hey, there's always a first! At worst, I'd probably end up circling between Seattle and Bellevue or something. So after the disappointing news that I'd not be allowed sedation, I sat down and started a Sudoku puzzle.

Then I waited. And waited. And waited.

People were streaming in and out of the office. Patients who got there much later than I were going ahead of me. I was getting frustrated about it. After about 2 hours, I finally asked the tech at the desk what was going on. (Mind you, the entire two hours I was stewing and panicking about not being able to have sedation.) As the tech came back out, a nurse came out to talk with the family who was waiting for a patient. This nurse tells the family that the procedure is taking longer than anticipated because of some really "miserable" blockages. She muttered something about her being lucky to have come in that day...nice. Great bedside manners these people have, yeah?

So the tech tells me that there were some complications with the patient who was ahead of me, but it should only be a little longer of a wait for me. Gee, I wonder what patient was ahead of me that had complications?!? I sat back down. It wasn't a big deal waiting, and please, fix someone if you have the means and they want the fix! But you know, I have needs too... Remember, I haven't eaten now in more than 14 hours. Haven't had a thing to drink in more than 10. I check my blood sugar...94. Yay, at least lowering my basal was a good thing. I'm stable, not super hungry, I'm good. As an aside here, a lady in the waiting room sees me checking my sugar. She voices that she has to do that to her cat. Here I am thinking that I'm going to get an earful about how cat diabetics are just like human diabetics...it's going to be one of *those* conversations. She then surprises me by actually being knowledgeable, somewhat, about diabetes. We talked about treatment methods, and though for cats it's pretty straight-forward, in humans it's not so much. She actually wanted to know the differences in treatments and such. She was quite a pleasant woman.

Finally they call me back to get me ready. It is now close to four hours since my appointment time. I'm tired, cranky, and hungry. Seriously hungry. I was feeling quite fine, but I knew that I would need to eat rather soon. They get me ready, explain the procedure, apologize for not letting me know that I couldn't get sedation, and stabbed me in the neck to fill me up with lidocaine.

The most painful part of the entire procedure was the pressure they kept putting on my neck. They bore into your jugular vein to get to your heart. It's called boring in, but really it's just like getting an IV line put in. The needle is a little bigger, maybe 12 or 14 gauge, instead of 18. As they put the guide wire in, the sound is much like that of a pipe cleaner wire going in and out of a small pipe, or that of a piece of metal being raked against a metal sander. It's that quick ratcheting type of sound. Right next to your ear. I've never been one who had a problem with nails on a chalkboard or similarly annoying sounds, but the sound of that wire going in was just excruciating! Also, the pressure in my neck was really painful. Though I was anesthetized for the initial stick of the large guide wire, it still hurt a bit. I'm sure that it would have been much worse without the lidocaine.

At first, the surgeons weren't sure that they were getting accurate readings from the catheter. I heard a few comments about low pressure readings and weird RV traces. They ended up drawing blood for labs, directly from my heart. Then they repeated the pressure and RV readings and they came back normal. Remember, they were looking for pulmonary hypertension, and with that it's expected that you'll have high pressures in the pulmonary artery. They were originally getting low pressures...which would mean I'm even more bizarre than most people think! But alas, the pressures turned out to be just fine. They had the cath too far out from actually blocking the artery, so the pressure was falsely low. After the lab draw, they were able to get the cath into the correct position.

The one thing that bugged me was the part where they were advancing the cath in and out of my heart. They told me to expect my heart to flutter. I could have used the sedation at this point. Seriously. That fluttering was bad. It made me start sweating, my heart felt like it was going to jump out of my chest. It was awful. If I ever have to do this procedure again, I will have a ride home...trust me on this!

When the surgeons were done, they had a nurse stand by to put pressure on my neck, so as to close the wound. I think I have a permanent kink in my neck from this lady. She was nice though...she just didn't want me to bleed out on my way home. Heh. The "kinky" nurse then bandaged me with a couple folded up pieces of gauze with some tegaderm on top. Next in was the nice nurse from the land of Oz. He told me that my blood sugar reading was 42. That was from the blood in my heart. While I was lying there, I didn't really notice that I was low...just felt really hungry. He was a sweetie-pie. While I was getting back into my street clothes, he went and raided the cafeteria for me. I got a nice turkey sandwich on wheat, and apple, two orange juice boxes, Lorna Doone cookie snack pack, and four Fig Newtons. I then left.

Got out to the bus stop and my bus arrived within a couple of minutes. That was nice timing. I sat in the back of the bus and started chowing down on my food. I got off of the bus in Bellevue and as I was transferring into the express bus to Kent Station, the driver told me to stop letting doctors give me my flu shot in my neck. Funny guy. He's driven me quite a few times over the last month, so he kinda knows what's been going on. He reminds me of my grandpa. :D

Once I was home I slept. It had been a long day. It wasn't until Saturday that I realized what my pain would have been had they not given me lidocaine. Ouch, ouch, ouch! It wasn't easy to move my neck for any reason. I also was able to take the bandage off. Small little hole with a bruise on it, that quite looks like a hickey. Bad, really bad. Hehe.

My cardiologist called me yesterday. The results: no PH, and nothing else to explain the shortness of breath. He would be inclined to do a left heart cath if not for the fact that my problem came on suddenly. If it had been gradual, he says, then it might be coronary artery disease of some sort, but because of the suddenness, he really thinks this is pulmonary. He told me to call my pulmonologist back and get in for a follow-up. Ugh! He did apologize for it not being PH...he knows that it's been a long time since the start of all this. He's glad that it's not PH, but he said that a lot of his patients who have PH are not happy people, and he liked my personality and didn't want me to lose it because of a disease... that was nice, but I still want answers!

I'm trying to wrap my head around the fact that whatever my health issue is, it may take years for me to find the right doctor to figure it out. Why is there not a real life "Dr. House"?

When specialists admit "I don't know"

2007-11-15T12:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was fun. On top of having a hellish cold with a pre-bronchitis cough, I had my appointment with the cardiologists. The appointment was set for 10 AM, which wouldn't normally be so bad, but when you like taking public transit into Seattle, well you just have to get up a lot earlier in the morning than you're used to... No big deal, but was I tired!

Cue spotlight...cue robot named "fellow cardio"... his lines: ask patient a bunch of questions every other robot has asked, listen to patient's heart and lungs, the robot then declares that the best route to go would be just the right heart cath. No need for a left heart cath, since it really doesn't look like the patient has any congenital arterial diseases, as Dr. Pulmo thought might possibly be there. Fellow cardio exits.

Cue Dr. Cardio... imagine a spotlight right on him, imagine the scenery...sterile white, a lone exam table, a patient (me) sitting in a folding chair falling asleep leaning on the built-in desk in the room. Patient is tired of being patient. Patient is just tired. God-like Dr. Cardio greets patient with a warm handshake and a bit of humor in his eye...

Dr. Cardio: Please sit on the table and let me have a listen to your heart.
Patient: Okay, but I have a cold so I'm sorry if things are rattling around in there.
Dr. Cardio: That's okay, I'm only listening for one thing.
Patient: Uh, ooookaay...?
Dr. Cardio: Deep breath in, out, iiiiiiin, oooooout, iiiiiiiiin, ooooooout.
Patient: Um, sorry about that. I'm trying, really I am.
Dr. Cardio: It's okay, I heard what I needed to hear. Please sit back down in the other chair.

Fellow enters with papers in hand. Dr. Cardio starts talking about what needs to be done next. He looks at patient and monologues:

"So basically we don't think that there's anything wrong with your heart. However, the pulmonary guys don't think there's anything wrong with your lungs. Your symptoms are worrisome, especially because the onset was so sudden. We obviously know that *something* is wrong, but your symptoms and the test results don't really tell us that it's anything wrong with your left heart or your arteries. So what are we left with? Pulmonary hypertension is the first thing that comes to mind. It's a rare disease, and you're a perfect candidate for that diagnosis. Normally we like to remain uninvasive in our testing, but unfortunately for about 60% of the population we can't achieve a diagnosis without being invasive. You are one of the 60%. So, we are going to schedule you for a right heart cath. This procedure is done on an out-patient basis and it only takes a few hours. You'll get the preliminary report before you go home. We honestly think that this is the diagnosis that you'll get. However, this procedure could also tell us nothing at all. If it tells us nothing at all...well, then I DON'T KNOW. I guess we'll just hope that this is going to be your diagnosis and that we'll have it all figured out for you during the cath. If not, we'll send you back to the pulmo's because you really don't seem to have any problems with your heart as far as we're concerned."

Patient then looks at Dr. Cardio and says, "Well, at least you're not telling me it's all in my head!"

Dr. Cardio then restates that there's no way this could be in the patient's head because the studies already done reflect that there *is* something wrong. He hopes that the patient can be a little more (heh) patient while running more tests. The patient states again, "At least it's not in my head!", going on to say, "So, basically you think I have PH, you're not sure, but it's not a heart problem, unless it is PH, in which case I never need to see you again anyway, since that's treated by pulmos...?" Dr. Cardio smiles and agrees.

Patient: What happens next, if it's not PH and the test shows nothing else?
Dr. Cardio: Then I'm out of ideas.
Patient: So you're sure it's not ideal to do a left heart cath as well?
Dr. Cardio: I'm completely sure.
Patient: So essentially it's PH or nothing?
Dr. Cardio: Well, not nothing, it's something... I just don't know what else it could be.
Patient: Well, at least it's not in my head.
Dr. Cardio, fellow, and patient all laugh. Dr. Cardio gives patient a pat on the shoulder, bids patient a good day and exits, stage right, with fellow trailing.

The spotlight dwindles, the patient goes out to schedule the procedure, then goes outside and boards a bus...and falls asleep (here we zoom in on the sleeping patient and fade to dark).

I'd like to mention that because I fell asleep on the bus, I almost missed my stop at Kent Station. As I said in the opening paragraph, I was tired!

The big sneeze...

2007-11-05T15:43:00.000-08:00

Let's just get right to the point. I hate Seattle weather. I really despise it. There's no rhyme or reason to the weather here. Everyone says that it rains constantly, and while that's mostly true, it's not really that it's constant...it's more like it rains constantly for a couple of days and then it gets really sunny-but cold-for a day or two.

This pattern really messes with the natural way people are supposed to live. Some people, namely me, have this weird thing inside them that triggers a cold whenever the weather changes. I really wish that the weather would stay one way for awhile. I can handle weeks of rain, I can handle days of snow, I can really handle sunny and warm months... Why is Mother Nature playing games? What is it with this two days of rain, one day of sun and warmth, two days of fog and dreariness, one to two days of sun and cold? All this wackiness has given me the cold of the century! I feel like everything from my neck up is dead. I can't hear, my eyes hurt, my nose is running but congested at the same time, my throat is scratchy and painful... I hate being sick. :(

I must have some really crappy karma that I'm paying for...heh.

The one where the doctor has a good bedside manner...

2007-11-03T20:03:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I had my Exercise Tolerance Test along with another Pulmonary Function Test. Since I don't drive in Seattle, I took the Metro bus system...boy does that bring back memories of my teenage years!

So I get to my appointment and get settled in for a long few hours. First, the pulmo tech numbed up my wrist so that he could draw blood for an arterial blood gas test. That was the most interesting test I've gone through thus far. It was amazing to see how really forceful your arterial blood can be! He then left the room and came back when the results were back. The only thing "off" on the test was my carbon monoxide test.

They then sat me down to do the PFT. That went well, but it showed the same numbers as my test from back in April. So I still have a severely low DLCO (my lungs' ability to exchange oxygen and carbon monoxide out of the air and into my blood stream) readings, and a restrictive pattern in my lungs as well. They did a bit of a different test on this PFT. They had me panting into a tube and then stopped the tube from moving any air. This showed whether or not my lungs got tired while doing this over and over or not. It showed that they didn't, which definitively proved that I don't have Myasthenia Gravis. (Which I knew anyway because they drew blood to find out if I had the antibodies for that.)

After a quick site change for my insulin pump's infusion set, because the doctor needed to use my left arm for the blood pressure cuff, I got situated on the stationary bike for the ETT. Basically what that entailed was being hooked up to the blood pressure cuff as well as a bunch of ECG leads, while riding a stationary bike as it progressively puts out more resistance. I did pretty well on the bike...I was told that my goal was 10 to 15 minutes on the bike for enough data to be gathered. I did 13 minutes 34 seconds. I just couldn't take it anymore. I was getting dizzy from breathing so badly. While I was on the bike both the doctor and the pulmo tech were readjusting my ECG leads. Apparently they thought that from the readings they were seeing were really wacky (more on this later). Eventually they got them into the correct positions. The doctor and the pulmo tech let me go after a bit of a recovery and making sure that my arterial stick was completely healed.

On Friday I had to go back to the UWMC for my results. I saw "fellow" Dr. Pulmo this time. She's pretty nice, and rather smart. :) When she walked into the room, she immediately asked me if everything was the same, better or worse. I answered that it was a little worse and that the new shoulder pain I was having was a real bummer. It only happens when I'm really out of breath, but it's really a pain that I'd rather not have. She said that it was interesting that I'd mentioned that because it goes along with one of the two possible diagnoses that she wanted to talk with me about (she'd get to that later though). So, she talks about my labs being all negative, talked about the CO in my blood, talked about the fact that I don't have Myasthenia Gravis like they first suspected, etc. She then told me that I am no longer a pulmonology patient...! I looked at her quizzically. She went on to say that the ETT proved that I do not have a problem with my lungs. What I do have is a problem with my heart. It'd be easy for her to refer me to a cardiologist and tell them I need a right heart catheterization, but because this could also be a problem with the left heart, to ask a cardio to do a left heart cath as well would make that cardio tell her to get out of his profession. Basically meaning that she could order both, but a cardiologist is going to want to see me first before he even considers doing the left heart cath. So, ugh...I've got to wait some more before they can figure anything out. She told me that she put on the referral that my appointment was urgent and that I needed to be seen within 14 days. Hopefully they'll call me on Monday to schedule the appointment.

So what are the two diseases that I could possibly have? Well, there's the obvious Primary Pulmonary Hypertension, and then there's the other... Congenital Coronary Artery Disease. Now, because I'm under 45 and because Coronary Heart Disease doesn't happen in women under 45 without some underlying reason (which she thinks in my case is my high clotting factor and/or high platelet levels), then it's congenital...meaning I was born with a ticking time bomb. The only way to diagnose the CAD is to do a left heart cath. So that's where I'm at. After all of the tests and all of the crap I've gone through, it's down to one of two diagnoses...funny that both of them have acronyms. Troy loves acronyms. ;-D

Dr. Pulmo (the fellow) was very reassuring that I'll be all right, that she didn't want to scare me but when I practically forced her to tell me why I needed a cardiologist, she knew that I was the type who needed to know everything. I like doctors who don't pussyfoot around you. Give me the facts, give me straight answers. I hate doctors that aren't true to their patients. I like this Dr. Pulmo very much. :D

I wish that I had better news. I'm taking it kinda hard today. I was fine yesterday, after the appointment, when the bomb was dropped. In fact, as I was leaving my appointment, Erika called me. She's a friend that I met online, back when I was pregnant with Kaycee. She was pregnant with her twins at the time. She moved to Seattle a couple of years ago, and happens to work at the UW. We met outside and went to have some coffee. At least she didn't get me completely lost this time! (Last time, she had me going through a maze and I was a few minutes late to my appointment, which is funny now, but then I was completely out of breath and in some distress...) We had a good chat. I told her a funny stalker story, which I hope made her day a little brighter. :)

Now, I've been quite melancholy all day. I'm realizing that with either diagnosis, my life is going to drastically be altered. I'm not sure I'm ready for those changes. Being a Type 1 Diabetic isn't much of a change from daily life. Yes, you either give yourself shots or wear a pump and bolus for your meals...but really, it's not that difficult. As long as you keep everything consistent, for the most part, you'll be consistent with your glucose numbers. Sure I spike up sometimes, and have lows quite often, but I attribute that to my being stupid in estimating the number of carbs I'm taking in. I don't have to follow a strict "no sugars, low carbs" diet like a Type 2 does, so it's really not that different than being "normal". However, with either of the two diagnoses, I'll have to alter my lifestyle like crazy. Exercise will be different, food intake will be different, lifespan will be different, I will be different.

I'm really not in a good place right now. I know that other people are fighting much worse diseases, but honestly when it happens to you, you feel like the only person going through it as well as feeling like you've got the worst problem in the world.

Insurance fiascos...

2007-10-29T12:39:00.000-07:00

I really don't know who to blame here... Either it's my husband's company or it's the association they're affiliated with in order to get insurance at a discounted rate.

Back in June we found out that the association was changing from one insurance provider to another. Not such a big deal, but I didn't like that they were changing insurance on us again. They always seem to do that when you've got some big issue going on. For me it's been during two pregnancies and, as you all know, my breathing issues this year. Another big change that was part of this year's insurance change was that our copays, deductibles and coinsurance jumped significantly. We went from having $20 copays for office visits to $35 copays. Not too bad if you're only going in to see the doctor for ear infections or physicals once or twice a year. But if you're me, and have to be seen at least three times a month (for the breathing problem, as well as all the testing that's been going on), it can get quite expensive and prohibitive to the budget. Our deductible remained the same at $500, which was good, but our coinsurance doubled. It was $2000, now it's $4000. For those who don't know, coinsurance is the out of pocket maximum for the calendar year, not including the deductible and copays. So technically the out of pocket maximum is $4500 plus all of the $35 copays.

Here's the rub. When you switch insurance companies in the middle of a calendar year one of two things happen: 1) the old insurance company lets the new insurance company know what you met regarding the deductible and coinsurance or 2) the new insurance company can choose to not recognize the old insurance deductible and coinsurance paid. Luckily our new insurance company chose to do option 1. However, herein lies the rub... Apparently old insurance company still thinks that we're members! So, they have not been notified that we've changed insurance by the (I'm assuming) association that Troy's company is involved with. Which means that basically option number 2 is what is currently happening. Growl!

Even though I met the deductible and was $4 shy of the coinsurance max on the old insurance, new insurance thinks that I didn't meet anything, causing me to have to pay out an additional $500 for the deductible and possibly even the max of $4000 for the coinsurance. With all that's gone on since the insurance changed, I met the new deductible with my first order of insulin pump supplies under the new insurance...and I've so far met $900 of the coinsurance max with all of the tests and new doctors and whatnot. So technically I've paid out $500 more than I should have and am really only about $1100 away from the new coinsurance maximum. Even with this, I'm steaming because this will probably never get resolved! I've asked the benefits person at Troy's company what to do...he says contact the two insurance companies and have them deal with it. I did that, was sent a letter from the old company and they were supposed to send the same letter to the new company. Apparently that's never happened. Otherwise, all of that would be reflected on the new insurance statements...but it's not there. :( I think now I need to call someone at the association, especially because the old insurance company still thinks we're members...which would tend to make a person think that the association and/or the company is still paying their premiums, no?

All I know is that one of these days the new insurance company is going to say to us that since we're double covered, they're going to stop processing the claims as the primary insurer. We're technically double-covered, even though I'm being good and not using the old insurance at all! Who knows what would happen if I did and then the old insurance got its act together and retroactively canceled anything that it had paid out? Bad stuff, that's what would happen!

I know a lot of people don't even have insurance, so I'm grateful that we do. It's just that this is much more of a fiasco than I'd like to have right now...considering every time I get on the phone to straighten all of this out, I get short of breath! Who knew that talking on the phone could be so taxing!?!?

Fun day, but I'm paying for it now...

2007-10-24T20:04:00.000-07:00

As I said in my last post, I volunteered at the little kids' school today. I got up, got ready, got the kids all up (Chris and Tani slept through their alarms again...), sent Troy to get me a mocha, and left soon after he got back from Starbucks. Since I had to go to the big kids' school today as well, it was okay that I had to drive them, but I'd rather they be responsible and get themselves up and out of the house! So, after filling out the order form and handing money to Chris for his graduation cap and gown and announcements order, I headed down to the little girls' school...

My job was rather simple: fill out teacher picture cards and hand them to the teachers. Easy peasy... However I was sitting at a lunch table in an elementary school. Little people, little furniture. By the end of my shift, my rear was asleep, my legs wouldn't hold me upright, my back was on fire, and I had a mild headache. However, it was a lot of fun meeting other parent volunteers, seeing all the absolutely adorable itty-bitty kindergarteners...oh what a treat! Want to have some fun? Go to your child's elementary school and put a sixth grader next to a kindergartener...it's hysterical to see what six years will do! Even better, a second grader next to that sixth grader...look at how the teeth from the second grader will eventually fit into the head of the sixth grader.

Anyway, came back from my shift and was exhausted. Who knew that just sitting there, keeping things organized would be hard work? It was fun. :)

Of course, then I get a call from my son... apparently he couldn't figure out where he was supposed to turn in his order. In his 5th period class he finally asked where he was supposed to have turned it in. Apparently he didn't think of asking while lunch was still happening, since that would be too smart. Ugh. Children. So now I have to call up the Josten's rep and see if I can mail in the order. Yay me!

Looking around my room, I've decided that it needs to be cleaned. If I'm up to it tomorrow, that'll be my project for the day.

Can I get some sleep please...?

2007-10-23T16:47:00.000-07:00

So tomorrow I have a rather busy morning. By 9 am I will have to style the hair on two kids, get them off to school, go to the bank, go buy snacks and breakfast for myself to break the $20s from the ATM, go to the high school to fill out an order for graduation cap, gown, invitations, and announcements, go to the elementary school to put money into the kids' lunch accounts as well as to help out with Picture Day. I will work my picture day duties until 1:30 pm.

I will probably then go home and die... or rather change into my jammies and watch TV for the rest of the day. I'm doing the picture day duties because it saves me paying for one child's pictures. :) I'll also get to have lunch with my kindergartener, she'll probably be surprised and happy about that. I'm already tired and it's not even tomorrow yet!

All of this means I need to be in bed, asleep, by around 9 pm tonight. I'm *never* asleep earlier than 11 pm. This should be an adventure.

Being sick...

2007-10-22T10:48:00.000-07:00

Being sick totally and completely sucks. :(

A little background since I just started writing here... Last year, in July,Troy took me to the St. Francis ER (in Federal Way) because I was feeling like I had a kidney stone. They gave me the good pain meds, did a few scans, and told me that though I had a rather large stone in my left kidney that wasn't the pain I was feeling. They said that stone wasn't going anywhere, it was caught in a "corner" of my kidney (yes, I've been told that numerous times over the course of a few years), but that I had what looked like a large vericose vein on my left ovary and that was causing the pain. I should follow up with my OB/Gyn and they released me.

A few days later I follow up with my OB/Gyn and she thinks that I probably don't have the pain from the varicose vein but that it could be from my IUD. So, she decides that I should go through exploratory surgery and at the same time have the IUD removed, because most likely it is what's giving me the problematic pain. Surgery gets scheduled for September.

At the end of July we pack up the kids and head down to California to visit family. On the way down I was feeling kind of nauseas but didn't do too badly. After being there for a few days I finally told Troy that I really was in pain again, so he took me to the Los Gatos Community Hospital, near his parents' house. The ER doc was a jerk, listened to my story (told him about the possible kidney stone/vericose vein and that I had surgery scheduled for the vein), and told me that he didn't think anything was wrong. They gave me pain meds, sent me in for some scans, then the ER doc decided for some reason that there had to be something else wrong so he admitted me. While being admitted I saw a few other docs, lots of nurses, and lots of phlebotomists. No one could see anything wrong, so sometime in the middle of the night (no really it was more like 11 PM, I think), they called in a renal specialist. He came in and listened to my story and then asked me if the "stuck" kidney stone had ever been further evaluated. I said no, but that everyone tells me it's probably been there since I was a baby and not to worry about it. He asked me where I'd been evaluated for kidney stones before and I let him know what hospitals I'd been to here in WA. He then called up the two that I've been seen at and had my CT films emailed. He had a radiologist print them up on films and then lined them all up in the nurses station. He then traced how that stone (approximately 3.2 cm or 1.25 inches in diameter) kept bouncing around in my kidney. Yes, it was moving, just moving slowly and not ever going to come out on its own. He scheduled me for a lithotripsy the next day.

Lithotripsy is a procedure where they use ultrasonic waves, through a water bed, into your back where it breaks up the stone. The part I didn't really like about it was that he wouldn't then go in and get all the pieces, he'd leave a stent in and they'd come out over the course of a couple of days. Ouch! I'm so glad they have really nice pain meds at the hospital! I was released a couple days later and went to recuperate at my parents' house. Let me just tell you that peeing with a stent in is no fun at all! Luckily I only had it in for a few more days and then went back to the renal doc's office and he removed it. Losing that tube was the best part of the vacation, let me tell you! On to home...

Time went on and it was the day of my exploratory surgery in September. The week before I went and did all of the normal pre-op workups and one weird thing came up. I had a slow R wave progression on the ECG. Not knowing what that meant, I went home and looked it up online. It looks like it's something that happens either after you've had a heart attack, or it was bad lead placement. We went with bad lead placement... Had the surgery, everything was fine. The vein had gone back to being no problem at all and my IUD was removed. I don't remember exactly what she said but it may have imbedded a little bit in my uterus, so it was good that it was removed.

A few days post-op I starting having this horrible pain right under my lower left rib cage. I let it go for about a week and then went in to see a doctor who is in the same practice, but not the same office, as my own primary doctor. She sent me for an ultrasound and said there was probably nothing wrong.

My own doctor got the report a few days later and had me go get an MRI soon thereafter. I had an enlarged spleen and an enlarged liver, as well as a splenic infarct and splenic vein thrombosis. I had what?!?!?! She put me on Lovenox (an injectable blood thinner) as well as warfarin (rat poison, also known as Coumadin). I was then told to come in weekly for INR tests, those are to find out your clotting time while on the blood thinners. She also drew labs for all kinds of clotting disorders and diseases. All of those came back normal, so she then sent me to the UW to see a surgeon. The surgeon told me that what had happened is something very common after laparoscopic surgery and that after 6-12 months on the blood thinners it would be resolved. I would still have the pain, but after it was resolved the pain would slowly go away. So, I got to add percocet to my pill regimen.

Fast forward to January. Just after the beginning of the year I went to go down the stairs in my house and had the weirdest, all-of-a-sudden, shortness of breath. What? From going down the stairs? Bizarre. Going back up the stairs was worse. Going from the couch to the bathroom or kitchen was worse. I call my primary doctor all freaked out. She sends me for more bloodwork, but has no idea what could be wrong. All the bloodwork comes back relatively normal, but my Sed Rate and WBCs are elevated slightly. She chalks it up to infection and puts me on Cipro.

I finish the Cipro, am still having problems breathing. It's only happening while I'm walking or doing anything strenuous, and my doctor just thinks that it's the infection. She takes some more blood and refers me to a pulmonologist. The pulmonologist thinks it's adult onset asthma. She sets me up for a PFT (pulmonary function test) and gives me asthma meds. Says to come back in a month. I do the PFT and it shows some restriction, a low reserve volume, and an especially low diffusion capacity (this is what transfers the CO2 and O2 between the lungs). Dr. Pulmo decides that's really asthma and says to continue with the asthma meds. I call a week later and let her know the asthma meds aren't working. She says continue on them and come in for the normally scheduled appointment.

I go back in for the normally scheduled appointment and let her know that the asthma meds aren't helping in the least. She decides that I need to do a bunch of other tests, but our insurance changes before I can get them done. Unfortunately, she doesn't accept our new insurance nor do most specialists in WA, apparently.

I email my primary doc and let her know that I need a new referral to a new pulmonologist because of the insurance change. Her referral coordinator calls me back and says that she can't find any pulmo's who will take my insurance, so check with the insurance company and find one and they'll refer me there. I do just that, call them back, they send over the referral, the new pulmo's office needs all of my records before they'll make and appointment. UGH!

I finally get an appointment with Dr. Pulmo2 and he thinks it's one of two things...by this time it's July of this year. He thinks it's really asthma and we haven't found the right meds, or it could *maybe* be pulmonary histio, since PJ has LCHistio. He does a walk test and notes that I desaturate to the low 70s while just walking, and thinks it's a fluke. Whatever. He sends me for another PFT with a methacholine challenge. The methacholine challenge will definitively tell if I have asthma. He also sends me for another two CTs and an echocardiogram (by this time I've had one other CT, two chest x-rays, and a stress echocardiogram). The new echo doesn't tell him anything new, nor do the CTs, except they both show a small 3mm nodule in the middle right lobe. The nodule is chalked up to be scar tissue from a serious bout of pneumonia I had a few years ago.

The methacholine challenge proves that I don't have asthma. I swear, no one listens to me! I've been saying that for months! I go back in to see him, he says I need to do an exercise PFT but that he doesn't have that equipment there, I'll need to be referred to the UWMC in Seattle.

I get referred to UW Pulmonology in Seattle by my primary doc, since she's a part of their network. The people in Seattle say that they can't see me until the end of October (this was the middle of September when I called). I email my primary and let her know that I'm disappointed that no one is taking me seriously, and that an "urgent" appointment in 6 weeks is ridiculous. She concurs, and calls the Dr. Pulmo3. He can get me in the following week. Funny how Dr. Pulmo3, who didn't have anything available until the end of Oct., suddenly had availability the next week!

I hate driving in Seattle, so I decided to take the bus up there. That was fun, and I'll be doing it again when I have to go back. It was relaxing and took me straight there. :) It was also cheaper than paying for parking. I also got to meet up with my friend Erika, who works at the UW. We had lunch in the cafeteria and chatted about a lot of stuff...then she got me lost and I was nearly late for my appointment! That was okay...they made me wait for an hour anyway. Next time I go, I'm hoping to meet her for coffee or lunch again....

Anyhow, first the Fellow comes in. The Fellow is an MD who is getting extra training after their internship and residency. She quizzes me about my history, all the tests I've had done, etc. She has me do a 6 minute walk test. Then I get to see Dr. Pulmo3. He has me do a bunch of neurological tests. Turns out he was thinking myasthenia gravis. Blood came back for that test as normal... Yet another diagnosis down the drain. I was actually hoping for that because it's an easy fix...take some meds, get a few IVIg treatments. No problem! Oh well. He also schedules me for *another* echo and an exercise PFT.

I go to the echo. The point of this echo was that they were supposed to get an estimate of my pulmonary pressures. I emailed my primary doc and she says that the echo looked good, but unfortunately they didn't get a good look at my pulmonary pressures. UGH! ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!!? I email her back and ask if she can tell me what the pressures were, if in the report, and could she either rule in or out the diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension. She finally emailed me back today and told me that she can't do either with her interpretation of the report and that I should talk to Dr. Pulmo3 and see what he says. Unfortunately, Dr. Pulmo3 won't give me his email address, and the winner of the Bitch of the Year Awards is the one who answers his phones. I'd rather not talk to Ms. Bitch of the Year, thank you!

So here I am. I wait. I get to stew for nearly two weeks until I see Dr. Pulmo3 again. I have my exercise PFT on Nov. 1 and see him again on Nov. 2. I still can't breathe when walking, I'm starting to have a problem breathing when I'm lying on my back and sometimes while lying on my right side. I feel like I'm getting worse. I swear, Mystery Diagnosis better be ready for me when I do get a diagnosis. My house is a mess, the children talk back at me when I ask them to help, well one child in particular. I went in the kitchen a couple weeks ago and decided I'd be nice and clean the kitchen, it was also a test of my tolerance for activity...I barely made it through unloading the dishes from the dishwasher. I continued on. I don't think I've sweated so much in my life, ever. Breathing is a lot of work when you're having problems with doing it. I no longer take air for granted.

I'm so sick of being sick.

My introduction...

2007-10-21T11:24:00.000-07:00

So, I'm not that great at writing out blogs. I've never been one to keep a diary like most girls do. I guess I always have just hated to write. I was really bad at creative writing, mostly concentrating on math and science...no real creative writing involved there, other than the eloquence of a good proof!

I really started this because a lot of my friends write on here, so I figured I'd better start one up so that I can keep track of them. Some are on MySpace, but really, we're not teenagers anymore, right? No one ever reads anyone's blogs on MySpace anyway... According to my teenage daughter, blogs are uncool (my word, not hers) on MySpace...as are listing the jobs you've worked, the schools you've attended, and any book you've read that was actual literature and not fan-fiction.

So, to the reason for my blog title. Well, I am a Starbucks addict. Moreso a Mocha Frappuccino addict. Since you can only get the latter at the former, it makes me the former's addict, no?

A little about me... I'm a wife and mother of five. My kids range from 17 to 4. One boy, four girls. I knew that college tuition was going to be a killer, but can you imagine paying for four weddings at some point?!? Crazy. (I get sidetracked a lot...you'll notice that about me. See, I was talking about me and turned it into talking about college tuition. Back to me...) I am a stay at home mom. I am horribly head-strong...or is it just highly opinionated? I'm a Type 1 Diabetic who looks like a Type 2, or rather the stereotypical Type 2 anyway. I love reading. I'm addicted to TV. I hate house cleaning. I hate having been sick for the last ten months, but that's for another post.

Oy! I need a Mocha Frap now!