family

I’m being suppressed!

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Your average IVF cycle starts with a month of hormone suppression, typically by way of hormonal birth control. Well. Actually, it’s not quite a month, it’s more like two and a half weeks, and you only know if you’re properly suppressed after a suppression check around the two and a half week mark.

Today was my suppression check. I’ve been on oral birth control for about three weeks, maybe a little less, and it’s made me into a beast. I don’t mean that in a positive way; I mean I’ve been as volatile and sensitive as I was when I was a delicate teenager, known for days of emotional pique that left my family sighing and saying, “She’ll grow out of it.”

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(side note: Heathers is a very wonderful movie)

Which is mostly true. I’m far less volatile, by and large, than I was when I was going through puberty. Except when I’m on hormonal birth control.

Even then, I don’t quite reach the same heights I did when I was thirteen and sobbing because I don’t know why except nobody understood me except you, Michael W. Smith, and the toy horses that I couldn’t tell my boyfriend I still played with. I did at one point, when I was on clomid, the cycle before I got pregnant with Sam. Kat was visiting us from California, in preparation to move out and live with us, and on day two of clomid, I had a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde moment, in which I completely lost my fool mind sobbing because Kat and Kyle were bonding over their shared love of Pokemon, something that I do not and never will understand.

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(this is me when Pokemon is the topic of conversation)

I felt left out, and my poor, hormone-addled brain turned this mild feeling of “well, it sucks that I can’t relate to that” into a disaster. They were now best friends because Pokemon, and I was no longer a friend, and I would die miserable and alone while they played Pokemon as best friends forever. I told them to leave me behind and go get lunch while I buried myself under blankets and sobbed.

Obviously, none of my fears came true, but man, was I a wreck over them. And thankfully, Kyle and Kat are super understanding and brought me back my favorite meal from Chili’s and then we all three went on a trip to Salem for no reason other than that it was there and had neat stores.

Hormonal birth control is sort of a gentler version of that. I’ve yet to have that level of meltdown while on hormonal birth control (come close, but usually over my work in a call center because that’s just… it’s a terrible place to work, y’all. Also, if you’re the type of person to take out your frustration with a situation on a call center worker, I don’t like you), but I’ve noticed that I become more prickly and more apt to overreact to things.

In some cases, I figure it’s just that my tolerance for bullshit goes way down; and it’s already pretty low. Traffic on the Mass Pike goes from minor annoyance to, “Are you kidding me?! You’re doing 40 MPH in the passing lane, and there’s nobody in front of you and your car appears to be in good working order?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING.” Telemarketers go from “what you’re doing is probably illegal, and I’m just not going to answer the phone because I don’t recognize that number” to “I will find you where you live and personally force you to walk barefoot on wet food.” I avoid all discussion of politics and religion; if you ever find me recusing myself from such discussions, it’s less that I don’t care and more that I like you and don’t want to lose my temper either at you or where you can see.

In other cases, I overreact to perfectly reasonable situations. About a week ago, for example, Kat asked when I got home from work if we could run out to the store. This is a perfectly reasonable request, but my hors were moning, and I managed to turn it into a Thing. It was a very fraught grocery store trip, not much helped by Sam’s quintessential three-year-old behavior or the traffic I’d endured to get there; the primary good that came out of the whole thing is that I now text Kat on my way home every day to see if she needs a store run, or even for me to pick up some food for her.

My biggest fear with these hormone issues is that I’ll end up scaring or hurting Sam–not physically, but with angry words and, worse, angry tone of voice. Growing up, I always had a tremendous fear of my dad’s yelling. He didn’t yell terribly often, but when he did, we knew that shit had hit the fan, and it was not good times. I don’t want Sam to ever fear me or my voice for any reason. I want him to respect me. I want him to know that when I tell him to do something, it’s for his own good. But I don’t want him to fear me.

Sunday, we went up to Target as a family. Sam had been in a State all day–he’s going through a growth spurt, and he’s three, which combine to form a Perfect Storm of rage. We never quite know what will set him off–will it be that he’s wearing the wrong shoes? Will it be that he doesn’t want to be buckled in his car seat? Will it be that there are caterpillar remains on the car? Who knows? And when he’s in a State, anything can set him off, even more than usual.

So he was in a State on Sunday. He was hungry, so Kyle took him to the Pizza Hut in Target to have something to eat while Kat and I did a quick shopping run. I met up with Kyle and Sam as the run ended, Sam cheerfully clutching a bottle of fruit punch and Kyle less cheerfully carrying a bag of popcorn. “Can he stay with you?” Kyle asked. “I need to grab a few things.”

Sam latched onto my cart, cheerfully munching popcorn as we slowly walked down the aisles featuring arts and crafts and party supplies. I tread carefully, knowing that any misstep could cause a meltdown, and meltdowns aren’t my favorite thing, especially in my emotionally volatile and hormonal state. We almost made it, too. Kyle grabbed whatever it was he needed, and we found a line. As we were waiting, Sam let go of the cart and started poring over the candy, finally deciding that he wanted a Kit Kat for dessert.

Understand: candy is a treat. It’s a sometimes food. Sometimes, he gets candy as a dessert if he finishes his entire dinner. Sometimes he doesn’t. But he wasn’t hearing that on Saturday, and when I took the Kit Kat bar away and placed it back on the shelf, meltdown mode activated. He dropped to the floor, as if he suddenly weighed a thousand pounds, and sobbed. “But I doooooo!” he protested, trying to grab the Kit Kat again (“but I dooooo” here means “but I do want the candy bar”). “I don’t care,” I told him and looked at Kyle, who’d gotten that world weary look on his features.

“Should I take him to the car?” I asked.

“NOOOOOOOO!” howled Sam from the floor.

“Yes,” said Kyle, rapidly trying to get our merchandise on the conveyor belt.

I’ve not become an expert in many things over the last three years, but one thing I’m adept at is sweeping up a reluctant child in one arm and carrying him out to the car. Sam’s body is a great deal bigger than it was three years ago, but I’m still able to football carry him across the parking lot without dropping him or anything else I’m holding, even when he’s kicking and screaming.

And I do mean that literally. He stopped kicking once I shifted him to my hip–I think that might be some instinct like when you pick up a kitten by the scruff of their neck and they just go limp–but he screamed as mightily as before, especially when I told him that I was going to put him in his car seat.

“I DON’T WANNA BE BUCKLED!” he screamed in my ear, which started ringing like I’d survived a movie explosion and Chris Pine was trying to tell me he loved me.

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(I love this movie and had a dream about him last night)

Sam continued to scream once we got to the car; I put him in his seat, and he began to writhe and twist like Luke Skywalker being attacked by the Emperor, with comparable screaming to accompany. “I DON’T WANNA BE BUCKLED!” he continued to yell, sobbing at the same time. I gently but firmly guided his arms through the straps on his car seat, and he kept pulling them out and hitting me. It was hot and humid. I didn’t once consider hitting him, but I wished that I could consider it, if that makes sense.

Instead I yelled, and I don’t remember what I said. Nothing nasty. I didn’t call him a little shit (he was very much acting like one) or berate him or insult him. I think I told him to sit down. The problem I felt wasn’t in the words I used, but in the tone, the same tone my father used to use when he yelled at me as a child, the one that terrified me.

It didn’t affect Sam at all, of course. He’s the kind of kid where, if we did spank him, he’d probably say something like “is that the best you can do?” The only thing that really works on him is a logical and immediate consequence for his actions–you hit Mommy, you go to your room to calm down. You throw a toy, the toy gets taken away. You refuse to clean up your mess (which happens so rarely lately–it’s a miracle how well telling your three-year-old that it’s a race works in getting him to clean up after himself), the toys get put away for a while. Yelling, especially when he’s already screaming and sobbing with a tantrum, is about as effective as spitting in the ocean.

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(this is the first image that comes up for “spitting in the ocean” and I’m not sorry)

I’m not worried about him, but I did scare myself, not from my words but from the tone. Kat, who was in the car towards the end of this (and was eventually instrumental in calming Sam down–she’s amazing at that, gets him distracted by pointing out things like hey, look, a ladybug, and then he sniffles and quiets and then asks questions about ladybugs), said she’d never heard me that angry before.

And it’s been a really long time since I’ve expressed anger that way. I think the last time was long before I even met Kyle, during a hot and exhausting wait for a bus at Disney World, when my sister and I were screaming in each other’s faces for no good reason (well. It was hot and exhausting). It used to happen more often. It was normal where I grew up. Yelling was how you took out your frustration and anger. We all yelled at each other at some point. We all had screaming fights that left our throats sore and our heads pounding and were ultimately completely pointless.

My home now isn’t like that. We never yell; we holler across the house, “Hey, do you want any of this pork?” or “Could you grab me some toilet paper?” or occasionally “I’m leaving now, whether we’re ready or not!” Anger isn’t a rare thing, but we handle it differently, depending on who’s angry at each other. Kat and I snipe at each other, more sarcastic than anything, but then cool down and talk things through. Kyle and I don’t even snipe at each other; we both just take deep breaths, express our frustration, work through it, and move on.

So yelling like that was… I didn’t like it. I don’t like it. I wasn’t ever afraid that I’d hurt Sam or lose control, but I didn’t like the tone that came out of me, something that scared me when I was younger and something I didn’t want to scare Sam.

I feel like I’m probably overreacting to it. Kyle pointed out later that night that Sam loves me, that we got home from Target and Sam immediately cuddled up on my lap with his head on my shoulder as if nothing had happened. Sam didn’t even flinch in the moment; his tantrum continued uninterrupted, as if I wasn’t even there trying to do anything about it. I really did scare myself more than I scared him, which isn’t good, but it’s better than if I’d actually scared him.

I don’t know. I do know several things, however.

First, I’m relieved to be off birth control. That shit is a menace. I’d have requested that they switch me to a different hormonal birth control (NuvaRing and Ortho Evra tend to be my favorites), but it didn’t seem worth it for two and a half weeks. I know I’m not as beastly when I’m just on stims, for some reason; they just mostly make me tired and bloated.

Second, I’m glad to be on antidepressants, because they really do help with mood regulation. Sometimes, when I feel really tired or really bummed out about something, I wonder if they’re even working… but then I remember how many years and countless nights I couldn’t fall asleep because of anxiety about any number of things; I remember the panic attacks that I had after Sam was born, and before, and how they’ve stopped almost completely; I remember how I couldn’t feel anything except that everything was meaningless. I’m pretty sure that, without them, I’d be even worse on any hormone medication than I already am.

And third, if this is the worst I ever am to my kid, I’m a damn good mom.

Hormone injections start Thursday, first monitoring is Monday. Until then…

Getting There

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Last night, I told Kyle that I really wished we could have a normal week for once, because our weeks lately have been anything but normal.

Take this week.

Things started out somewhat normal. Sunday was filled with trips to the park and the store and experimental recipes (specifically, strawberry Jell-O popsicles in Star Wars molds, which were super easy to make but have a kind of weird texture? We’ll have to work on that) and then the week started out normal. Sort of. I went to work and Sam went to school and Kyle went to work.

My Monday was probably the most Mondayest of Mondays, but that’s something I won’t get into. When I got home on Monday, I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone but Sam, and I did, and we had a delightful evening just cuddling and watching videos together. I went to bed thinking of one of my favorite poems, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, in which the narrator talks about how they can be having the worst and saddest day of all time, “but if the while, I think on thee, dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end.” That’s honestly a Sammy thing. He brings me a lot of joy.

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(after bathtime the other day)

And Tuesday was better, not by a HUGE margin, but better. And then Wednesday.

Tinkerbell, as I’d written a couple of weeks ago, was recently diagnosed with hypercalcemia. She’d been doing better by a mile, but on Wednesday morning, Kat heard her straining to use the litterbox, straining so hard that she made herself vomit. Tinkerbell wasn’t herself at all, so we sucked it up and brought her back to the ER, which meant high bills again. It turned out that the hypercalcemia caused something called “megacolon,” which is basically like EXTREME CONSTIPATION for cats. We saw X-rays of it. It wasn’t pretty.

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(aside: I have so many questions about the Poop Emoji and also this movie, most of which are probably better left unanswered)

$1500, some fluids and enemas later, and Tinkerbell is pretty much back to herself, now with doctors’ orders to eat only wet food and take Miralax to keep her regular. Like any old lady, her guts have lost motility, and since we can’t really put her on an old lady diet of prunes, prune juice, and a side of bran, Miralax it is. If that doesn’t work, we’re looking at prescription meds.

The $1500 is the sticking point. Once again, we had it, but it was what we had left over after the last time, when we recouped about $600 and Kat managed to do a great whip-round and raise $700 to offset the overall costs of the situation. I’d pulled $1500 out of our account just a couple of days ago because I didn’t want it to end up being spent in a flurry of bill paying and birthday money spending. And it wasn’t spent on those things. It was spent on the cat’s constipation issues.

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(my actual life lately. The furnace is a cat’s anus)

There really wasn’t any way around it. We weren’t about to just let her die in agony of constipation, and putting her down would’ve been both (a) silly because it’s constipation and (b) pointless because it would’ve been the same cost either way. The overall cost for the treatments she got is pretty standard, so even if we’d waited and taken her to a cheaper vet, we probably would’ve had a similar bill. It was a lose-lose situation, financially (though thankfully, since we have a plan going forward, this shouldn’t happen again any time soon).

And just like that, PGS is off the table for the time being.

We could do it, I suppose, if we waited until next spring or something. Waited until the next tax return, waited until the next windfall, whenever that is. Kyle’s company gives him a sizeable bonus every year, and combining that with a theoretical tax return would probably be enough. In theory.

I’m hoping to do another cycle without PGS in the next month or so; I start birth control probably Saturday or Sunday. After that, we’d have two cycles left of IVF with ICSI before we’d have reached our lifetime maximum on the insurance, and I don’t know what would happen after that. It’s a while from now. I’m afraid to think that far ahead because things keep changing and becoming undone.

But then there’s hope, too.

This week, some friends of ours finalized the adoption of their foster daughter after what seems like an eternity of having her. I watched it on Facebook Live (sidenote: I always have to laugh at people who are grumpy about technology, because holy crap, how awesome is it to be able to watch your friends adopt their daughter live while it’s happening 2000 miles away?), and I cried buckets. And then I cried more buckets at a picture of their daughter signing her new initials at dance class. I don’t know if there’s a word for “something so awesome that it makes all other awesome things look boring” but if there is, that’s the word I’d use here.

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(if such a word exists, it’s probably German)

Watching my various friends who are going through the process of adopting through foster care has been heartbreaking but also enlightening. I used to think that it wasn’t something I could do, especially after the pain of dealing with infertility… it’s bad enough to get your hopes up every month for a child that doesn’t even exist yet, but to fall in love with a child that does exist only to have that child taken away or constantly worry about that child being taken away? Terrifying.

But I’m feeling differently lately, not in an immediate sense, but in a sense that someday, when we’re done with this IVF process (whether it’s because we’ve had a child or because we couldn’t), I’d like to foster-to-adopt. We’ve always talked about adopting, and we’ve always wanted to, and I think we could eventually manage going down that road. Eventually. Not as a consolation prize or as a “well, we couldn’t get pregnant, so we might as well adopt,” but because we have love to give and we want to give it to someone who needs it.

Eventually. I think, though, that right now, life is a bit too turmoil-y for it. But someday.

In the meantime, I go in for bloodwork tomorrow, and we have another appointment with the RE on July 6 to square things away for this next cycle. Something somewhere along the line will work out. It’s just a question of getting there, that’s all.

Flying Solo

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Before I got married, I was a traveling FIEND. I loved flying and traveling solo, anywhere at all. I couldn’t afford to do it as much as I wanted–money is still a thing, after all–but I always felt something of a thrill getting onto an airplane, checking into a hotel, slipping between those cool and probably not at all hygienic sheets, and just enjoying time away from home.

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(like I’m not going to do this at home, but at a hotel, definitely)

I still do enjoy traveling, but it’s changed a lot. I used to love traveling solo; now, I can’t stand it. I need to have my family with me or else I’m mostly miserable.

Mostly.

Which is funny because traveling with a kid is probably a special circle of hell reserved for people with truck nuts, diet racists (a.k.a., “I’m not racist but…” followed by something very racist), and whoever invented these. A coworker and I were laughing about it, how anytime you vacation with your kid, you come back more exhausted than you were before you left. And that’s entirely true, even with just one kid in the picture. Sam takes an immense amount of wrangling, even more when he’s tired or hungry (which he always is on vacation; yay for schedules being all wonky?). Kyle and I have four hands between us and we feel like we need at least eight more just for one Sam.

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(still not enough)

But still.

This week, I went on a business trip. I don’t do business trips often, but I do go on them, like I’m important or something (ha, that’s funny, mostly I spent the entire time sitting in informational sessions on best practices and being too introverted and socially anxious to even yell out “BINGO!” when I got a BINGO before anyone else in the room because I didn’t want to draw attention). Before Sam was born, before I was married, I probably would’ve enjoyed the hell out of the trip, even with all the bizarre bumps in the road. And don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have a bad time, but…

Well. The hotel room felt too quiet. My hands felt too unbusy. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw a little boy with blonde hair wearing a T-shirt that looks like one of Sam’s at the airport (he turned out to be, like, seven. In my defense, I’m very tired). I kept slipping away to try and catch Kyle and Sam in a quiet enough moment to call them, and even though Kyle and I dealt with vile traffic on the way home last night, it still felt like a burden off my shoulders to see him there.

My dad went on a bunch of business trips when I was a kid; I don’t remember half of them. I know he went to London, mostly because he got us a boatload of souvenirs (like a shirt that said LONDON on it in big block letters that I wore to bed basically until I was 25; and a beautifully illustrated book of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes). I know he went to Nashville once, and Berlin. Most of the business trips he went on came before 9/11, so we’d actually go to the gate with him to say good-bye (yeah, young kids, did you know you used to be able to do that?). And I could always tell he missed us by how many souvenirs he brought back, as if every time he thought of us and felt sad, he bought something for us to make himself feel better.

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(not quite this shirt but close)

I didn’t buy Sam any souvenirs, mostly because the gift shop next to my gate didn’t have anything I was willing to pick up when it was inevitably discarded within 15 minutes of Sam opening it.

But I missed him. I’ve Skyped with him and FaceTimed with him, but I haven’t gotten a chance to hug him yet, and I’m looking forward to that.

I don’t know. I’m not one of those people who are like “I AM NOTHING WITHOUT MY CHILD” because I know that’s not true. I’d still be feeling this way if Sam wasn’t in the picture and it was just Kyle and Kat I was leaving behind every time I traveled. There’s something about building your own family that makes you want to have them within driving distance, if not at all times, then at least with great frequency. And it makes you miss them when you’re apart from each other.

Our house isn’t the same when one of the four of us (five, with Tinkerbell, whom I include for this exercise) isn’t there. It feels incorrect, like if you’re playing a song on the piano and skip a note or like when you’re walking along and miss a step.

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(for the record, I do this all the time)

And, well. I don’t feel myself when I’m apart from my family. Maybe that makes me a little pathetic, but that’s okay. It only really becomes a big deal when there’s a business trip anyway.

Kitty Boots

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I think the overall moral of this story is that my cat is an asshole, but that’s getting ahead of myself.

Tinkerbell spent the night at Tufts Veterinary Clinic on Monday. They’re expensive (as noted), but they’re also the best around (and the closest emergency clinic to our house), so it wasn’t even a question for me. They gave her fluids and ran tests, and they even convinced her to eat a little food. The vet called me Tuesday morning and explained that the blood work had come back mostly normal, save for two small blips. One was a decreased platelet count, which is common in older cats; the other was elevated calcium levels, or hypercalcemia.

In her case, the hypercalcemia was what’s known as “idiopathic” or “lol we have no idea what’s going on here.” But she was doing a lot better yesterday, eating well and drinking well and overall bright and alert, so they saw no reason to keep her. I went and picked her up after work, with enormous thunderheads towering in my rearview mirror and classical music playing on the radio.

(I like to listen to classical music on my drive home; something about its smoothness helps me relax. On the contrary, though, I’m a Top 40 girl for the morning commute, particularly if I’m listening to Matty in the Morning)

So I picked her up, and because I’m softer than a melting marshmallow in May, I let her out of her carrier for the ride home.

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(my car is an absolute disaster area, pls ignore the mess on the floor)

She was surprisingly content with this arrangement. She spent most of the ride lounging on the front seat like the royalty she is, but for the first ten minutes, she rode on my lap, looking out the window over my arm. She tried to look on the dashboard, but found that was too unstable while the car was moving, and settled instead for poking around the passenger-side floor and, eventually, the backseat.

I picked her up out of the backseat when we got home, and she promptly peed all over me, protesting as she did so. Well, I can’t blame her. They gave her a lot of fluids, and she’d probably had to go for a while but been unable to communicate as much because she’s a cat and can’t talk.

(she sort of talks; she yowls, which she did when I picked her up… and then there was a lot of pee, which I assume humiliated her as much as it disgusted me)

Inside the house, she immediately started exploring everything, making sure it was all as she’d left it. She devoured a bowl of her new cat food (prescription stuff for hypercalcemic cats), chugged some water, pooped perfectly well (compared to what she’d been doing, which was not pooping at all), and then spent the evening lounging at the top of the stairs and showing off her cat boots.

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(things of note: her irritated expression at being photographed, the bruising from where they placed her IV, and my ugly ass carpet… I can’t wait until we can afford to tear it all out and replace it with hardwood)

So it’s all good news in her department. She’s an ornery, picky old lady, but she’s alive and well enough for her age. She has another vet appointment at her usual (significantly less expensive) clinic in about a month, so we’ll see how she does in the meantime. For now, though, she seems like she’s stubbornly sticking around for the long haul, and I’m very happy to see that.

There’s more good news as well. Because her issues weren’t anything severe, we recouped some of the cost of her stay at the clinic, about $600. As if that wasn’t awesome enough, Kat managed to organize a quick fundraiser, and many of our awesome friends donated a total of $700 to help us offset the costs. I’m in awe and so very grateful on so many levels. We’re still a little less financially ready for PGS than we were, but thanks to our friends and Tinkerbell not actually being sick, we’re not in as bad of a place as we were.

So I’m tired, but happy. It feels like this week has already taken a month, and it’s only Wednesday, but at least the back half of the week seems like it will be less stressful than the front half.

…right?

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If it’s not one thing…

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I love cats, always have. When I was about Sam’s age, my parents got us a cat that we called Chim-Chim because he looked like he’d come down the Chim-Chimney (a la Mary Poppins), all dark and sooty. He didn’t last terribly long, after breaking a window in our basement and escaping before we could get him neutered. Our next cat, Flower, gave me cat scratch fever, which sounds like a big band number (a la Zoot Suit Riot), but was really a serious medical condition. She was far too violent to have in a house with small children (I was about five and my brother was an infant), so we had to rehome her. Two years later, we adopted sisters, Tigger and Silky, from some friends of ours in New York state whose barn cat had just given birth to a litter. They stuck with us until I was probably nine or ten, and then we had to rehome them because my sister had developed severe allergies.

After Tigger and Silky were rehomed (which thoroughly broke my heart), I decided that I’d adopt a cat of my own the second I moved out of my parents’ house. Thankfully, though, I didn’t have to wait that long. On my seventeenth birthday, my mom drove all of us to the grocery store after school, ostensibly to get some supplies for my birthday party the following night. Instead of getting party supplies, though, she picked up a box of kitten chow, a litter box, and a bag of litter. While I was still processing this, we drove to the animal shelter the next town over so that I could choose a kitten to bring home.

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The shelter had about half a dozen kittens at the time, which was somewhat remarkable for early November. One litter was four weeks old and had just been brought in. They were all long-haired with Siamese-type markings, and none of them knew what was going on. They were matted to high heaven and none of them had gotten their shots yet because they were so brand new.

The other litter was just a brother and sister, both grey tabbies, about six weeks old and ready to go at any time. I washed my hands from the four week olds and met the sister, a tiny puff of fur who fit in the palm of my hand. She wasn’t content to sit there, though, and dug her needle-like claws into my peacoat until she reached my shoulder, where she perched and purred contentedly. I was sold, 100%, and on the drive home, I decided to call her Tinkerbell.

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(Tinkerbell the Christmas after I got her–she would’ve been about three months old)

I wish I could say that she’s been at my side ever since, but it’s vacillated. A little less than a year after I brought her home, I moved away to college (side note: why do movies always depict people moving away to college as them moving out forever? Like literally, just because you’re going away to college doesn’t mean we’re going to turn your room into a hot tub time machine or something. Calm down, movie parents), and I really only saw her on weekends. Sometimes, not even then, like when I spent a semester overseas, studying at Oxford.

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(the September after Oxford, during her “I am a triangle” phase)

When I moved to Texas, I couldn’t bring her with me because my life was too unsettled. I hopped from home to home and place to place, and even once Kyle and I found the apartment we’d live in for about the first year of our marriage, everything was too up in the air to commit to bringing her down with us. Tink and I didn’t properly reunite until Kyle and I moved to Massachusetts, about five years ago, but she’s been by my side there ever since.

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(Christmas 2013)

For the most part, she’s been a healthy cat. She pukes with unerring regularity, as a method of either demanding attention or communicating displeasure. Once upon a time, I wondered if this was cause for concern, but since she’s been otherwise healthy, it hasn’t worried me too much. She used to be obese, so fat that she was shaped like a triangle, but as she’s aged and calmed down (read: as she’s ceased sharing her home with other cats), she’s slowly lost weight… nothing concerning, just age. She hasn’t changed, behaviorally, since she was about six months old: she’s absurdly lazy, talkative and demanding, cuddly but only on her terms (read: you must be lying down, not sitting, and there must be room for her not just on top of you). She loves cheese, her stuffed turtle, and her catnip mouse.

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(some point recently, lounging on Kat’s bed)

And she hasn’t eaten in 24 hours. Maybe more.

Kat texted me yesterday to tell me this, and after some frantic shuffling, I came home to bring her to the nearest veterinary ER (which is one of the best in the state–it’s at the Tufts Veterinary School, so you know they’re going to be good). They ran tests on her but couldn’t find anything wrong, so they wanted to keep her overnight because she was dehydrated and they wanted to run some more tests–bloodwork, urine samples, X-rays, ultrasounds, the works. Despite not eating, she was 100% herself: she yelled at me and Kat the entire drive to the vet, yelled at everyone who came in to look at her, made mournful noises when we dared to pick her up and cuddle her, tried to jump off a table that was way too high for her.

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(bundled up at the vet yesterday and very angry about that fact)

I’m waiting to get the call back and hear what they’ve found, if she’s eaten anything, if she’s gotten better or worse. I’m dreading it for many reasons. What if they’ve found something that’s unfixable? What if it’s something that’s fixable but that will cost a lot of money to fix? What if it’s just going to be ridiculous bills either way?

They had us put down a deposit last night, $1875, to cover her overnight stay, testing, and any treatment they might do overnight. That’s almost $2000. Thankfully, we had that… because we had set aside $2000 for PGS. I didn’t even think about it before swiping my card (that’s not true; I did think about it, but I thought about it in terms of, “well this sucks”). She’s my baby, you know? I can’t not try to fix whatever’s wrong, if I have the money for it.

But what if we don’t have the money? What if they call today and say, “we can fix it, but it’s going to cost you $5000”? What do I do then?

When we first got Tigger and Silky, back when I was a wee child of seven, Silky stopped eating and started throwing up. My parents brought her to the vet, and the vet found that she’d eaten a piece of floss and gotten it tangled around the back of her tongue and all through her intestines. Without hesitating, they performed emergency surgery and removed it, and Silky was healthy afterwards–healthy, active, and as happy as a cat owned by a family with small children could be.

The surgery, though, cost $600–more than–and they didn’t talk to my parents beforehand. When I was a kid, the fact that it was even a question infuriated me. It was her life! How could you even pause and think about it? You save her life and find a way, that’s what you do!

But now I’m an adult, in the same position, and I don’t want to make that decision. If they call me back and quote some ridiculous number to save her life, I don’t know what I’ll do. She’s old; at best, she’s probably got another three, maybe four years in her. That’s aeons in cat years, but what will her quality of life be? If they fix this, will she decline more quickly afterwards? Will she stop chasing leaves and playing with her catnip mouse? Will she sleep far more, start missing the litterbox, lose use of her legs? If she was younger, if she was even five years younger, this wouldn’t even be a question, but now…

I don’t know. The last 24 hours have made me feel so hopeless in so many ways. Literally the only thing that’s made me feel better is looking at pictures of kittens on various shelter sites. Otherwise, I feel like I’ve lost way too much in just a couple of hours–my hopes for a healthy baby and my beloved and cantankerous old lady furbaby.

Sigh.

All Ears

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This weekend, we confronted an old and familiar enemy–the ear infection.

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I’ve written before about how Sam dealt with monthly ear infections from roughly the time he started attending daycare until we got ear tubes put in when he was about eighteen months old. He inherited this physical annoyance from Kyle, who had so many ear infections when he was a kid that his ears are permanently scarred and ringing. One time when he was visiting me, he suspected that he had an ear infection, and so we went to the ER. The doctor looked in his left ear and remarked, “Wow, yeah, you’ve got some really bad scarring in here,” to which Kyle replied, “I know, but I came in to see you about the other ear.”

After Sam started daycare, we slipped into a frankly obnoxious routine: Sam got a cold that turned into an ear infection. He’d spend a good week recovering from the cold and ear infection, ten days on antibiotics, and then have about a week of decent health, only to get another cold and ear infection immediately thereafter. We went through so many bottles of the pink stuff that you’d think we’d invested in it. Kyle and I lost so many days of work because Sam couldn’t go to daycare when he had an ear infection, not until he’d been on antibiotics for twenty-four hours.

The worst ones sneaked up on us; they happened when the fluid built up so much in Sam’s middle ear that he got carsick. And at his age back then, carsickness couldn’t be avoided by a small voice from the backseat whimpering, “Mommy, my tummy feels sick.” We’d just hear him start coughing, and before anyone could grab anything to catch it in, he’d puke all over himself and the backseat. And then we’d have to turn around and drive home with that delightful smell permeating everything.

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At Sam’s eighteen month appointment, his pediatrician brought up the idea of ear tubes to us. “It’s a really quick procedure,” she said. “He’ll be in and out in time to have a perfectly normal day, though you’ll want to keep him home so that he can rest and heal.”

After a few more doctor visits, Kyle and I found ourselves in a surgical center with a groggy baby. The surgical center was, for some reason, located in a pretty seedy neighborhood. It was under construction, and large pieces of plywood covered the windows, spray painted to direct us to the front door around the corner. In broad daylight, this would have been discomfiting, but we arrived at the center before sunrise on a mild December day, and that just made the whole thing worse.

A handful of families were already there, all of them with carriers holding sleepy babies. The nurse who’d scheduled the surgery explained that they liked to do procedures in descending order by age, and so we knew that the two babies called in ahead of us must have been really, really young.

Sam was game for the whole thing, at least at first. He toddled around the waiting room in flannel pajamas, tried to go through the doors to the recovery area, tried to sneak into the nurse’s office. Gradually, however, he began to remember that he was hungry; after all, you’re not supposed to eat before surgery. We’d been in the waiting room for about an hour when he started to whimper; by the time they called us in at two-plus hours after we’d arrived, he was howling.

And he didn’t stop. I couldn’t blame him, though; surgery is a weird thing when you’re an adult, and I imagine it must be even weirder when you’re a baby. He begged the nurse to take the blood pressure cuff off him (inasmuch as an eighteen-month-old can beg: “Off please?” he asked her with fat tears rolling down his cheeks). He said “no” a lot. He didn’t listen at all when I pointed out that the six-year-old sitting across from us was taking this whole experience in stride. And eventually, he clung to me as we made the trip down the hall and to the surgical suite where he’d get the tubes put in.

He didn’t like lying down on the table, but the nurses distracted him with some spinny, glowy toys that made a pleasant whirring sound. That said, my son is not one who will be distracted for very long if something Strange is happening, and sure enough, when the anesthetist came to knock him out, he started howling again. This was particularly difficult to watch, at the anesthetist was approximately 500 years old with palsied hands and the bedside manner of a midwinter bear. He held a mask over Sam’s face with one shaking hand and, with the other, pressed Sam’s jaw shut. Sam screamed for a beat and then was sound asleep, a furious expression still twisting his features.

A nurse took me out to the waiting room, rubbing my back as she did (nurses are awesome). “It’s always harder for the moms and dads than it is for the babies,” she promised. “The surgeon will be out to get you in a couple of minutes.”

I sat down next to Kyle, both of us bleary-eyed and wishing that we were the ones getting a dose of sweet, sweet knock-out juice. Not fifteen minutes later, the surgeon came to get us, as promised. “He’s in recovery. The procedure went really well, and the tubes should last him about six months to a year.”

We followed a nurse to the recovery room where we found Sam very much awake and twice as angry as I’d last seen him. He didn’t stop howling until Kyle administered a large bottle of apple juice; Sam isn’t usually a juice kid, but he was so hungry that day that he’d probably have chugged a bottle of black coffee if we’d offered it (author’s note: black coffee is nasty y’all). And he didn’t really calm down until we gave him donut holes at home (because if your kid has surgery, they have a right to enjoy sweet treats afterwards). He then slept for five hours and returned to normal so quickly that it almost defied belief.

And then, no more ear infections! Oh, it was a gift. Granted, Sam still got sick sometimes, but far less frequently than he had before and with far less severity. The tubes functioned beautifully, and they stayed in for another year and a half, all of that time blissfully infection-free. It’s been wonderful, it truly has.

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But then Saturday happened.

Sam and I have both been dealing with a cold all the last week, and it’s a doozy. It started for both of us with a nasty migraine, and that was followed by horrendous head and chest congestion. For me, it’s mostly involved a lot of wishing that I had less to do this week so I could afford to take a sick day and sleep. For Sam, however, it’s involved a lot more physical bleh.

He’s had a headache pretty much all week, and though Tylenol keeps it at bay, it doesn’t make it go away entirely. He was in this state Saturday, after his nap; Kyle brought him downstairs, and he was whining and whimpering and cuddling, clearly not feeling well. I went to lie down for a little while myself, also feeling gross, and I’d only been up stairs about half an hour when I heard Sam start screaming. He’s three, so this isn’t entirely abnormal, but what was abnormal was Kyle coming upstairs and informing me that Sam was complaining of ear pain.

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We took him to the urgent care clinic, and long story short, it looks like he’s managed to perforate his eardrum. This isn’t the end of the world; Kyle’s had it happen to him more often than he can count. We guess that the tube in the infected ear fell out but that the hole didn’t have enough time to heal before an infection set in, leaving it vulnerable.

The good news is that Sam isn’t in any pain. It hurts like a BEAST when you rupture or perforate your eardrum… at least for a couple of minutes. Once the eardrum is actually perforated, the pressure alleviates and the pain goes away. Sam was back to his usual hyperactive silly self by the time I’d thrown jeans on and gotten down to the car on Saturday; with the help of the pink stuff and ear drops, he’s doing just fine.

As for me, I’m just hoping we can get a new tube put in before we return to the old pattern.

Six Years

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Yesterday was my anniversary. I usually would’ve written something long and sentimental on Facebook about that, something about Kyle being my life partner and best friend and favorite teammate and all, but we had other matters to attend to, namely returning home from a vacation to see his family in Texas.

It was a great vacation, really. We had a lot of fun, despite plentiful mud and rain (or, in some cases, because of it). Sam got to see and fall in love with his Nana’s puppies, and he got to spend a lot of good time with his Nana and Poppy and Uncle Grant, none of whom he sees as often as any of us would like. We stayed in a gorgeous hotel and just had a nice, relaxing time together as a family. I think it was one of the more relaxing vacations we’ve had in a while.

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(not quite this relaxing,  but close)

But getting home. Oy.

We were flying out of DFW, which is no small task. When Kyle and I first started dating, he started bragging to me about the size of his airport (that isn’t a euphemism) and how it had five ZIP codes (that isn’t an exaggeration). Plenty of airports are big, but DFW is scary big, intimidating and confusing and hot.

We got to the airport around 3:45 p.m. for our 5:51 flight–plenty of time to get through security, get some snackish dinner items, and relax a little before boarding. Kyle and I were feeling good as we reached the check-in counter for jetBlue and asked them to print off our boarding passes and luggage tag. As those items printed, the lady behind the counter gently informed us that the flight had a new departure time of 8:30 p.m. but that we should stick by the gate in case that changed.

I had to ask her to repeat herself three or four times because, for those not willing to do the math, that’s a three hour delay.

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I can handle three hour delays when traveling on my own. I don’t like them–nobody does, of course–but just give me a place to plug in and a phone or Kindle full of books, and I’m set. Kyle’s the same way, and we can both handle them together, just between the two of us.

Sam, though.

Sam is three. He’s a very clever three-year-old with a massive vocabulary, a stunning imagination, and an almost cult-like following in his junior preschool classroom. What he does not possess, however, is patience. At all. He’s a devotee of the idea that instant gratification takes too long; if he has to wait for anything, he will protest and he will make sure the entire world knows it.

An hour and a half wait before boarding would’ve been doable, but three hours, and not only that, three hours at bedtime?

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But we tried to make the best of it. We stopped at TGIFriday’s for some dinner (Sam munched on soft pretzel sticks because his usual choice of noodles and broccoli was unavailable). We picked up snacks and magazines and souvenirs at the news stand. We managed to placate Sam for a while, with space to run and his Kindle to play on and snacks from his Nana to keep him sated.

Around 7:30, our resources were exhausted and the inevitable meltdown began. Sam sobbed that he wanted to eat a WHOLE bag of M&Ms, not just a FEW M&Ms, and he didn’t WANT water, he just WANTED WATER, and WHY WAS EVERYTHING HARD. The other passengers gave us stank eye, knowing full well that this shrieking child was going to be on their massively delayed flight; Kyle and I tried very hard to melt into the floor.

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But finally, FINALLY, we boarded the plane (passing large families and a Bernese Mountain puppy named Bo as we did), and despite a few rough patches, it was a smooth flight. Sam slept from about an hour in; I dozed, and I don’t know what Kyle did. Once we landed, we made our way to the bathrooms so that Kyle and I could relieve ourselves and so that Sam could get his diaper changed.

There was only one problem: Sam did not WANT to get his diaper changed.

Kyle took one for the team and changed him. I don’t know exactly what went on in there, but based on the screaming and Kyle’s haggard appearance afterwards, I can only assume it was an exorcism.

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(The Exorcist teaches you more about parenting a toddler than any book ever will)

As they approached and I opened my mouth to offer to take Sam from him, Kyle interrupted me. “If you have to use the bathroom, do it now.”

So I went. When I came out, Sam was once again crying and out of his stroller, looking down at his pajama pants. Kyle looked about five seconds from crying and was also looking at Sam’s pajama pants. “Can you go get some paper towels?” he asked, and I hurried off to do just that, no questions asked. Kyle explained the situation when I returned: Sam had been throwing such a tantrum when Kyle changed his diaper that the diaper got put on wrong. Sam had then peed and, well. The results were predictable, to say the least.

Back into the bathroom they both went to change, and after that, we were finally done with our bathroom adventure, 45 minutes after getting off the plane.

I should mention, too, that this was at 2:00 a.m.

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The airport was empty by then, or mostly, and had taken on that liminal space quality, where it felt like reality blurred. Kyle and I got lost on our way to baggage claim, since the security guard at the closest door was gone for the night, and finally reached our carousel at around 2:15. It took a while to find our bag, but once we had it, we headed out to retrieve our car, only to have our parking stub not register in any of Logan’s automatic pay machines.

Because of course.

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We gave up and just brought it with us. Thankfully, we’d taken a picture of the row we parked in, so we didn’t have to worry about hunting that down. We shoved everything into the Prius, paid our stub at the gate, and exited the airport…

…right into a traffic jam.

Kyle initially blamed it on “some idiot doing something stupid” but it was just construction lane closures that ended more quickly than we expected. The roads were clear the whole way home, and Sam was wide awake, asking both of us question after question, mostly about reflections in his window (“what’s that planet, Mommy?” “that’s not a planet, sweetheart, that’s a street light”).

Finally. FINALLY. We got home around 3:30. The neighborhood was quiet and eerily dark–no streetlamps, no cars, not even our porch light. We shuffled inside… and then Sam refused to go to sleep. This continued for about half an hour, until Kyle finally delivered him a “way past midnight” snack, and we all crapped out, officially at 4 a.m.

So I’m exhausted and haven’t got a romantic bone in my body, just some weary ones. But I will say this: our marriage works. It works because of nights like last night, when the world throws curveball after curveball at us, and we just link arms and laugh at it. It works because we don’t snap at each other when we’re mad at something else, because we bear the load together.

There was a great article on Cracked.com about six years ago (exactly four months after Kyle and I got married, so I was in a sappy mood when I read it). The author writes about “5 Ways You Know It’s Time To Get Married” and ended by proposing to his girlfriend, which was sweet enough. My favorite part, though, was the second-to-last point, about neither of you being in debt to each other, neither of you resenting pulling more weight when the other can’t:

Don’t picture your relationship as two people pulling a wagon. It’s like two legs carrying a person.

If you break a toe, your legs don’t have an argument about the fact that one of them is forcing you to limp. You just automatically change your stride and keep going.

I take it even further. When your legs are both tired, your right leg doesn’t just give up because it’s tired and leave your left to do all the work. They slow down and work together to get where they need to be, so that they can both rest.

Marriage–building your own family–is a team effort. You’re not pulling for yourself anymore; you’re pulling for the team, the whole team. Your successes and failures are shared, and so are the burdens you carry. Marriage doesn’t make the bad things in life go away; instead, it makes them easier to manage, because instead of being one person panicking and trying to carry it all by yourself…

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…you have two people sharing the load, even when things get tough.

And, well. All that to say: sugar, I’m glad to be on your team. I love you.