Home ownership really sucks sometimes. Last weekend it was the hotwater system playing silly buggers with us with a busted valve of some sorts (yes this really is the extent of my vast knowledge of things mechanical and/or practical around the home) and this weekend it’s the air conditioning causing headaches.
There’s something up in the roof that must be forming condensation on it somewhere where it shouldn’t be forming condensation… and like, now there’s like, all this water just like… dripping through the ceiling! Poo. Bum. Piss. Fart. 🙁
Initially it was just a couple of intermittent drips until we noticed that the whole section seemed to be bowing under what must have been quite a puddle forming so we poked a hole in it (as you do) and then stood there looking on in a manner most forlorn while we watched water running out of the hole until the puddle had emptied.
Of course we can’t really do diddly about it over the weekend other than sticking our heads up the man hole semi-regularly and saying ‘Oh this isn’t good.’ So there’s a bucket in the hallway and a slow drip happening… and I’m feeling all anxious that any second now the ceiling in the hallway is going to cave in and make a God awful mess of gyprock and soggy insulation while I sit here being frustrated about not knowing anything about such things and also not being physically capable of getting up in the damn roof to try investigate it or maybe (crazy thought here) do something about it.
The real fun in this delighful little scenario starts tomorrow when I try (now, don’t laugh) to get a BrisVegas air-con type dude to come out and have a look at it. Shouldn’t be a problem at all. Air con people aren’t really in demand around these parts in the middle of summer… 😐
Yes.
Everything is my fault. It’s all my responsibility even though I couldn’t give a shit. I am getting out of bed in the morning, getting through the day and considering it a major achievement… so excuse me if some of the salient details are escaping my attention. All I know for sure is that I am in pain and I don’t want to be.
RMB
After watching the movie last week "The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas" I’ve been watching some more films this week about WWII and the Nazi occupation with Yale who seems to have missed a few of those ‘must see’ films. We watched "Life is Beautiful" and "Schindler’s List" and I think next we were talking about watching "Das Boot" (in German with the subtitles – Jurgen Prochnow just don’t have the same… ummm… gravitas when dubbed over with some strange English voice).
So… as you do when you’re interested in something – anything really – you do a few Google searches… remember the old days of remaining ignorant until you had time to make it to the library??? I love the internet. Anyway I started off by searching info about the construction etc of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German Concentration Camp just to get a sense of the timeline where these films (The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and Schindler’s List in particular) were supposed to be interacting with the actual history. I then read through a number of different pages on the Denazification of German and Austrian society after the war and several other pages about various key SS officials and the Nuremberg trials etc and at some point I realized that there wasn’t a lot I was reading that I wasn’t already at least vaguely familiar with – it was the minutiae that I’m not overly conversant on (dates, key officials, numbers of deaths, post-war reparations etc). I kept hopping from one link to another and ended up (somehow) reading about the Japanese involvement in the Pacific which somehow got me to reading about the Nanking Massacre which occured when the Japanese Imperial Army had invaded China and took Nanking by force in December of 1937. An event I am sad to say I have never heard about in my entire life. I don’t ever remember studying this in school, don’t ever remember stumbling over it in a Time Magazine or on a History Channel documentary or anything. In fact my only recollection of anything even remotely connected to the Japanese occupation of China at this time was as the backdrop for a film I saw last year "Children of the Silk Road" which was an interesting enough film but apparently was not very true to historical fact from what I understand. I guess modern history hasn’t ever been ‘my bag’ so I’ve gaping holes in my knowledge base here.
Obviously I don’t think it’s possible to know something about everything… hell it’s hard enough to know everything about one thing. But feeling like you don’t know anything about some things makes me feeling like i know nothing about anything! It bothers me somewhat. Maybe I need to get my head out of the literature and back into the reference section… .
I saw the news article about the Californian woman who had octuplets last week and immediately thought ‘Oh dear God! Tthat poor woman!’. I also assumed that they must have been naturally conceived because surely no right minded ethical member of the medical profession who specializes in reproductive technology would be socially irresponsible enough to implant such a large number of embryos.
Or so I had thought.
It turns out that the single unemployed mum who gave birth to these children already had six children at home where she lives with the children’s grandmother and grandfather and the octuplets were apparently the result of an IVF procedure. I’ve read some reports that claim that the mother in question filed bankruptcy not long before undergoing IVF and is currently seeking all sorts of sponsorship arrangements and media deals to raise money. Ostensibly these funds are to ‘help with the costs of raising so many babies’ but it’s starting to sound like this woman deliberately decided to have a litter so she could become famous, make money and go on to be a ‘child raising expert’ of some sort.
So how does an insolvent single mum of six, presumably uninsured and living on welfare, afford IVF in the first place? For the sake of those poor little babies I hope all this is incorrect, but there’s so many raving loonies in this world that there’s a possibility that fame and money may have been the motivation for this extreme multiple birth. Go get up the duff with a gaggle of babies, create a media maelstrom and cash in on the morbid curiousity that will inevitable ensue.
I can not comprehend why any sane IVF specialist would transfer 8 embryos in one cycle or alternatively allow a woman to have a timed sexual intercourse cycle or IUI (Intra-Uterine Insemination) with hyperstimulated ovaries releasing 8 or more eggs?!?! It makes no sense. The woman already had six children… I wonder if she was even infertile? If she wasn’t infertile then there was a higher than average chance (compared to other infertile IVF patients) that the embryos would implant. The doctors all know how fucking insanely risky it is for babies born in such high multiples – the likelihood of them being born premature was likely 100%. The odds of major neurological and medical conditions like cerebral palsy, anaemia, blindness, heart defects and lung immaturity is really high even in premature twins let alone octuplets. It just makes no sense.
If this woman really has (as the media is currently suggesting and her agents appear to be confirming) deliberately gotten pregnant with an unusually high multiple birth for the media attention and possible financial gain… then I think her actions are thoroughly reprehensible. If her doctors were in anyway complicit in this scheme then I think they have at best shown extremely poor judgement and at worst are basically responsible for any ongoing medical conditions these poor babies may incur and ought have their medical licenses revoked and be held liable for the ongoing care of the octuplets.
Extreme multiples are usually considered to be mistakes in the IVF profession and are often regarded as embarrassment to the reproductive technology industry. I remember my IVF specialist telling me about one of his patients who was pregnant with quads – only two embryos were implanted but both had split and become two sets of identical twins… while the odds of such things are incalculable Dr IVF expressed the sentiment that it wasn’t a desirable outcome and he also mentioned that a patient with quads doesn’t reflect creditably on his clinic.
Doesn’t matter which way I look at this scenario it just looks like really bad medicine…. and the babies are the ones likely to bear the lifelong brunt of it.
*************************
Update: So as more details come to light in this bizarre baby grubbing case it seems that her other children were the result of IVF treatments also. So why the fuck would her doctors agree to transfer 8 embryos into a woman whose history demonstrates her fertility is sufficient for the embryos to take??? I’ve gone from empathy to disbelief to anger over this story in the last few days. How could anyone let this stupid bint deliberately have an extreme multiple birth which would expose the babies to unacceptable risks of serious congenital defects? I don’t fucking get it. NO ONE was thinking about the safety and health of the potential babies when the procedure was undertaken.
From BBC news article – I hope some punitive action is taken against these quacks.
She (Nadya Suleman the mother) has come under criticism for choosing to have more children through in vitro fertilisation when she already has six.Her other children, aged 2-7, were also conceived through in vitro fertilisation, Ms Suleman’s mother has said.
"To put this many embryos back in a woman who is so young and had proven fertility is completely irresponsible," reproductive endocrinologist Suleena Kansal Kalra of the University of Pennsylvania told AFP news agency.
The American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) is investigating how Ms Suleman became pregnant with octuplets and may "take appropriate action", the agency said in a statement. The ASRM recommends that women of Ms Suleman’s age have no more than two embryos implanted. .
