Why is it that so many people feel the need to stick their nose into everyone else’s bedrooms? Why is being gay still such a divisive issue in the 21st century? Shouldn’t we be more worried about war? poverty? gendercide? cancer? alzheimers? the chronic and systemic negligence towards our planets fragile natural resources? Surely just about any major problem facing modern society and future generations should carry more import, gain more press, and attract more political debate than who is fucking whom?
Recently on Gay Pride day (before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, I don’t begrudge people the right to stand up and say proudly ‘this is who I am’ if they are so inclined to do so), which was apparently a couple of days ago on June 25th , Nabisco, maker of the iconic Oreo placed this image on their Facebook page…
And then they got swamped by a tirade of bilious and hateful commentary as well as vitriolic threats of product boycotting. Oh. My. God. The sheer volume of bigotry, the complete intolerance, the unadulterated hatred that spewed forth from the masses aimed at a cookie company! I was appalled and disgusted and yet kept reading… it’s like watching a medieval inquisition unfolding on Facebook all this prejudice and hate a good deal of which was hidden behind religious and/or biblical rhetoric – it’s unbelievable.
And I simply do not understand it at all. Why do these fucking zealots even care? Why don’t they mind their own business? Why do these people give a flying fuck about who other people choose to love?
People should be allowed to love anyone and everyone who is going to make them happy (male or female… or bit of Column A/bit of Column B). Railing against a fucking cookie manufacturer is not going to make one whit of difference! IT MAKES NO SENSE!
It’s been at least four and a half years since I’ve had an unmedicated nights sleep. And even with the copious Valium prescription repeats, I only manage somewhere between 5-6 hours… on a good night. Which means I’m racking up somewhere between a 2-3 hr sleep debt every night. :S
Without the Valium, it’s a complete waste of time. I go to bed, I toss and turn for hours trying to get into a position of relative comfort, read: one whereby my back shuts the fuck up long enough to allow me to fall asleep. Should this elusive position actually be found and I do manage to fall asleep unassisted, I will inevitably wake up within 2-3 hours with my jaw clamped shut so tight I feel like I can’t talk, my fists in little ineffectual balls of fury and even my little feet feel like they’ve been tensing up against the pain. Not good.
Needless to say, the famed Roche Mother’s Little Helper and I, have become good friends… I would have bought shares in the company five years ago if I’d known how much of their product I was going to end up consuming. In the beginning (hehehe) there was a mere 2.5mg of diazepam a night to help me get to sleep which seemed to assist with the tense jaw thing and for a while did help with the getting to sleep thing. But as I’ve scaled back the traditional analgesics which seem to do fuck all to make a dent in neuropathic pain, and have cut back the so called neuropathic pain blockers which are completely ineffective and leave me hideously dopey (hey, don’t laugh)… the daily Valium quotient has slowly crept up and up to the point where I routinely take 10mg a night as a minimum and work up from there depending on how crap I feel. :S
The end result of which is that I haven’t had a decent night sleep for nigh on five years and have no doubt accumulated a considerable sleep debt which is probably irrecoverable at this stage! And according to the Scientific American, studies into short term sleep deprivation can cause foggy brain, impaired vision, driving deficiency and drum roll please… memory lapses! Oh, I could have told them that last one. Long term sleep deprivation can cause/exacerbate insulin resistance, heart disease, diabetes and obesity! Yay!! All that good stuff to look forward to! :S
So how do you try and crib back a five year sleep debt… I imagine it’s damn near impossible at this point, though it has been suggested that perhaps a month of medically induced coma could bring me back into balance!
Ok, having a nightmare tends to be decidedly unpleasant… having a nightmare that reoccurs over several nights is another matter entirely. Waking up to the same shitty reoccurring nightmare at 2:50am for the third straight night and then back pain keeping you from going back to sleep turns the slightly inconvenient to a right pain in the arse! 🙁
I had a horrible dream the other night, then yesterday morning again and then the same dream again at stupid o’clock this morning. And it scared the living hell out of me – each time. I guess having bad dreams about being in car accidents when you’ve been in a few hideous incidents is likely to do that to you… but this dream seems particularly gut wrenching and particularly vivid, and it is leaving me with a horrible churning sensation in the pit of my stomach…
I was driving in my car, following a friend on a dual carriage way and he was weaving in and out of the traffic a bit and I found myself continually speeding up in an attempt to keep up… but my friend’s car kept pulling further away from me. I kept watching his car as I tried to catch up to him, when obviously I should have been watching the traffic around me instead. Suddenly I was faced with a corner (wtf?) that consisted of a red Camry and a blue 4WD. I didn’t even try to stop – there was no time. I ran straight into the ‘corner’ at full speed and that sickening sound, the crunch of twisting metal and scraping steel ripped through my head… to me it is the sound of impending trauma and pain. Lots of pain.
It woke me with a jolt on each occasion and my heart was racing one hundred miles an hour, and I felt like I was going to be sick. Not a surprising reaction I guess considering I’ve had four nasty MVAs in the past – a couple of which, no one knows how I walked away from.
I don’t need this… Why can’t I dream about cabins in the woods with bearskin rugs, fireplaces and cognac or half naked men bearing drinks with little umbrellas in them on white sandy beaches or thermal hot springs filled with monkeys sitting in them getting red butts! But no. I get car crashes. 🙁
Infertility effects far more people than most of us think it does. When I first found out I couldn’t fall (or stay) pregnant at the drop of a hat – which is pretty much the assumption we all work under while we spend years wasting time and money on contraception that we don’t need – it hit me, not like a tonne of bricks, but rather more like a wet haddock upside the head… a seemingly minor setback. There was no major ‘OMG I can’t have kids’ crying into my teacups moment. No, ‘Oh why me? Life is so unfair!’ bullshit (but some of that did come later*). Just a ‘Well this fucking sucks… what can we do to fix it’ kind of head space kicked in.
No one expects that they won’t be able to have kids when they are ready to, but it happens, and to significantly more couples than most people realize. When you discover you’re infertile, one of the completely inexplicable things a lot of women tend to do, is expend an awful lot of energy keeping it to themselves. My family knew about it when I started on IVF… but none of them have any real idea of exactly what I went through. Some of my friends knew I was on IVF. but it was usually only disclosed to stop the semi-frequent questions asking when we were going to have kids! I rarely discussed it with anyone if I could in any way avoid doing so. And when I absolutely couldn’t avoid a discussion, I would talk predominantly about the medical procedures, the prohibitive expense of it, the time, energy and resources that went into it, the way the whole thing felt like gambling… anything and everything but never talked about the emotional toll.
Because it was just too hard. Too hard to describe the enormous physical strain it puts you under (my God the hormones!). Too hard to define the emotional turmoil that came with every failed cycle (the constant disappointments!). Too hard to acknowledge how much the entire endeavour made me feel like a complete and utter failure as a woman. Just too hard to talk to people about it in general, and I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone… family, friends or professionals. I was disinclined towards discussing my feelings about IVF because I didn’t want to be repeatedly getting emotionally upset and I really didn’t want to share my intimate health problems with all and sundry and find myself constantly recounting my personal failures. Those were my reasons for trying to keep it to myself, but from what I understand the tendency to be silent is pretty common for people in this situation for a multitude of emotionally charged reasons.
I saw the other day that there is a documentary currently being made at the moment called ‘On Infertile Ground’, which focuses on the ‘silence’ that surrounds infertility. They have just started a fund raising appeal to gather support and monies to pay for their documentary – one which I will be very interested to see once it’s made and one which will no doubt feel all too familiar to me. I kinda want to donate money to their fundraising efforts myself… but being part of the 1 in 6 couples who have spent TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS on fertility treatments over the years, I feel like I’ve spent more than my fair share of $$$ on infertility, thank you very much!!!
Maybe some of ‘the lucky ones’ who managed to get pregnant for FREE (fuck, how that concept does my head in) will throw the cost of a box of Clomid (approx $30.69) towards their fund raising, and offer up a little thanks for fact that they never had to know what the bloody hell Clomid is.
*I didn’t talk about it much, but I did end up blogging about how infertility and IVF made me feel (back when NO ONE read this thing). I wouldn’t recommend it, because it’s mostly pretty angsty and downright depressing, but if anyone wanted to know how IVF effected me over the years, you can click on the ‘IVF’ in the tag cloud my front page and go look back on how bitter and twisted infertility can make you. Strangely enough, I don’t think I’ve ever really managed to entirely shake off all that bitter cynicism…
In the beginning, they sweep you off your feet, quoting Shakespeare. For example this conversation between myself and Mr K (c.1998) which, for obvious reasons, I have never forgotten and still brings a smile to my face…
Borys: “Would you like to come to my Mum’s, for dinner tonight?”
Mr K: “Oh, I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, be buried in thy
eyes… and moreover, yes, I will go with thee to thy mother’s!” *cheeky grin*
But over time, the sonnets and pithy word play disappears and the day to day grind of him bringing home the bacon, and me pretending to cook it, and us subsequently arguing over who is going to clean up it up… kind saps one’s energy for quoting Shakespeare at your beloved right out of you, for some reason. Why is that, I wonder?
That the longer you are together, and the more comfortable you are with someone, and the more time you spend in each other’s company – the less effort we seem to put into the little things that amuse one another? And instead we fall into a happy, but less heady, equilibrium where the romantic gestures and pithy one-liners from ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ only come out for Valentines Day cards or perhaps over breakfasts on your wedding anniversary! Sigh… it’s just unacceptable.
There should be more wooing within marriage, I say!
There should be more flowery speeches, more grandiose language, and more theatrical declarations of one’s intentions to dine at one’s mother in law’s home! Oh, by the way gentlemen before you get carried away wooing your ladies with bounteous and beneficent declarations of undying love and devotion… beware of cheap imitations!
