Deal with it? Avoidance is a coping mechanism of sorts.

Posted on June 14, 2009 by borysSNORC

My house which until recently felt like it was falling down – well perhaps not so much falling down as being ripped to pieces – is starting to take on a more ‘houselike’ appearance again with the weekend’s addition of some wall frames and trusses etc. Erick the Half a Bee is fantastic. I can’t believe that he’s doing all this for us. I don’t know anyone else in my entire life who would do something quite so generous as to help us build an entire room onto our house…. it’s a little bewildering really as he seems to be missing that whole "What’s in it for me?" that most people seem to have come preprogrammed with.

It’s been great spending so much time with him too. He’s pretty easy going and a lot of fun… and cos he was my favourite cousin growing up we have quite a few ‘Remember whens…’ to mull over. But… (there had to be one coming didn’t there) there’s been a recent development which has added a whole new level of stress to the already stressful building endeavour.

Erick the Half a Bee and his wife are Foster Carers and a couple of months ago they were entrusted with the care of a newborn baby girl whose mother is some sort of crack whore. Okay slight exaggeration… she’s some sort of methamphetamine junkie but you get the idea (bit of background – this woman has had her three previous children removed from her care at birth in similar circumstances I understand and has several times abandoned rehab programs).

Anyway, they were charged with the little baby directly after the necessary detox period until the Mother (and I use the term loosely) decided to go into rehab (yet again) and I’m not sure why, but the little one was given back to her to be her ‘motivation and incentive to get herself cleaned up’. To make a long story short the Mother (strangely enough) ended up failing in spectacular fashion when it came to meeting the demands of care taking for a newborn whilst trying to beat drug addiction and the baby has ended up back at home with Erick the Half a Bee and his wife for an indefinte period at this point…. luckily for the little one I think.

Now to the crux of the issue. I don’t want a mewling (there’s a word you just don’t get to use a lot) infant in my house. In the last decade I think there’s been maybe one or two of my friends for whom I have been genuinely happy when they’ve gone and done the breeding thing… but as for the rest, those have required the positively exhausting socially acceptable exercise of using the expected ‘I’m so happy for you’ smiley face to be in situ at all times. Mr K had asked Erick the Half a Bee if the baby would be coming down with him on the weekend as he knows the little blighters still push my buttons (though fuck knows why after all this time the angst lingers on) and he got a reply that went something like this ‘If Borys wants her room finished she’ll just have to deal with it!" which sounds nothing like Erick the Half a Bee and everything like his opinionated wife. Opinionated is normally a good thing – hell I’m about as opinionated as they come but I was taken aback by the complete lack of sensitivity in the statement given the situation.

So they turned up on Friday evening. Thankfully the innocent little offender was asleep…. but when I stumbled out of bed on the Saturday and was confronted with a dirty nappy on the kitchen bench, an empty baby bottle near the kettle, another one on the coffee table in the living room, a can of formula (some of which was spilt on the bench), dummy, bunny rugs and other baby like acoutrements around the place I stood there shivering, looking around and shaking my head and thought to myself – "Self… it’s time to get the fuck out of Dodge!"

So I took the Small Child to soccer which is not a fun endeavour when you’ve had hardly any sleep and there’s no decent seating for love or money at the soccer fields. After that I went to K-Mart to buy a laundry basket, some sneakers for the Small Child and other bits and bobs. Then I went to get my car handwashed which cos it was Saturday took well over an hour or more (what a pity). Then home for a quick sandwich before taking the Small Child and his little JackAss of a friend to the cinema to see Night at the Museum 2 only to come home quickly shower and change before heading out to the Fur and Feather party at Monkey Manor… whereupon I got mightly smashed.

All up I think I may have spent a total of two hours at home and all because I didn’t want to be dealing with a baby in the house. Pain, depression, anxiety, panic and all other good things that have been happening in my life of late haven’t left a great deal in reserve for dealing with infants at the moment.

Though in truth… it’s been almost four years since my last IVF cycle so puny humans really shouldn’t bother me anymore right? When is this shit going to go away?!?!

Frakkin’ toasters.

Posted on April 28, 2009 by borysSNORC

Is it only Tuesday? I wanted to write on Sunday night about a performance art piece I did on my front lawn but then got distracted by …. ummm …. tits! *shrug* I don’t know… can’t remember too easily distracted to remember what distracted me.

I was having a rather heated discussion with Mr K about how he perceives that I have a tendency to get a picture in my head of ‘how things should be’ and won’t budge from that picture no matter what. In particular this was in relation to IVF and how he felt I had always had this ideal in my mind of what our family should be and he felt this is why I continued on IVF for so long and with such dogged determination. He also seemed to think that I’ve never been able to just accept the way things are and that having the one Small Child was pretty damn good and he felt that I’ve never been happy with the way things panned out. He also pointed out that he felt I went into every new cycle with a fatalistic negativity that it was never going to work and it was probably this combined with other external factors (such as how it was sending us broke and how my family was dealing with my Dad and MND) that probably contributed significantly to the continual failures.

He’s probably right on some counts. I am very focused and determined when I put my mind to something and am rarely dissuaded from my chosen course of action voluntarily. Yes, I am quite aware that I am a stubborn bitch when it comes to the things that are important to me. The negativity he felt I was displaying was really me attempting (probably rather poorly) to manage my expectations. You see, the IVF co-ordinators tell you to see counsellors all the time, particularly after you’ve had a lot of failed cycles and one of the things those counsellors keep telling you is to try to be ‘realistically optimistic’ – it’s like some sort of fucking mantra with those people. Being ‘realistically optimistic’ is just a euphemistic phrase really that means "don’t go getting your hopes up too high so as to avoid crushing disappointment month after month". So to-may-toe… tom-art-toe on that one.

But at some point during the conversation he made an analogy to my always having a perfect picutre in my head and not being able to accept what I have or what could be achieved now… to how I make purchase decisions. In particular he compared it to how I shop for appliances. Yes… men (and this one on that day) really are capable of being that fucking stupid sometimes. My attitude towards IVF and my desire for a perfect white picket fence nucelar family is the same as my reluctance to buy an appliance for the home that doesn’t totally suit ‘my picture in my head of what we need’…. apparently!!! In particular he mentioned how I’ve been ‘dithering’ over buying a new toaster because ‘the perfect one I wanted was too expensive and that I’d rather go without than accept something less that what fits the picture in my head’.

It’s not a tumour… it’s a toaster.

He tells me that my reluctance to buy a sub-standard item is due to my inability to accept anything less than that which is perfect. At which point, I guess it’s safe to say I … err… went bat shit crazy for a bit there. Oh. My. Gawd!!! Comparing how I coped with one of the most difficult challenges of my adult life to how I choose to buy household appliances? Is he on fucking crack?!?!?!

Naturally… I replied very calmly that I feel my consumer habits are very considered and savvy… and yes I do have a tendency to shop around to find items that will best suit my needs and I also tend to then choose products that I feel are going to be of sufficient quality to satisfactorily perform their designed function for the maximum duration possible and preferrably for the best prices available. Read – I told him I don’t like buying fucking cheap arse crap for the house and am normally happy to wait for good quality stuff to come on sale rather than waste good money on shite that will die as soon as the warranty expires and what’s wrong with trying to be thrifty and save a bit of money anyway?!?!?

At which point there may have been some slamming of doors and driving off in a huff to return half an hour later with the ridiculously expensive, brand new toaster in hand which was rapidly unpackaged and pluggged in and the old (still fucntioning I might add) toaster was then turned into a well executed defenestration performance art piece which and subsequenly an installation exposition item of sorts on the front lawn….

… where it yet remains. Viewings by appointment… price on application.
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IVF mission: one healthy baby to one healthy mother.

Posted on February 4, 2009 by borysSNORC

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.

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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.
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Totally self indulgent, long winded post – I’d skip it if I were you.

Posted on January 21, 2009 by borysSNORC

I’ve started trying to write this paragraph four times now (this is the fifth attempt) and each time I have deleted the sentence to have another go at trying to get my thoughts out. Today it’s been two years since my Dad passed away and I’ve been feeling really unsettled for the last couple of weeks realizing that so much time has passed already. Last year, I was still feeling very melancholy and was trying hard to remember my Dad the way he was before MND (Lou Gehrig’s disease) but this year, I’ve been quite wrapped up in what changes the last two years have bought to my life.

Being of a conservative generation and possessing a calm, steady and even temperament – my Dad wasn’t an overly demonstrative man so whenever he talked to us on personal or emotional topics it always carried significant weight and usually left an indelible impression on his daughters. Before my Dad’s illness had deteriorated to the point where he lost his ability to talk, he sat me down and told me that he was very worried for me with all the IVF treatments we had been going through (Yes – my Dad was the one in the room with an insidious terminal disease and he was concerned for MY wellbeing) and told me how much it pained him to see us going through the continual round of surgeries and hormone treatments, the increasing financial burden and the emotional devastation of repeated failures. At the time I didn’t know how to respond except to try and reassure him that it wasn’t that bad and that we were holding up okay.

A couple of months after that I had another discussion with my father about IVF and I told him that we were giving it away as we had decided we’d done all we could… and I lied to him and told him I have the Small Child and Mr K and that our little family was all that I wanted it to be. He seemed visibly relieved to hear that I’d given up trying to have a second child… but the truth of the matter was that Mr K and I had decided to put it on hold until after my Dad’s inevitable death. The physical and emtional stress of IVF, the grief of a recent miscarriage and three years of pain watching my mother struggle and my father slowly die certainly took its toll.

Dad passed away quietly in his sleep early on a Sunday morning 21 January 2007. My Mum called me at 5am to tell me he was gone. Unfortunately, I had been at a party until 2am and was still legally way over the limit so I had to wake Mr K and the Small Child so Mr K could drive me to my parents home. When I got there my mother was in tears, my older sister BigSal was likewise messy and my younger sister was in her car driving up from Bryon Bay. I was feeling overtired, overwrought, still judgement impaired from the wine the night before and somehow – totally numb. By the time my younger sister arrived she, my Mum and BigSal had all been crying for hours…. while I had been phoning the extended family, the funeral directors. It wasn’t until I called Edouardo at nearly midday that I felt myself become tearful. This was in no small measure attributable to the distance that had sprung up between us (his wife hates us) and his obvious sorrow at not being around during my Dad’s last years. It was an emotionally draining day – one which I wish I had faced without the haze of sleep deprivation and a hangover.

The next day, Monday was the day I was scheduled to start my first full time job in many years. Strangely enough the position was with Goliath, the very same organization my father had worked at for 37 years. I mulled over and over whether I should show up or not amidst all the emotional turmoil… when I did finally decide to turn up for work on that Monday morning, it was largely due to my Dad’s pragmatic outlook – he was never one to sit around feeling sorry for himself and he wouldn’t applaud me for doing so. I knew I could sit around with the family watching them continue to cry or I could go do something useful… in this regard I am just like my Dad.

I remember that first day feeling really rather shell shocked and wondering if our friends and family world would think me a heartless baggage for showing up at work the day after my father died. I vividly remember thinking ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ while we filled out a pile of paperwork. I remember having to tell the Induction trainers that I was going to need time off in that first week to meet with the funeral directors on Tuesday and the whole day off to attend my father’s funeral on the Thursday. I remember the way they looked at me like I had suddenly sprouted a second head or something and said ‘should you even be here?’ I remember assuring them that I was fine so long as I didn’t have to talk about it…. to this day I’ve wondered why I never had the nervous breakdown I feel I so rightly deserved back then.

I remember spending my evenings that week feeling overwhelmed at what I’d gotten myself into with that job (I was hired to be a Wireless Broadband Consultant… me! With zero IT experience!) I also spent my evenings that week putting together a slide show of photos of my father that I had been collecting since his diagnosis. I felt the need to remind everyone that Dad was not always sick and immobile and stuck in that fucking wheelchair. I wanted to remind everyone that Dad climbed mountains, went white water rafting, fixed cars, loved camping, laid bricks, cooked a mean BBQ, liked a beer and a laugh. I wanted everyone to remember him as he was…. not the shell of himself he had become from MND. It was really important to me to try and overshadow the sad memories of his last years by reminding everyone what he was like before.

I put that slideshow to music and burned it to a disc that we could take to the chapel for his memorial. The music was The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ as this song reminded me of my Dad going skydiving when he could barely still walk. It reminded me of how he hung in there doing as much as he could while he still could. On Wedesday before the funeral I shared it with my Mum and my sisters and my sister BigSal didn’t like the song. I said it was done and I didn’t have the energy or the motivation to redo it. She then did something that I don’t think I’ve fully forgiven her for… she complained to our mother who then came to try and convince me to change the song. I still can’t believe she dragged my Mum into such a petty thing on the day she was burying her husband. It is beyond belief. In hindsight it may have been her way of trying to control things, something, anything during a time when everything felt out of control… I don’t know. I do know that instead of spending the morning of my father’s funeral with my family at my parent’s home I was stuck at my PC redoing the video because my sister wasn’t coping. Instead she wanted it set to Bert Kaempfert as it was one of my Dad’s favourites but it’s was so 70s lounge music uptempo and all solemnity was suddenly lost. So I redid it a third time to Jeff Buckleuy’s ‘Hallelujiah’. As you can imagine it was heartwrenching and left now a dry eye in the place, not even Fr Ray managed to hold back the tears – Fr Ray who has had the misfortune to preside over the funerals of many of his friends over the years.

Through some damn miracle, though I know not how, I managed to get through that week, and the following weeks of training at Goliath. I was working ostensibly to help pay down some of our IVF debts. I was supposed to be working to give us a boost in the lifestyle department (we hadn’t had a family holiday for years) and I was supposed to be going back to IVF and my ten little embryos that I have in storage in 2008…. that was until a stupid woman in a fancy RX8 failed to stop and rudely ripped the rug out from right under my feet sending me headlong back into a world of unending pain, stupor inducing drugs, restlessness, hopelessness and (I admit it) depression.

So with my father gone now two years am I thiking about him? Or am I wrapped up in my own petty problems? I know he’s been more on my mind over the last few weeks… mostly the little things over the holidays . I’ve been thinking about my Mum a great deal and wondering how she was feeling whilst being reluctant to broach the subject when I spoke with her earlier. But today mostly I’ve been thinking about how the last two years feel like they’ve been wasted. I haven’t been able to work since the fucking moron with the RX8 damn near killed us. I haven’t been back to IVF as we had planned and I don’t honestly think my body could with a pregnancy, nor do I think a baby could survive my ridiculous pharmacological regime.

Right about now, I really wish my Dad was around to figuratively slap me upside the head with some sound advice or a wet haddock… which ever was nearest to hand. 😐
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Dry your eyes Dorothy.

Posted on October 30, 2008 by borysSNORC

MD was in town for work this week and has bought his lovely wife and new baby with him, so naturally we had to get together for dinner….any chance to get the original Dinner Monkey to the table I say. On their arrival I was almost immediately offered a cuddle with the new baby. MDJr is a totally gorgeous baby – calm and happy, such a beautiful little guy. There’s something about newborns that give off the appearance of absolute perfection. I felt a little apprehensive and wasn’t sure I wanted to hold him… babies seem to leave me off balance now more often than not and I guess the defense mechanism against this has seen me taking to avoiding babies altogether over the last few years. Mostly this is because it dredges up so many shitty emotions about infertility, IVF and miscarriages… grief, pain, frustraton, feelings of failure and worst of all – jealousy.

I try really hard to push it all down but it keeps rearing it’s ugly head whether I like it or not. For quite a while when i returned to IVF to attempt to have a second child many of my friends (six of them to be precise) including my sister BigSal were starting their families. As each one of them fell pregnant I was genuinely happy for them as I was confident (hrumph… delusional) that I too would be pregnant soon. But as time wore on and more and more IVF procedures failed and their pregnancies turned into fat happy babies and I was still unable to conceive it got harder and harder to be happy for my friends. Then one of my friends, Diamond Des was first, announced she was having a second child… and Goddess Bek announced the imminent arrival of her second… and then BigSal, BurnieSnail and HH all seemed to follow suit. Before I knew it all six of them had delivered their second fat happy babies and I was still on the IVF rollercoaster trying to conceive four odd years (and more thousands of dollars than I care to tally) later.

And that’s right about when my ability to fein happiness for my friends totally deserted me and quickly on it’s heels the socially unacceptable bitter jealousy started to emerge. I spent a lot of time thinking on useless questions wondering why it’s so easy for everyone else. My IVF specialist was totally perplexed and told me that my case was keeping him awake at night. I had unbelievably emotional reactions to reading or hear stories of total strangers mistreating their infants… so much so that I stopped watching local news.

Within the year after that two other friends fell pregnant accidentally (and happily) which just tore me to pieces. Accidentally? How the fuck does that happen? The concept of pregnancy being a result of sex and physical intimacy had become so foreign that the idea of it not being planned to the nth degree seems laughable.

And everytime I think I’ve burried the whole thing something unexpected brings it to the fore once more. Whether it’s the Small Child asking me if he can have a brother or hearing that yet another friend is having a baby… it just dredges it all up again. But when MD told me that he and his lady were expecting a baby I was genuinely happy for them, excited even. I was really happy to see him so happy. It was the first time in years I felt that way for one of my friends and I was beginning to think maybe I was finally putting it behind me…. you know, accepting my little family the way it is, stop chasing rainbows and moving right along.

But after tonight when I held that perfect little person for all of about a minute and a half before making a fool of myself and bursting into tears… I came to the sad realization that I’m deluding myself. Unfortunately, it still ain’t over.

the Small Child … at four months
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