Our Menagerie

We have a full house these days.

This is Linus. He's what a random guy at the beach last year called "the Shaq of golden retrievers." He's a month shy of 4 years old, and he's enormous. And acts like he's six months old and still weighs 20 pounds.

^ Case in point. ^

Trout is our old lady. She's going on 11. Just two weeks after Cory and I moved in together, my college friend brought her to us from her grandparent's farm. Her mama was a barn mouser. She's been a good girl to us for a long time and I hope she sticks around for a long time to come. She's slowing down a bit but she's still a weirdo, which means she fits in well at our house.

This is Dexter. He's the new guy. Not sure how old he is, but we think he's just about a year. He came to us through my sister, who works at a vet clinic. He came to her through the undercarriage of a car, where he held on for dear life while it drove 16 miles down the interstate. And he's none the worse for wear today (besides some tiny little scars on his pads where he was burned by the hot car). When we got him we called him Tiny, but now he's two pounds heavier than Trout. But we still call him Tiny.
He's going to be a blood donor. And it is super hard to take photos of black kittens.












Today I took our menagerie to the vet all by myself. (Work is still super busy for us, but C has it worse than I do so he went into the office while I took the two hours to fix everyone up.) We had a big list of things to do for all three. Linus has worms and a yeast infection in his ears. Trout has an upper respiratory infection. Dexter needs to be vaccinated. I was pretty sure I was going to have a heck of a time wrangling two cat carriers and a giant dog but it actually wasn't so bad. Trout puked and then peed in her carrier on the way there; I'm not sure if she was carsick or stressed or what but the poor thing had to stand awkwardly in there for half the car ride so she didn't have to touch any of her accidents. Linus weighs 99.3 pounds, which is way more than he should, so they took a blood sample to see if he has thyroid problems. Dexter was the only one who came away unscathed; I'm going to talk to the blood bank who wants his blood and see if they're going to vaccinate him for me instead.

The doctor offered to help me carry everything back out to the car, but I declined (it wasn't all that bad).  She said "it looks like if you ever have triplets, you'll be able to deal with them super easy!" Heh.

Yoga Too?

Lately my brain has been flitting from one idea to another. I think it's because today is Black Friday in my association; when I get to process thousands of dollars and hundreds of registrations to our annual conference. It's relatively brainless work, so my mind wanders. And lately it's been wandering around my health. I've been drawn to yoga this past week. Not sure why. It could have something to do with how busy and stressful work has been, which is reaching fever pitch as the time before launch shrinks. It could have to do with my general wanting-to-be-healthier feelings that ebb and flow (and right now are flowing). And then last weekend when I was playing around in Pinterest I clicked on a random pin and clicked through to the webpage and clicked on a random link - and ended up watching a keynote speech from the Fertility Planit show in LA.

Realistically, it didn't hold any magic solution or insight, and I don't believe it will cure our problem with infertility, but it did make me start thinking about yoga again as just a healthy lifestyle. I also had never heard of Tara Stiles, and I like her approach - and the fact that she has a million videos on YouTube so I can start slow with 5-10 minute flows. I think it would be easy to discount yoga for fertility as a crock, and not bother, but I can't make decisions based only on my uterus and not think about the rest of my self.

I did yoga several years ago, for almost a year, and it was great fun. But I only did my one-hour-once-a-week thing and the rest of my life was business as usual (so I guess the yoga center was like my church, and I was a bad parishioner). I didn't eat any differently, I didn't feel any differently... I was pretty proud about getting into a full downward dog though. But I realized at some point (probably after I stopped going to the studio) that once a week was not the way it needs to happen.

So I've started easing myself back into yoga, in my bedroom for 10 minutes a night. And hopefully in a few months, after work dies down, I'll be able to start going to the studio again.

How Far We've Come

Yesterday I was talking to my coworker about infertility a bit, and she asked if I thought insurance would soon cover infertility treatments. Coincidentally, later that day was when Representative Phil Gingrey publicly perpetrated the misinformation of the causes of infertility, while at the same time supporting Todd Akin's foot-in-mouth comments about "legitimate rape" (or at least, said Akin was "partly right").

I think I'm most upset about these comments for two reasons.

The first is that he is a House representative. Now, it's not unusual for people in government to "misspeak" or to spread misinformation. But when that misinformation is the basis of potential policy that will affect my body, it concerns me.

Two, it's that he was a GYNECOLOGIST! He was a doctor who specialized in women's bodies! He should know first-hand what kinds of issues women's reproductive systems can have. And the fact that he is spreading misinformation not only as a representative of government but also as someone seemingly well educated in a related field - it infuriates me.

After I read the article, I struck up the discussion of insurance coverage with my coworker again. As long as there are people in government who believe that women are just plain wrong if they think that infertility is an actual disease, there's no way insurance will cover treatments. As long as people like Gingrey perpetuate the myth that "all there is to getting pregnant is to relax," insurance will be more likely to cover $10 bottles of wine before they cover $15,000 IVF.

At least take that $14,990 and send Gingrey back to medical school before he opens his mouth again.

Heh

I keep joking around that I wish I could be reimbursed for all the money I wasted on birth control that I didn't need, but I never stopped to think about how much it was. I can't quite remember what my copay was since I stopped taking it so long ago, but I took a guess and it came out to about $5400. Heh. That's actually less than I thought it'd be!