Anti-Infertility Bills

The legislation in Arizona is currently determining how to proceed with two bills that are fundamentally anti-infertility. I won't bore you with all of the details, because really, those who aren't dealing with infertility aren't going to find it all that interesting. But, I will say that if you have been previously, or are now so inclined to write to your representatives this is a good time to do so. Here is a copy of the letter that I have emailed and faxed to every single Arizona Representative. If you would like more information, let me know.


Apr 13, 2010

Representative Doug Quelland
Capitol Complex- House, Room 128
1700 West Washington Street
Phoenix, AZ 85007-2890

Dear Representative Quelland,

As a resident of the great state of Arizona I urge you to oppose two
bills, SB 1306 and SB 1307, which will make it harder for couples with infertility to have a family.

I am aware of amendments that have been made to the bills, but THEY HAVE NOT BEEN "FIXED." They are still anti-infertility
treatment and anti-family. I strongly oppose these bills and I will be watching how you vote.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) has been practiced in this country for
almost 30 years, bringing more than 50,000 babies to overjoyed couples each year in the U.S. alone, and something approaching 3 million babies worldwide. This medical treatment is mainstream, medically proven, and accepted.

Donor egg treatment, similarly, has been practiced for more than 20 years all across the country. It is the standard of care for many
couples, especially young women with premature ovarian failure and women who have undergone lifesaving chemotherapy to beat cancer. For such women, if they ever want to become pregnant and have a baby with their husbands, donor egg therapy may be their only hope.

Yet, suddenly the Arizona legislature has decided to single out these life-giving, pro-family medical treatments from among all others and subject them to a new regime of Governmental restriction. I urge you to oppose these bills.

SB 1307 harms us because:
-- it sends our doctors to prison if a microscopic embryo is
"harmed;" this will drive doctors from Arizona and mean no
hope for people with the disease of infertility;
-- it contains vague language which could be interpreted to limit
treatment options such as embryo cryopreservation, a key tool in
minimizing the risk of multiple births which can be unhealthy for
mother and baby;
-- it stops progress on research to better treat infertility;
--- it makes it hard if not impossible for infertility patients to
donate any unused embryos to research, which is the preference for many
post-infertility couples;
-- it accords unprecedented protections to microscopic embryos (policed
by the threat of prison for doctors) that could plainly interfere with
the practice of IVF in Arizona.

SB 1306 interferes with donor egg treatment by:
-- imposing burdensome and inaccurate informed consent obligations on
doctors who offer donor egg treatment;
-- threatening doctors with loss of their medical licenses and prison
if they fail to follow the new informed consents to the letter;
-- limiting or outlawing valuable research involving eggs that could
help treat infertility, and laying the groundwork for further
restrictions by describing egg donation in dehumanizing terms.

If embryo cryopreservation is prohibited, Arizona will become the Triplet, Quadruplet, or Quintuplet Capital of the country, as women will be forced to transfer all the embryos they may produce in a cycle.
Those high order multiple births will wreak havoc on health care costs, not to mention the poor maternal and child outcomes that would likely result.

Alternatively, in the absence of embryo cryopreservation, doctors could be restricted to allowing only a few eggs to be fertilized so only a
few embryos are created in which case patients and doctors will likely
just leave the state rather than receive substandard medicine at
astronomic costs.

My husband and I are currently dealing with the devastation of
infertility, and we know first-hand of the difficulties it brings. I
urge you to reconsider making this process any more difficult for my
family and for all of those dealing with the process of creating a
family in the presence of infertility.

On behalf of the more than 100,000 Arizona citizens who are contending
with the heartbreak of infertility, I respectfully urge you to oppose
SB 1306 and SB 1307 when they come before the House for a vote.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Christina Park

Sweet therapy

It's amazing the things that people use in place of cognitive behavioral therapy: drugs, sex, shopping, food, alcohol, even working out can become destructive in an addictive behavior pattern.

Last year when I had a bad bout of costochondritis, an ER doctor originally diagnosed me with anxiety issues. It didn't feel right to me, but I'm a pretty high strung person so I didn't completely disagree. Knowing that if I was manifesting such serious psychosomatic symptoms I needed help from an expert, I took it upon myself to go to a psychiatrist. Although she agreed that I have anxious tendencies, and she offered me some new coping mechanisms for that, she also diagnosed me with sanity and tried to fire me twice in the last year. I only saw her every few weeks, and each time she tried to tell me that there was nothing else she could offer me, I changed the subject. Unfortunately, people with chronic pain disorders are often called crazy, acutely sensitive, or even hypochondriacs, and I wanted that ace up my sleeve should some doctor again decide that I am simply insane and manifesting my own pain problems. It's easy to tell them that you're in the care of a mental health professional and she deems you completely sane.

Unfortunately, I have officially been booted from the shrink. She told me that she will be happy to consult with any future doctor on my mental health, but that she was offering me no further benefit.

In truth, she wasn't offering me much benefit to begin with, because I choose to cope with my stress in an unusual way: I turn into a modern day hybrid of June Cleaver and Betty Crocker (who listens to Flogging Molly while baking).

With fertility treatments causing me to be moodier than John Mayer, my oven has been getting quite the workout lately. And thanks to our amazing fruit and vegetable co-op, I have had no shortage of beautiful spring produce to use up.

In the last few days I have gotten up, hit the gym, and then come home to don my beautiful pink retro polka dotted apron. I have baked double fudge stuffed devil's food cupcakes with cream cheese icing, a dozen sausage/egg/cheese/potato breakfast burritos, a gallon of fresh strawberry jam, loaves of strawberry bread and banana bread, and now I'm starting on apple cinnamon monkey bread for the boy to take to work tomorrow. I have no idea what my next session will involve, but I have a basket of sweet potatoes, apples, a pineapple and two yellow squash to use up soon (Iron Chef anyone?).

Unfortunately for my poor husband who has been amping up his workouts lately, none of my favorite coping mechanisms are exactly low calorie. Sure, I substitute wheat flour and splenda here and there, but I doubt it makes up for the pounds of chocolate, butter, chorizo, or sour cream I use.

The girl scouts who dropped off cases of cookies to the base today to thank our troops are also not helping his cause.

So while Tiger Woods and Jesse James chose very different 'addictions' (I don't believe this for a minute, I'm just being sarcastic about these creeps), I still didn't choose a very healthy one. Perhaps there are people out there who are addicted to meditation, or volunteering, or knitting hats for homeless eskimo children, but we each choose our path.

Mine looks like this:






Tasty path, right?

April showers don't let me down.

Okay, so it's been months since I've blogged.

I read other's blogs with such envy as they manage to make cooking dinner and taking out the trash news-worthy, while I struggle to figure out what in our lives would make good blogging fodder.

In a little less than three weeks we leave for our Caribbean cruise and I am both excited for vacation and terrified that the bikinis that I must wear will be hideously unflattering. Prior to now, I would have just stopped eating for a few weeks beforehand, dropped ten pounds and been done with it. But, it turns out that starvation mode isn't so good for the body when you're trying to get knocked up so I've been sticking to my promised 1200 calories a day and putting in time at the gym a little more often. Our fertility specialist won't treat us if my BMI falls below 19, and right now I'm at exactly 20, so unfortunately I'm not allowed to lose much more. Although I'd love to get back to my high school weight, I am happy to now be a little lighter than the weight I was when I was diagnosed with cancer five years ago (FIVE - YAY!). If you didn't see me in the year or two that followed I will just let you know that hormone therapy packs on the pounds! At the highest point I think I had put on THIRTY pounds! Yikes. Not ever being heavy before, it was tough to take off, and especially hard to do the healthy way since Corey isn't a fan of me only eating every other day. I have about four more pounds that I'd like to lose, and then I'll be done.

We are trucking along with the infertility treatment. I will spare the gory details because not only is no one interested but me, but it also involves a lot of acronyms, drama, emotion, and disgusting things you'd probably rather not know about Corey or I. So, just rest assured that we are doing whatever we can medically do.

Corey was officially promoted last week. I know it seems like forever ago that he found out he was getting promoted, but the Air Force takes it's sweet time and does things in a particular order so he was one of the last groups to get promoted. Although it doesn't change things much in his particular job, it's still nice for him to see an additional stripe on his uniform and it's another step on our ladder.

Easter was quiet around here, but we will have an eventful April so it was kind of nice to stay home, catch up on episodes of LOST and chill with the puppy (who is almost not a puppy anymore). Next weekend is NASCAR which means that my parents will be down working for their charity, and our one year anniversary is Sunday, which means that I have exactly six days to figure out what kind of lovely paper central present I am getting for my darling husband. Do nudie magazines count for a paper present?

In the spirit of living in the moment

After reading what I wrote in my second to last post (let's all just ignore the mental breakdown that was my most recent) Corey and I sat down and had a little chat. By the grace of God, we managed to be on exactly the same page about things and made a decision: we are going on vacation.

Had I known exactly how stressful real vacation planning is, I might have rethought our conclusion, but a week later I am happy to say that we have researched, re-researched, compared, and agreed on a location as well as booked it, paid for it, and mentally packed for it.

We are going on a seven day cruise of the Western Caribbean with stops in Belize, Honduras, the Cayman Islands, and Cozumel, Mexico. Clear water and warm, humid air never sounded so sweet.

We did decide on Carnival cruise lines, which we're a bit leery about given the party ship claim to fame they have, but the fact of the matter is that I somehow became inherently cheap and had we decided to go on Princess we would have gone with a less expensive interior room. Granted, many people stay in those rooms and things go well for them, but let's just say I've seen Titanic and the people with the suites get on the rescue boats first. So, we decided to ride in style on Carnival and take the money we'll save and use it on scuba diving the great barrier reef and zip line rides through the Belizean jungle.

The money vacating our savings account has bothered me much less than I thought it would, and I can honestly say that I think the memories will be worth every penny.

Now I just have to figure out how my parents will survive eight days of their Grand-dog, the Beagador Crown Prince of the Western Hemisphere. May the Lord be with them.

I want a baby!

I don't have the time or the emotional energy to elaborate on this, but in the spirit of sending thoughts into the universe a la "The Secret", I am saying this out loud (or as out loud as one can get through a computer keyboard anyway).

I want peanut butter and jelly stains on half of my clothes, mud pies on my living room carpet, sleep deprivation, sweet pea puree in my hair, and half of my savings account spent on Pottery Barn baby furniture that never gets used because I can't bear the thought of the kid sleeping more than ten feet from my bed in a pack and play.

If I have to hear one more story of someone we know accidentally getting knocked up when they didn't want kids to begin with I'm going to drive directly to Gymboree and punch someone. Damn breeders.

That is all.

Walking the line

I'm a planner. I'm a super, mega, anal, OCD, planner of everything. I have binders in every room of the house containing daily to-do lists for the next week, savings schedules for this year, grocery lists, weekly menus, gifts to buy for the next decade...you get the picture.

I wasn't always this way and had you asked me five years ago whether or not I would own ten notebooks of purposefully varying sizes and colors for specific cataloguing of daily activities, I would have looked at you like you were mad and screamed something about never turning into my mother. But in this way, I very much have. And for the most part, I cringe to admit, it is highly effective and makes parts of my life a cinch.

What it doesn't do is nurture the freckle faced twenty-something that I have hidden inside. She yearns to break free and leave town on a whim, belting out her favorite song through the sunroof while the wind tangles her hair. She wants to leave fertility treatments and pest control appointments in the back of her mind and focus on the way things feel, taste, sound and look.

There are people (I know there are as I have blog stalked them) that take off unexpectedly to go on trips. Maybe they decide to go to an amusement park for the weekend, or maybe they quit their jobs and travel through Europe, staying in hostels for a year. I LOVE these people. And even more so, I want to BE these people. I want to wake up Saturday morning, throw an extra pair of jeans and my toothbrush in a bag and take the boy and his dog to the beach. I want to take ten grand out of our savings account and head for Bora Bora just because we can. I want to go to the airport and get on the next flight, no matter where it's bound.

Sometimes, generally in the foggy haze between asleep and awake, I convince myself that I can be this person. In a split second I assure my conscious self that I am capable of throwing my notebook out the window and going wherever the wind takes us. Then slowly, I feel the cloud lift and reality settle with great density upon my shoulders. Sometimes I even go so far as to make a list of places we could go spontaneously. Then I realize the irony of my actions, ball the paper up into my palm, and open my small brown binder to focus on the tasks for the day.

Very recently, a man I went to high school with passed away. I wasn't close with him, then or now, but that doesn't mean that his death didn't impact me. The fact is that he died of natural causes, as ridiculous as that feels to say about a 28 year old. His lovely wife is having to endure not only his loss, but also the loss of both of her parents in the last year as well. It sounds like a movie you'd never want to watch, and it brings me physical pain that all anyone can do for her now is pray. And as I pray for her I think about what she must miss about her husband and what she must wish they had done with the time they didn't know was dwindling away. I'm certain she doesn't long for more time to do laundry, or wish that the house was cleaner that week. I doubt she yearns for time to move backwards so they could put more money in savings or succeed in more lucrative careers.

If I were her I would long for more weekends on the beach, doing nothing. I would wish we'd used up the forty days of vacation time the boy has. I would thirst to get the time back spent scrubbing muddy paw prints off the microfiber sofa and instead go outside and play with the dog in the rain.

I made several resolutions this year, all catalogued neatly in the blue folder on the kitchen island, but there is one predominant one that I'm adding to the list: "To Identify the Line".

The line between too perfectionistic and too apathetic. Between laundry washed, dried, folded, starched and hung according to color, and piled up in the corner to petrify. Between never taking vacation time and going AWOL to live off the grid in Brazil. Between putting every penny in savings for some yet-to-be-named emergency and blowing it all on Jimmy Choos and mint condition Nintendo NES games. Somewhere between those poles there is a vast gray line with a little less structure and pattern and a little more complexity and delicious chaos.

I want to walk that line.

Post Xmas wrapup

I'm so bad at blogging for the same reason that I'm horrible at taking pictures during interesting things - I'm too busy DOING the interesting things. Okay, maybe things aren't always interesting, but they are almost always busy.

At the beginning of November Sprocket helped me put away the Halloween decorations and get out the winter things:

That was pretty exhausting so he got a pillow and a blanket and took a little nap. He thinks he's a person:



Then Corey and I did what we do each year to get into the holiday spirit. We put together our Operation Christmas Child boxes. I love this charity so much and we have a lot of fun putting boxes together thinking of the children who will be getting a Christmas present thanks to this wonderful organization.




This was also exhausting for my boys, so they cuddled up and took another nap. I am in love with this picture because a) it's the cutest thing this side of a baby in footie pajamas, and b) this is the first time I was actually able to sneak up with the camera and snap a shot without waking one or both of my guys up:



We spent Thanksgiving at my parents' house in Pinetop and enjoyed ourselves although we really missed my baby brother's company as he had to work. Unfortunately, I spend most of our time in Pinetop with terrible migraines thanks to the altitude so I don't have many pictures of the Thanksgiving feast itself, but rest assured it was lovely. Sprocket doesn't get much people food, but we have established that while he is a fan of turkey, broccoli elicits a much different response:

Last week my best friend in the world finished up her degree and was commissioned as an officer in the Navy, so I made my way out to San Diego to celebrate with her and attend the presentation. Unfortunately, both of my guys were sick (Corey with the stomach flu, and Sprocket was on a thirst strike until we bought him a cat water fountain) so I had to make the trip solo, but it was wonderful to see her and spend some time with her lovely family.





Once again we spent Christmas with my family in Pinetop (a ritual that I think will be changed next year as my altitude headache reared its ugly head in the worst way), and enjoyed having another white Christmas. Sprocket wasn't quite sure what to think of the snow at first, but after a few tentative bites he declared it both entertaining and delicious and spent quite a bit of time running amok in the back and front yards.



I think that catches you up on most things that have taken place in the last six weeks or so. Of course there have been other amazing, or disappointing, or confusing things, but I'll leave those for another post on another day. Right now I'm just enjoying the post Christmas high and the peace and quiet that can only mean that the puppy is taking another one of his naps on the couch. If only I could find the camera.