I Have Several Things to Say

First, I'm going to attention-whore.

As you know (maybe), my nephew, the Duckling, is due in about a month. I made him a hat already, but I try my best to make blankets for all the super-important babies that are born. And I finally got Duckling's blanket done.

I am quite proud of myself. I used SmoothFox's Four-color Spiral pattern. It was kind of tricky in the beginning, and working with four skeins of yarn was a little cumbersome, but it was pretty easy once I got started (and finally got BoyWonder to understand that it wasn't something he could pick up and move around without causing the yarn to tangle into a giant nest).

All I have left to do is the tag... It's a little bit of sentimental squishiness. My mom salvaged a bunch of my grandpa's old shirts that Grandma was trying to throw away, so I'm going to embroider a tag made of that fabric. I have to get that part done this week somehow, since the baby shower is Saturday. I'm kicking myself in the ass, though, because when I went on a big craft supply purge last fall I threw away a ton of embroidery floss, and now I have to go buy more. ugh.

In other crochet news... I decided that after busting ass on Duckling's blanket, I wanted to make something for myself. Not that I never have, but it's pretty uncommon. I start projects for myself, but I always put them on the back burner to work on things for other people. So I spent some time thinking about what I wanted, and decided a blanket would be good. Something that's worked across instead of in rounds, and not a complicated pattern. But not too boring, either.

So I found this granny ripple pattern. I like ripples, and I like the granny stitch, and I haven't seen many blankets with that pattern.

The colors are kind of hard to see because the lighting in my house is weird today. I ended up picking Vanna's Choice yarn because they say that all the colors in that line coordinate, which means I can use the scraps later and not freak out because the colors don't work (I have color issues--I don't know how else to explain it). And I've done a couple of other projects in the same yarn, so I've got a nice collection of scraps already.

But here's where I am:

The black is the first row. I'm going to follow the color pattern in the picture of yarn (black, grey, white, green, yellow) but I probably won't stick to even rows. The set I'm doing now is three rows of each color. I'm not sure yet, but I think the next set will be one row per color. And then I'll decide from there what I want to do. I also had a really hard time deciding how big to make my beginning chain, and I'm starting to think it's too big. It's as wide as my queen-size bed. That's awesome, but it's going to take a shit-ton of yarn to get it done. And probably a very long time, if I decide to go the same size as a comforter.

But the crocheting is a nice distraction from life.

BoyWonder still won't have a hypothetical conversation about what our visit with the RE might bring. Will we consider doing IUI if we need to? If that's not an option, can we start looking into foster to adopt programs or start looking for an adoption lawyer? He's not ready to talk about any of it yet, and I'm frustrated. And he's probably frustrated that I keep bringing it up, but I can't help it. My mind moves a million miles a minute, panicking that maybe I will have to settle for being the awesome aunt that spoils the crap out of all her nephews. Which is fine, if that's how it's going to be, but I'd like to mentally prepare myself if he's not open to other options.

And I'm scared that the Duckling being born is going to hurt me. Don't misunderstand me, here. I'm happy for my brother and his girlfriend. I'm happy to be an aunt. I cannot wait to have a new baby to squish and love on. But walking into the maternity ward to see my nephew and think about how long and how hard we've been trying to get there is probably going to upset me, and I don't want to break down into a giant sobby mess right there in front of everyone on what will otherwise be a beautiful time. (Wow. That was a long and windy sentence.)


So there is all that. And there's more. I think I've posted before about my mom's illness. It's been a long and frustrating journey, but she's finally starting to feel better, with no thanks to modern medicine, and western doctors who decided that she's actually just depressed, not sick.

She's seeing an awesome doctor in Wichita who does natural health type stuff. He's been treating my mom for six months now and she's finally seeing some real improvement. Her pulse has been in the fifties (for the last year or so, her pulse was, on average, around 42 bpm), and her blood pressure has been going back toward the 'normal' range.

We're going to our first Lyme Disease support group next Monday. I'm going because I'm interested, and I really want to do something to help. I watched a documentary on Lyme called Under Our Skin and it was terrifying and infuriating at the same time. If you're interested, you can watch it on Netflix, and a quick google search informed me that you can also watch it on Hulu. Honestly, it made me sick. Sick with worry for my mom, sick and pissed off at the way our society handles modern medicine and health insurance companies controlling what doctors can and can't do, angry for the people who had to go through seven or ten different diagnoses before they were finally tested for Lyme.  I'm thankful she doesn't have the neurological symptoms and I'm incredibly grateful that she found a medical professional willing to treat her, even without insurance. I'm glad that she's healing.

But I need to be doing something more. Mom's story is similar to what's shown in the film. She has been diagnosed and then un-diagnosed. She was misdiagnosed with depression multiple times. In fact, when she was originally diagnosed (I was seven or eight), they gave her a round of antibiotics and told her her Lyme had been cured. The crappy, awful thing about that is she'd been having symptoms for over a year. Six weeks of antibiotics doesn't cure Lyme if you've had it that long. The doctor she has now suspects that the problems with her intestines started fifteen or twenty years ago and it might take two or three years for everything to recover.

There are thousands of stories like this and it's bullshit. I spent my childhood watching her struggle and no one believed she was sick. For the last two years I've been in a weird limbo, bouncing my thoughts between worrying that she's going to die, but being in complete and total denial that that could ever happen. Not my mom. She's too strong and awesome to be sick enough to die. Not when she could have just received the right treatment in the beginning and prevented all of this. It just isn't possible.

Do people know this is going on? That many doctors don't believe that Lyme disease is a chronic disease? Or how about the fact that the tests used to diagnose the disease are wildly inaccurate?

So... Now that I distracted myself.... That's why I'm going to the support group meeting. I want to do something to raise awareness. To hear more stories and get a sense of what's going on. What kind of treatments are they getting, what doctors they're seeing, how they feel. I don't know what I'll actually do with the knowledge, but I still need it. And so does my mom. So here we go.


This post was much, much longer than I intended it to be.

For now, my tea is ready, and the sun is shining in my living room. I'm going to curl up and work on my blanket, watch a movie and enjoy my last two hours of alone time.