I'm back. Sorry for running off like that.

A lot has happened since I scurried off and abandoned this journal: work went completely into chaos, for one. We lost two beloved pets, and acquired another. I went through bouts of writing interspersed with no time at all to write, because of the awful overload of work. Yes, I do realize I'm lucky to have work, however odious it might be, so don't wag your finger at me. I put this URL on lockdown back in the spring because I was interviewing job applicants for an open position on my team and realized they were all reading my blog. It was unsettling to have people I didn't know and who were trying to impress me ask me about family members and health issues as if they were my long-lost cousins. Bleah. Anyway I don't know what I was expecting, since I'd made this an extremely findable blog. That's changed now. I cut off the padlock, but have locked down the searchability factor and altered my profile. Now people can read if they choose to do so, but the posts won't be traceable directly back to me. So, it's Sunday after Christmas. We washed up back home last night and are putting things back to right. I'll get back into the posting habit, if there's anyone left to read what I write. And if there is not, I'll post anyway. This blog was always more therapy for me than reading material for anyone else. Happy almost new year.

Call me a crone and I'll bust you one.

I've been dealing with the hormonal mutiny every woman has to face at some point in her 40s. Trouble is, I wasn't ready. Is any woman ready? Anyway, it started with the previously mentioned never-ending visit from Aunt Flo. Apparently this was caused because I didn't ovulate last month. Hello, perimenopause. Boy, is it not nice to meet you. Anyway, apparently when you don't ovulate your hormones just go into complete confusion and they go running around your endocrine system with their little heads on fire and their little hands waving in panic. So, I couldn't stop bleeding, and to boot I was fighting an extremely low iron level (still am). As fast as I was shoveling iron in, I was losing it. So, I went to see my doc. She prescribed progesterone and lots of it. My panic-ridden hormones said "we SPIT on progesterone!" and they kept up the chaos and I kept bleeding. 30 days went by. Finally, my doc got out the big guns and put me on birth control pills. (The fact that I'm back on birth control 2 pregnancy-free years after going off it, is fodder for a whole different post.) I'm not just on birth control: I'm on 3 pills per day for the next three days, and then 2 pills per day for the following 3 days, and then down to the normal 1 per day probably until I'm 52. It's just depressing. But on a high note: this ought to halt the hormonal chaos and I can stop single-handedly supporting the feminine-products industry. Which will give me time to start contemplating the idea of menopause. Goddamn I'm not ready for that.

The saddest picture in my world

Before I was born my parents bought a chair to rock me in. It was a typical rocker for its time, with a turned spindles to support the back, and curved arm rests. It was painted black with antique gold trim and flourishes of apples and pears and flowers. Over the years, the paint was rubbed off the hand rests and the rockers had to be replaced, but my parents kept that chair. It was for me to rock my own children in one day. It turns out the never-ending visit of Aunt Flo is the result of one of my ovaries miss-firing. This is a relief, considering there could have been more sinister causes, like benign or malignant tumors. In the process of arriving at her diagnosis, my OBGYN performed an ultrasound. There on the screen was a dark gray image of my perfectly healthy, empty uterus. I'd never had an OBGYN ultrasound before. I'd always expected that when I did have one, it would be so I could observe the beating of a small heart inside me, and that I would get a series of little photos that would reveal the curve of a head, the little Hang Ten image of two tiny feet. The first picture in my baby's album. At the end of today's appointment, after my doctor explained her recommendations for treatment, she printed out a strip of images, zipped them briskly from the machine and waived them briefly in front of me. "For your chart," she explained, and left me to wad up the blue paper sheet I'd been covered with, get back into my black and lavender work clothes, and resume my hectic day. I was grateful for my health, but there wasn't time to think beyond that. Now, it's a half hour into tomorrow and I can't sleep. A month ago, when my younger sister mentioned the need to clean out the garage of my parents' house so tenants could park there, I asked her not to sell the rocking chair. "Please take it home," I said. "And rock your children in it."

Iron will

When I and my siblings were growing up, our mom was fixated for a while on our getting enough iron. Calcium was not a problem: She had milk for that. Fluoride was provided in our tap water. We ate oranges with gusto, so Vitamin C was not on her worry list. But iron? There was something to fret about. The last thing she needed was five little wan, anemic kids. My mom was canny. She knew that policing a multivitamin into her kids every day was not going to work. No, the iron problem would have to be solved by means of a carefully managed diet. She started sneaking spinach into soups and salads. She tucked an individual-serving-size box of raisins into every brown bag lunch we toted to school. She tried getting us to drink milk that had molasses stirred in (we hated it and flatly refused). She made liver and onions at least every other week. I can't think of a meal that is more designed to repel children than liver and onions. But my dad loved it. And on liver-and-onion night, as on every other night, it was either eat what was served or go hungry. We had wolverine appetites so going hungry was not an option. We'd drown the liver in ketchup and choke the mess down. All my mother's toiling on the iron front came to mind the other day when one of my lab results came back with a low ferritin level, again. Abysmally low. Hemoglobin is down, too, though not as alarmingly. I've been chasing after the ferritin for a while now, trying to coax it back within normal range. But It's remained at 9 instead of the minimum 22, and I imagine it thumbing its nose at me from the depths. Add to this injury the insult of either wacky hormones or a side-effect of the low iron (or both): never-ending visit from Auntie Flo. Now I have the attention of two doctors, both of whom want to run more tests to be sure nothing sinister is going on. Overnight I've turned from someone my insurance company makes money on to the dreaded "high utilizer." So, I'm scheduling appointments and going back to a carefully managed, iron-rich diet. I drink nettle tea, eat my spinach, take iron tablets, munch on raisins. I'm even considering cooking up some liver. Pass the ketchup.

One year

Today is the first anniversary of my wedding to The Hunky Scientist. It's been a wonderful 365 days. We've learned a lot. We still adore one another. It's the paper anniversary, so we gave each other cards (my first anniversary card EVER!) and we made some dinner (calzones). I'm blogging while he makes dessert. Presently, we'll cuddle up and watch a movie. And tomorrow will be Year Two, Day One. I'm very happy.

Flouting this blog's raison d'etre

Today I'm going to write. Yes! *gasp*. I really have no excuse not to: The Flexeril I had to take last night has mostly worn off. I say "mostly" because the dosage is for every six hours, but every time I take it at night I feel dopey well into the next day. My chemist husband says this is because dosage schedules are set around a drug's half-life. I love knowing things like this. But I'm getting off track. Back to the usual litany of excuses that I do not have: I can't clean house because I can't stand upright for long without my foot swelling up. It's Saturday, so I'm not working. Chocolate-making is out. So is going to the gym. It's a sunny, clear day but there's no way I can go outside and enjoy it. I have a folder full of writing exercises to choose from, and I've set myself the task of writing an essay AND a poem around each of them. Really, it's time to write. 'Bye for now.

mom@heaven.com

It's probably because my mother cared for me after my last foot surgery that I've been missing her sharply these past two weeks. My husband has cared for me magnificently, and I haven't compared their caring styles at all. But I just miss my mom. I have reflexive thoughts of picking up the phone to call her. When in the middle of a pain-med dose, I've idly wondered what her email address is. My mind keeps grasping for ways to communicate with her, and then abruptly ending up against the doorless wall of her death. So then I start longing for earthly reminders of her: I crave "mom eggs" in the morning (that's soft-boiled eggs on buttered toast); I'd trade a kidney for one of her meatloaf sandwiches. But I know from nearly two years without my mom that making those favorite meals may take care of my hunger, but it won't ease the longing to have her here. There's no medicine for that particular kind of pain. 

Last day of "sick" leave.

I'm using my last day of PTO to do clean-uppy things like run MacJanitor on my laptop. It's an iBook G4, and while it's a hardy little soldier, lately it's been having to think awfully hard before executing simple commands. So, I took myself on a wander through Apple's support site and boned up on how to optimize RAM and maintain OS X. Ooooooh, scintillating. Now I understand that my computer hasn't been able to run maintenance scripts (daily, weekly, or monthly) the entire time I've had it, since the scripts are written to run between 3 and 5 a.m. -- if the computer is on and not asleep. My computer has never been on and not asleep at 3 a.m.. MacJanitor allows me to click a button and run those scripts whenever I feel like it. There are daily, weekly, and monthly functions. I clicked the "Perform All Functions" button and then hobbled to the kitchen to clean up dishes. It took several minutes to run all the scripts. Now I'm hoping this little soldier will march a lot faster. We shall see.

Tomorrow I step into my new role, supervising four people whose job title I used to share, and two project managers. It's going to be a tough first week. Speaking of first weeks, I'm mighty pleased with our new president's first-week activities. He's had an easier time of it on foreign policy changes, but what I'm really looking forward to is seeing how his big stimulus bill makes it through Congress. My friends say they're worried. I'm not. I figure our leader is shrewd enough to have realized well ahead of time that his plan wouldn't make it through the gantlet unscathed. He's playing chess with Congress and it's the strategy as well as the outcome that I am keen to see.

On the surgery-recovery front: I found this morning that I am able to put a tad more weight on my right foot. We'll see how this works out later on the pain front. I have several exercise sessions to run through before this day is done. I'm hoping that as days pass I'll need less pain medication because it's kind of a hassle to get a refill on this stuff. Not only that, but I don't want to develop a dependency on it in order to sleep. I just got my insomnia issue under control a few before the surgery. But as of last night, the foot was waking me up with shooting, stabbing pains up the leg every 4.5 hours. Only thing to do is keep moving forward and see how things go.

Healing

Good news: my podiatric surgeon took the cast off my right foot and leg, removed the stitches, and pronounced his handiwork healing nicely. He gave me some exercises to do several times daily (ouch! owie! ouch!) to prevent scar tissue from restricting my foot's mobility and strength, and then he sent me to the cast room to be fitted for a "moon boot," which sort of resembles a ski boot. The boot protects my foot while the bones that were fused mend together and keeps my ankle from over-flexing, which allows my achilles to heal. I am grateful for the boot. But also I hate it with the heat of a zillion radiators. Reason: I have to wear it when I sleep. Awkward. And painful. So I have to take pain meds before bed. To tell the truth, after doing all the foot PT, I need it. At least I sleep well. A funny thing about recovering from foot surgery is that whenever I'm upright for very long, my foot swells into a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade foot. So while I can start putting just a tiny bit of weight on it, I can't do so for very long before having to recline and elevate the puffy thing above heart level until the swelling subsides. Needless to say, I haven't been able to exercise. But my surgeon said in another week I can start swimming -- pulling only; kicking forbidden. I can't wait.

In between

I am just unmedicated enough to be tired of lying around with my foot up on pillows, and just medicated enough to be unable to concentrate on writing or the written word. I don't dare take up any craft work, because I'll just have to re-do it later. THS and I have watched a few movies together, and now he's absorbed in a computer game, and I'm looking for low-focus-required ways to entertain myself. Our cat would rather I entertain her. In fact, she's staring at me right now, willing me to stop typing and do something for her amusement. It's a little uncanny how long she can just sit and stare at me, Yoda-like, using the Kitty Force. 

Now and then my foot starts feeling all stabbed and hurty, and I have to up the dose again. On pain killers, the days blend by. Natural pauses in conversation seem to me to take hours; I can't tell if what I say is said or merely thought, but my visitors report that conversation flows normally. After they leave, I think of spring. I think of tulips and daffodils forced into bloom from bulbs set into water-filled beakers. I see all the leaves of fall that will have settled over winter into loam for the earth, and my pale right foot with its paler scars. strong and planted to the soil in counterpoint with the left, right, left, right, carrying me over the trails and hills of this land.

That line from "Juno"

One of my favorite lines from the movie "Juno," and there are many, is one the main character utters while in the first stages of delivering a baby: "Ow, ow, fuckity OW!" Honest and an understatement. But that's how I feel every time I get up to do something simple like brush my teeth. Here's how it goes: Sit up from my reclining, foot-elevated position on the couch; grab crutches; hobble over to the bathroom; start brushing. As gravity does its thing and my foot begins to swell inside the cast, the pain comes in waves, and it feels like an approaching cannon sounds: boom, BOom, BOOM. I start thinking the wise thing to do is brush fast. None of this flossing business. Finish up, hustle back, assume the foot-up position, ask my husband for an ice pack, apply pack to the back of my knee and grit my teeth until the booming pain recedes to a blessedly dull ache. The only reason I am brushing my teeth this week is that my dentist is uncannily good at knowing when I've slacked off. Bastard brushes AND flosses, three times daily. I am on a mission to get through a teeth cleaning without a lecture and handful of pink stain pills from him. So I keep getting up, brushing, and thinking of Juno.

BUI: Guilty as charged

I am blogging under the influence: The influence of vicodin and flexeril. This is because on Monday I had the surgery I blathered about in a post last September. Two days ago, my fabulous and wonderful ortho surgeon lengthened my right achilles tendon and reshaped my foot. From the knee down, my leg looks like a mummy's. It was fun to have my husband, the hunky scientist, accompany me into the pre-surgery area and meet me afterward in recovery. He kept scrutinizing the bags they were hanging on the IV pole and telling me what was in them. And he and the nurses gabbed away about whatever injections the nurses were giving me (anti-nausea to combat that lovely side-effect of anesthesia, antibiotic, pain relief). And ever since I got home, he's been doting to just the right degree. I've had to keep my foot elevated, ice at the back of the knee, and take pain meds at just the right times. Failure to comply means Loads O' Pain. One great side-effect of the pain meds is that I am sleeping a LOT. In between sleeping, eating, downing the pain meds and more sleeping, I've been getting reacquainted with my crutches. I'll be using them for at least 2 months, so I'd better get used to them again. I haven't written this week. I may blog under the influence, but poetry or short-story writing under the influence is just a big invitation for trashing it all once I'm out from under. Next week I'll get back to it. But for now? Zzzzzzzz....