Crash

Saw the movie Crash last night.  Went to sleep with it in my head, woke up before my alarm still going over it, had to drag my head out of it when I got to work.  It is not an easy movie to watch, but it's beautifully done.

I was pretty skeptical when I heard this was a movie "about racism."  Tough to make that sound anything but pedantic.  But this movie is not pedantic, or simple in any way.  And while it's not a feel-good movie with a happy ending, it does not come out to be a tragedy either.  Some of the story threads within it are tragic.  The stakes are high enough that pretty much everything that doesn't turn out to be a tragedy feels like a miraculous escape.  But, well, that's not entirely unlike life.

It brought me near tears.  Not tears of sadness, really.  Once, I nearly cried with relief.  But mostly what I was feeling was just recognition. 

Go see it.

In which I am a geek about reproductive health

So I've been learning about Fertility Awareness. It's a way women can tell if/when they ovulate, when in your cycle you might be fertile, when you're definitely not, etc. You take your temperature first thing in the morning every day, and watch the changes in your cervical fluid (not as gross or difficult as one might initially think) and keep a chart of that stuff. People use it for birth control, or when they're trying to get pregnant, or to help diagnose and monitor various problems with hormonal cycles and the reproductive system.

I got interested in this because a couple years ago a doctor told me I might have trouble getting pregnant. This doctor was not one I particularly liked or respected, so I have not been worrying overmuch about what he said. But I'm aware of it. And if there were anything I could do to increase the chances that I won't have a problem, I would want to do that. So on good advice from a friend, I got off the Pill well in advance of when I might start trying to get pregnant, and I'm using the charting to get a sense of what's going on with my cycles.

Of course, one of the things I found out is that it's not at all unusual for it to take MONTHS to get back to normal after you come off the Pill. So I don't have a lot of interpretation from my data yet, because everything could just be residual effects of the Pill that will even themselves out. But it's empowering already, because I can come up with better questions to ask my new (way better!) doctor, and I don't feel like the whole thing is just out of my hands.

And the particularly cool thing is that if you do find out something's not working right, there are things you can do about it. Apparently sleeping in complete darkness can cause people to start ovulating when they haven't been, regularize their cycles, etc. And there are diet changes and nutritional supplements and other stuff that can be helpful... and you can TELL whether whatever you try is making a difference or not because you can see it on your charts.

Right now I'm working on figuring out how to make my bedroom totally dark -- we get a lot of light from the street and the firehouse next door. Anybody have any experience/advice with this?

Still here.

Yeesh, it's been a month? My brain has been very full and time is flying. I'm doing OK though, didn't disappear into a depressed funk or anything. Just busy.

Strange news this week: the doctor now says he does not think Mom has Alzheimer's, or any degenerative neurological disease. The trick is that he doesn't have any clue what the problem actually is. No dispute that something's not working right, but what is it?

On one hand this is a relief, because we don't have to look at what's happening to all those folks who do have Alzheimer's and prepare ourselves to go through THAT. But on the other hand, her support group and all the connections she's made with people in Alzheimer's services are suddenly not there for her in the same way, and she's still having all the same problems she was before. And we just don't know WHAT to prepare ourselves for at all.

Next step, talk to some different doctors. And we just keep going one day at a time.