BrooklynGirl

Because It's Scary

On Thursday a federal judge in Manhattan, Richard Casey, order New York Presbyterian Hospital to turn over the records of abortions performed there on the grounds that, according to The New York Times, "the disclosure would not unduly harm the hospital or the privacy of its patients."

Casey, again according to the Times, "rejected the hospital's argument that turning over the records would be an 'undue burden' and could prompt 'anger and mistrust of its patients, and damage to its reputation.'"

As a patient at Cornell, I plan to write Judge Casey and let him know that this ruling certainly has prompted anger and mistrust. When I see a doctor, I want to know that my care is paramount, and the knowledge that my doctor may not want to perform a specific procedure for fear of coming under attack by Big Brother Bush is far from comforting.

If you would like to do the same, please send your letters to:

Hon. Richard Conway Casey
United States District Judge
Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse
500 Pearl Street, Room 1350
New York, New York 10007-1312

Will Work For Assisted Reproductive Technologies

When I'm not surfing the Web or studying, I work as an editor for an educational company. I've been an editor at a bunch of places including a handful of trade book publishers (I quit when I was so embarrassed by the books I was editing that I started removing my name from acknowledgements pages) and an Internet consulting company (I was laid off when everything turned to shit in 2001). My current job, however, is without question the worst I've ever had, and I'll tell you why:

1. For-profit education is a bad thing. I used to believe that capitalist zeal could force educators to innovate in ways that non-profit, bureaucratic educational organizations could not, but now I see that it's never good when the interests of stockholders come before the interests of students and innovation only happens if there's money to be made.
2. Our products are bad. Because the No Child Left Behind Act supports high-stakes testing, school districts are taking what little money they do have and spending it on test prep: don't worry about learning how to read, just learn how to answer questions in such a way that people *think* you can read. (Yet another reason to get W. out of office.)
3. The executives at my company are bad people. For 3 years in a row, we've been frozen at 3% raises (during this time I've been promoted and singled out by the President for "outstanding" work), but every year the executives get phat bonuses including iPods (last year) and Handspring Treos (this year). On a recent junket, they decided that making plane reservations was too much of a hassle so they Chartered. A. Corporate. Jet.
4. The company treats its employees badly. They changed our working hours from 9-5 to 9-6 (with no corresponding raise in pay) and installed cameras at the exits and entrances to watch our comings and goings (one person has been fired for leaving before 6 although she regularly worked through lunch). They recently created 2 separate entrances: one on the 23rd floor for the executives, the other on the 21st floor for the rest of us. And there’s more, but I won’t get into it.

I mention this because today I was reminded that Monday is a regular work day in my office. While the rest of the country salutes the legacy of Washington and Lincoln by sleeping in, going to white sales, and watching the Law & Order marathon on TNT, we have to be at work....or take a personal day. At this point, I'm an hourly employee so I have to work if I want to get paid, but it's the principle of the thing. Oh, and the fact that the building is closed so there won't be any heat.

Anyway, I was grousing about all of this to my husband who for the first time was really encouraging me to quit (he recently got a raise and is apparently feeling flush). And for a minute or two I was tempted, but then I remembered that we're still waiting for the bill from the IUI (conservative estimate: $2,350) and who knows what the future has in store for us. So, for right now I’m working exclusively to support our assisted reproductive habit. Here’s hoping for an early retirement.

Boobgate 2004

Okay, so the Janet Jackson thing? Enough already!! I'm not a big football fan so I missed the whole halftime show, and by the time I had caught up to the situation, everything was so blown out of proportion that I could not look away (special thanks to the Drudge Report for making all this possible).

Anyway, I thought it would blow over eventually--I mean, it's a boob, for pete's sake. It's not something important like, oh, I don't know, that fact that ricin was found in the senate or that the director of the CIA admitted that George W. Bush is a big fat liar. It's a boob. But today, I came across two stories that made me realize just how dire the situation had become:

1. ER is cutting a scene from tonight's episode that shows the breast of an 80 year old woman because "the atmosphere created by this week's events has made it too difficult for many of our affiliates to air this shot." I can think of lots of reasons not to show the breast of an 80 year old woman, but the atmosphere seems like the most ludicrous reason possible. Unless she has an album coming out next month that she's trying to report.

2. A high school in Orange County is not going to allow MTV to film a reality show there because the school board was so disgusted by Janet Jackson's antics. Again, there are lots of reasons not to invite MTV into your high school, but all because of a breast? Really?

It's no wonder the state of women's health care is as it is today: if we as a nation are going to fall to pieces on account of a boob, what do you think would happen if we start talking about something even scarier, like ovaries?

I said it: ovary, ovary, ovary. Now, what are you gonna do to me?

If You Can't Say Anything Nice Come Sit By Me

Okay, so I have this friend from college. We were good friends in college and even though we both wound up in New York City after graduation, we drifted a bit--hey, it's a big city. Still, from time to time we'd get together, usually to talk about life crisis stuff: should I marry this guy I've been dating forever; should I try to buy a house; is that too much to spend for a really great outfit; etc. Then a couple of years ago we both decided to try to get pregnant at about the same time. We went out to dinner and talked about how cool it would be to share maternity clothes and have babies the same age.

You know where this is going right? Of course, she got pregnant right away. My husband describes this friend as the least maternal person on the planet, a description which is really apt. She doesn't cook so during her pregnancy she subsisted almost exclusively on Whoppers from Burger King. Even I, not the biggest vegetable eater on the planet, tried to force a salad into the woman from time to time. She complained that prenatal vitamins made her feel funny so she didn't take them. And of course last year she had a perfectly healthy and wonderfully adorable little boy. When she talked about the birth experience, she talked mostly about how bad the food at the hospital was and how much they charged for parking. The whole miracle of life part was lost on her, but that's okay because I wasn't really bitter. Yet.

Now it's a different story. Today, having just received an email that she's expecting again, I'm bitter. Nevermind that she hasn't asked me once what happened to the baby I was trying to have at the same time she had hers. Nervermind that she was successful in her first month trying, which surprised her because she's not even sure she and her husband are ready. And nevermind me, I guess. I'm just going to sit here surrounded by my amps of Bravelle and my books about financing infertility and be bitter. Feel free to join me.

An Oprah Update

It seems that many of the folks coming to this blog are reaching it because they’re looking for information on the fertility drug article in Oprah’s magazine. As a public service to those folks, here’s a collection of links to some actual medical professionals who have made it their business to point out the (many, many) fallacies in that article:

• Resolve
  
• American Society for Reproductive Medicine
  
• American Infertility Association (Geoffrey Sher)

Now back to our regularly scheduled program....

Beware My Wrath

Okay, you may recall that earlier this week, I was bad mouthing my husband's company for having such crappy infertility coverage for their employees.

So, all week I've been channeling negative thoughts about this company--nothing specific really, just wishing something inconvenient but generally innocuous like a plague of frogs on them. But then I got distracted....until this morning. Just as I was settling in to do my Spanish homework, my husband called to tell me his building was on fire. ON FIRE.

Fire is nothing to joke about, so I want to make two things clear: 1) no one was hurt in the fire (an electrical something or other that started early, before people were in the office), and 2) I have an alibi. Still, it makes you think there's something to this karma thing.

The Artful Dodger

I'll call my former boss, who I still work with but not for, Dodger. And he's a piece of work. He's from California and his mother is a lesbian, two facts he mentions incessantly as if they are some sort of excuse for his perverse outlook on life. But they're not. They're really not.

Now, Dodger is married, but this doesn't stop him from having enthusiasms for women, who he hires almost exclusively--he doesn't do anything with them; he just leers. He's never had an enthusiasm for me, since I'm abrasive and generally annoying, but I think he just likes being around women [were he here, at this point he would say that's because his mom's a lesbian] so we used to have lunch from time to time. At our first lunch, almost 2 years ago, he told me he and his wife were going to get pregnant that August. Unbeknownst to him, my husband and I had just started trying to knock ourselves up, but even then I had a clue that things don't always work out as we might hope. So, I told him I thought his wife would hate him talking about this and that shut him up.

For the next year, he would stop by my desk and tell me he had to step out for a bit (he lives around the corner from the office) because his wife was ovulating. During this time I had a miscarriage, endured the birth of my niece (which made me sick with envy I haven't yet found words for), and was officially diagnosed with unexplained infertility. Yet I tried to smile encouragingly at him as he went home to perform his stud service, and I tried not to pray that he and his wife wouldn't get pregnant before me and my husband. Then he stopped talking about it, and I assumed his wife was pregnant. But time passed....

Not long after, he mentioned that they had stopped "trying" (and he made the quotation motion with his bent fingers as he said this). He said they realized their apartment was too small for them to have a child, and so they had postponed their plans.

Anyway, today the Artful Dodger IMed me to chat, since we haven't talked in awhile. We traded office gossip and bawdy jokes. Then he asked me how old I was, and though I should have had my armor up, I told him "34" without thinking twice. He IMed me back that I should really think about having kids, since my time was almost up, and I stared at the screen for a long time before thanking him for his advice and logging off IM.

I don't know what to say about any of this except that I assume his awareness of fertility windows and whatnot means that he's "trying" again. And I know this is petty, selfish, and awful, but I have to say: I better get pregnant before his wife does.

A Word About Insurance

As if dealing with all things fertility-related weren't bad enough--the despair, the humiliation, the way it tends to take over your life--there's also the financial component, which is huge. Now, we're not rich; we have a comfortable life, but anyone who's done even the tiniest bit of research into fertility treatments knows that the money is just scary: $1,000 here, $12,000 there, etc.

I thought that there was a bit of light at the end of our tunnel because of the New York State mandated coverage for fertility, which covers everything except IVF (okay, that's a pretty big exception, but still). Now, when I read about this coverage, I was relieved, and even though it was open enrollment period for my husband's office (through which we're insured), I didn't do any research into the other insurance plans offered through his office. I know I should have, but I just couldn't deal--none of the insurance overviews say anything about fertility which means endless phone calls with people that I just wasn't free to make from my open cubicle at my office ("What did you say, you cover intrauterine insemination but not intracervical insemination?" Ugh--no thank you).

So, today I bit the bullet and, as we're gearing up for IUI #1, called the insurance company to try to figure out exactly what we're covered for, and the answer is a resounding nothing. They cover diagnostic procedures, but not IUIs, and we're not covered under the New York State mandate anyway, because--even though my husband's company was founded in New York, is based in New York, and in fact has the words "New York" as part of its name, apparently it's categorized as a national entity with an ASO (Assholes Served Only?) plan, which means we're out of luck. I'm so mad--at myself, at the plan, at the world--I could spit.

Oh, Oprah

So, did you read the article? You know the one I'm talking about. In O Magazine. I heard about it on a message board so I picked up a copy the other day, for some nice, soothing pre-lap reading. I found a nice quiet seat for myself on the subway (over a heating vent, which is important during this, the Coldest Winter of My Lifetime), and as I read, I fumed all the way home.

Oprah--what were you thinking? I mean, really--as a woman, how could you allow this article to be published? If you haven't had the pleasure of reading the article, the upshot is basically that fertility drugs are bad and they will kill you, but that's okay because you must be suicidal and self-absorbed for wanting to take them. It's full of all the old platitudes that all you really need to do is relax (and in this case, take a vacation in Italy) and you'll get pregnant. What codswallop!

No doctors from leading fertility clinics are quoted in the article. Worse still, as eveidence of fertility doctors run amok, author Barbara Seaman points to the cases of Richard Asch (who implanted fertilized eggs from Woman A into Woman B without the knowledge of either woman) and Cecil Jacobson (who used his own sperm to fertilize his patients' eggs). There's no question that these doctors are bad news, but their cases are from 1995 and 1992 respectively. How about we look for more recent events--maybe something from the 21st century?

So, there you have it. There's even more in the article that's appalling, but I won't get into it. If you've read it and you're offended, feel free to let Oprah know.