Enough miracles to go around?
Irony of ironies, for an infertile couple: my wife is a natural childbirth instructor!
So last night, when we were happily buying ice cream at Cold Stone in order to help
"save seventh period" for the local high school, we were intrigued to see two women on
the bench nearby--clearly friends--one of whom was wearing a t-shirt with a large stork and the words "Surrogate Mothers - We Deliver Miracles." So I struck up a conversation, and we learned a lot. Let me tell you, I can't imagine anybody who knows more about being an IVF patient than a gestational surrogate; the two women we talked to had been through it over and over and over. Somehow, talking to them made our own process more real and less scary.
By strange coincidence, while we were having the aforementioned conversation, getupgrrl was posting her latest and saddest news. The optimism I was feeling last night has evaporated in the face of this reminder about how truely cruel life can be.
I'll let you in on something that very few people really understand. Having a baby is every infertile couple's dream come true, no question. But the baby doesn't make the infertility go away. Infertility and childlessness are not the same thing, and it's really the infertility--not the childlessness--which causes most of the grieving. Which is one reason that "You could just adopt..." is a really insensitive response. An infertile couple with one child is cruelly reminded whenever they start thinking about what a great big brother/sister s/he would be. And even if that one child is exactly the right number for your family, you still will never forget the pain of the struggle. Even when you gaze every night at that angelic, sleeping face, you are still an infertile couple. Even when you're awakened every morning by that little bouncy creature snuggling up in your bed and telling you he loves you, you are still an infertile couple. Even when you are unequivocally welcomed into the fraternity of parenthood by playgroups, schools and other rites of passage, you are still an infertile couple. All of the joys of parenthood cannot completely make the years of infertility recede into blessed forgetfulness.
That's not altogether a bad thing. Sometimes the memory can be a wise counselor, reminding you how empty your life felt before, and how much you love and want the child whose behavior is currently driving you up a tree. Sometimes it can bring up indignation: at parents who mistreat their children, or the rash of dead-baby abandonments here in California. And sometimes the grief all comes flooding back. For me it usually happens when, like today, I hear another infertile couple's bad news: I am transported to the cold, gray day in December 1998, when our doctor showed us the ultrasound pictures that indicated our latest treatment had failed...and I hear my wife's plaintive "I thought since it was Chanukah, maybe I could have a miracle, too."
Our go/no go ultrasound for this cycle is on Tuesday. Dear God please help me regain my optimism by then.
Posted at 05:01PM Jul 21, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in Infertility | Comments[4]
Here we go again
We're just heading into another IVF cycle. This involves giving
my wife a series of medications to shut off her (ab-)normal
hormones and substitute a carefully mediated set of artificial
ones which are designed to produce a textbook menstrual cycle.
Unfortunately, as you probably know, messing with a woman's
hormones has nasty side-effects; sleep disruption and mood
swings are now the norm at our house, for example. (As if the
stress of infertility itself weren't enough to handle.) So when
wife calls the IVF coordinator at 9 AM Monday, and gets a voice
mail reply at 4:57 that evening; calls 8:30 the next morning and
gets voice mail at 4:45 (which she returns by 4:55 but no answer);
and calls 3 times between 8:00 and 8:40 the next morning, to no
avail -- well, to me, at least, the emotional distress this would
cause a patient is obvious.
I'm sure this is only going to get more interesting as we start
adding additional hormones to the mix. Can't wait for those
twice-a-day progesterone shots....
Posted at 11:45AM Jul 14, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in Infertility |
Two heads are better than one
On my office wall (yeah, I still have a place I can call "my" office...don't tell Scott)
there is a piece of paper with one line of text highlighted. The piece of paper came out of a meeting I had with Stuart Marks. The highlighted sentence is "Increase the ratio of thought to lines of code."
At JavaOne this morning, Tor Norbye and James Gosling demonstrated one of the best (little-known!) ways to do that: Pair Programming. While Tor was writing some code onstage, James was watching over his shoulder, asking questions. And more importantly, he was finding bugs. This caused Tor to comment on how nice it was to have James Gosling helping you code (and to ask whether we could include James along with the product).
But you don't need to pack up James in order to get a similar result. Now, I would never claim that James is replaceable. :-) But where pair programming is concerned, anybody who is proficient enough to understand most of what you are doing will provide useful assistance. And the benefits are considerable. (Here's another study with similar results.)
It's fun, it improves programmer morale, and the increase in quality far outweighs the increase in programmer hours spent per project. So what I don't understand is why we developers aren't clamoring for it to be standard practice everywhere...especially since one study indicated that pairs work best when the two people are of somewhat differing ability. Can you think of a better way to simultaneously get your senior programmers to share their knowledge, and your straight-out-of-college new hires to contribute to your bottom line?
Posted at 05:36PM Jul 01, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in General |