Dance, Dance, Dance and Boy Scouts....

When I was going through all those years of fertility treatments, I never really thought about what life would be like if we ever had kids. I remember thinking that I would always bake birthday cakes from scratch, and I do. That was something that kept me going in the darkest days of treatments. When we finally had a boy, I guess I thought of football and baseball games, and when we had a girl I thought of softball but that was about it.

Well, Maeve is defintely nothing I could have ever imagined or dreamed of. I was not a real girly-girl growing up and Maeve is into Musical Theater and Dancing. Wow. I have entered a whole new world. Today is dress rehearsals for a benefit show that the dance studio is putting on tomorrow.

Maeve, and now Molly also, dance for One Step Above Dance Company, or commonly in the area known as OSA. Tomorrow afternoon at the Fairgrounds they are doing their company, or competetion dances ad a benefit. Tickets are $5 and all the money goes to the Ellettsville Boys and Girls CLub. Now, I have to say that I am super excited to be part of something like this that will benefit the Boys and Girls Club, because I love our boys and girls club, It is awesome and the people there really care about the kids.

Maeve and her dad had to be out at the fairgrounds at 9:40 this morning to rehearse their Father-Daughter dance. Every couple of years the studio does a fun dance with fathers and daughters, and they performed for the first time last week. I got to watch and I have to tell you it was amazing. Some of the dads were great dancers, others had no clue, but that wasn't what mattered the most, what was the greatest thing was the look on the girls faces when they were dancing with their dads.

Now I guess it's time for me to get cheesy, but you know, I loved the fact that the studio took the time to offer this dance, and even more that there were so many dad's that agreed to dance with their daughters no matter what their skill level was. In this day and age, with so many broken families and so many parents working two and three jobs that they don't have time to spend with their kids, ad with the teenage pregnancy rates and the research finding that it might have something to do with the lack of a fathers influence. It is so wonderful to see these guys take the time from their lives to spend time with their daughters.

Right now, Maeve is just getting out of the shower and I have to get her fully dressed, hair and make-up and into one outfit for practice at 1:40 then she has her other dance at 3:20. Like I said, it;s a dance, dance, dance day.

It is also a boy scout day, as Tiernan is going to the Boy Scout lock-in at the armory today, and he has to be there at 1pm. So it sounds like dad is going to be driving to the South end of town to the armory to drop Tiernan off while I am driving to the wet side of town to the fairgrounds for Maeve's dance practices.

Next weekend will be even more of the same as Maeve has regionals at Beech Grove saturday. It'll be my first experience with this, I was never in dance or dance competitions growing up, so I am learning all the time!

Depression...

Almost a year after my hysterectomy and nothing has been the same. Probably the first big mistake I made was listening to the doctor when she said, let's wait six months after surgery to see what your body does. I should have insisted on have all my levels tested before surgery and then within a week or so after surgery testing them again and started on medicine. I didn't, and it's true, hindsight is twenty-twenty.

Now don't get me wrong, my life is defintely better off afterwards. I was in so much pain from the cysts in my ovaries and the fibroid in my uterus that I wasn't living. I was spending more time in bed in pain than doing anything else. I will still tell people, if it has been recommended to you, then go ahead, but to keep your ovaries if at all possible. For me it was not possible to keep my ovaries. The only problem is that almost no one that I talked to had lost their ovaries too. I had no idea what I was going to be in for. Maybe more research, maybe more talking, maybe just more fighting for it the way I felt was right.

I started getting depressed about six weeks post-surgery. It was about like post-partum depression, but I didn't have a nursing baby to help take the edge off the depression. It was just getting worse and worse to the point I had to call the doctors office, so a prescription for an antidepressant, but that didn't do it. I think I have the brand changed twice and the dosage changed more than I can think since then. Of course after six months out, the hormone replacement got added in, and that brought it's own set of problems with it.

I haven't been able to sleep since the surgery. Which I hear is normal, but of course no one wanted to do anything about it, oh let's get some hormones in you and it will get better, finally last month they gave me something to sleep that works as bout as well as jelly beans! So I was fed up and called the doctor's office first thing Monday morning, with the promise that the nurse would call me back that morning. Yeah right, finally Friday afternoon about an hour before the office closed someone called me back, but of course they didn't do anything.

After almost a year of not being able to sleep it has finally caught up with me, and the depression has deepened. When you aren't sleeping, it is very easy to fall deeper into the depression. So I was already depressed after the surgery and it wasn't being handled well, then top that with not being able to sleep, that wasn't being treated at all, and I am a mess. You want to talk about the hormones?

The migraines started about four weeks out from surgery, and they were terrible. I think I have been on three or four different migraine medicines, and no matter how many times I say, that the medicine was doing nothing for the migraines. I mean I can only take two pills in 24-hours and the migraines will come back in 6 to 8 hours some days. I keep trying to tell them that they aren't working, but no one wants to listen, which only makes the depression worse because I feel like I am not worth listening to, The hormones only help to create more of them.

I finally got on hormones, got on a patch. Of course that didn't do too well, still ave headaches, so they added a estrogen gel. As long as I was taking both of those on schedule and not skipping a patch change or the gel, I was getting fewer headaches. They added some progestrone, not sure why, but it has seemed to increased the headaches.

Now I still love my doctor. She delivered all three of my kids and she has been great. But when I first started seeing her, she was a new young doctor in an office of older doctors, then she moved out on her own into a small office, that soon grew and grew and now has three doctors and two midwives in the office. She is still a great doctor, but her office has grown too large. The office staff no longer seems to care. I can remember when I would call in and all I had to say was my name and all the staff knew my history and could help with anything. I mean, let's put it this way, my account number in her office is #38! I have no idea how many people they have in there now, but I know that I almost never talk to the same person, and I have caught a couple of nurses saying things to me that were out-and-out lies, and I am not going for that and had to call her on it, and of course she was upset, but yo know, once your office gets too large, it is out of your control.

I made the hard decision this week, in a few of my more lucid moments to research a new doctor. I had been needing to have a general doctor anyway, and that is what I looked for. A general practice doctor, but one that had underlying specialities in women's issues and HRT. So on Wednesday I called and they got me in the next week on Thursday. They were trying for Tuesday, but didn't have one early enough to make sure I would get home before the kids got off the bus. I was shocked. I am used to having to call four months in advance to get an appointment. I am looking forward to hearing another view on all this, and really hoping for some answers. Or at least if not an answer, someone to listen and be willing to work with me to find an answer, not just brush it off like it's no big deal.

I am sure I will be blogging about my thoughts from the appointment next week. Oh you poor people, you have to listen to me ramble! Oh well, you knew what you were getting into when you read the title of the blog and still kept reading!

CB Logan: The Logan Clan!

CB Logan: The Logan Clan!: "Well, just heads up about The Awakening book since it hasn't came out yet (end of April). In the story, we have clans. The Raven clan, which..."