Tids 'n' Bits

Life's been kinda hectic for the last couple of months.

At the end of April I finally miscarried. It was awful and no one warned me how awful it was going to be at all. Cramps were waking me up through all of the early morning hours, but just enough to be able to get right back to sleep. Around 7am they got worse and I was driftingly sort-kinda asleep until 9am when they started to be much more frequent and far more painful. It took me almost an hour of heavy bleeding and intense pain for me to realize that I wasn't just having cramps, I was in labor and jesus christ did it hurt. I don't know that you can explain that pain to someone who hasn't experienced it; it's like menstrual cramps that are worse than anything you've had coupled with the sense that yes, this may be just the thing that drives you totally mad. It continued like that for another 10 hours of going back and forth between the toilet and my bed, breathing nice big cleansing breaths, rocking, fidgeting, digging my fingernails into my thighs, screaming occasionally, you know, laboring. It got bad enough that I went to the hospital around 8 that evening, but not before passing two "somethings" that each felt about the size of a clementine. They did blood work and an ultrasound at the hospital and by that time the contractions were slowing down and I was in loads less pain. The ultrasound showed that I had passed the gestational sac and the placenta and there was just blood left over, so that was good, it really was over, no more god-forsaken contractions. It was draining and I came out of it totally exhausted. The one thing that's different between miscarriage and birth, besides the pushing, is that there's no pay-off; there's no baby at the end as a reward for all of that effort and pain. Somehow I just know that it would've been totally worth it if I could've had one. I spent two nights in the hospital because my PT/INR, which measures how much of my blood thinner is present, was too high and coupled with the bleeding, they just wanted to keep an eye on me. Three weeks later they went in and laparoscopically tied my tubed, or sutured my tubes or whatever it is they did. I spent about a week afterwards feeling generally crappy, but I'm back to my normal crappy now, so I'm pleased.

Two weeks later, I started school back at good ol' Temple University. The put me through hell to get registered and I wasn't actually registered until the day before classes were to start, but it all turned out fine so there was really no harm besides a stressed-out Rachel. I'm really enjoying my first class: Effective Teaching: Theory and Practice. We've gotten just that: a nice balance of theory and practice on the most effective strategies to use for both classroom management and instruction. It's a small class of about 11 people and the instructor, a former high school principal, is really good. So that's going along well, two evenings a week for about 2 hours we get together, talk about teaching, each give a mini-lesson, deal with any new theory, and break. I'm really enjoying it. It is nice, however, that it will be over in a few weeks and my second summer course has been converted to an online course, so I won't have to drive the hour back and forth from school each time and I might actually have time for a vacation in there somewhere!

Around the time school started, or maybe just before, I decided to get serious about losing some weight. I've been on long-term prednisone treatment and besides keeping the disease in some kind of check, it also causes pretty steady weight gain. So, I set about dealing with that. I got a membership to the YMCA and started the Body-for-Life diet. So far, no big results that I can see, but I've only been on the diet for two weeks and working out for a month. I have been able to go up a notch in my belt, so that's gratifying. So, we'll see. I'm hoping that if I stick with it I could lose 35-40 lbs in the next 10-12 weeks and gain some lean muscle mass, which I think will help me to move better and look better than I do right now.

Anyway, that's it for me right now. I'm going to go back to reading "IT" by Stephen King, one of my favorites.