Getting the Blog Back Together! A Baby Story

My face is wet. It's part sweat and part tears. A lot of sweat and tears. I'm sobbing and gasping--barely getting the words out. "That...was the hardest thing I've ever done!"
"Yes," replies my OB kindly, "Parenting is the hardest thing there is."
But I wasn't talking about becoming a mother. I was talking about having a baby.

Part One: Pregnancy!
This was our last chance. Or anyway it felt like it. After tons of tests, dose after increasing dose of Clomid, intrauterine insemination, and lots of fasting and prayer (not to mention getting all ready to do IVF right before losing our insurance benefits covering IVF and having to postpone that little project indefinitely), I had spent the last 4 months on birth control pills and an essentially carbohydrate-free diet. The horribleness of this diet cannot be overstated. When I say carbohydrate-free, I'm not talking "low-carb." I'm talking skinless rotisserie chicken pieces for almost every meal and two servings of leafy green vegetables a day. No fruit. No carrots. No peas. No beans. It was about 800-900 calories a day, and I had to be monitored frequently by a doctor plus enjoy daily fistfuls of vitamins that were now missing from my diet. After 4 months on the diet I had lost 50 pounds, but I was not a functioning member of society. I quit the diet and ditched the birth control pills. Now we'd see if it had been worth it.
For the first time in my life, I had ovulation symptoms. My mom was in town when the egg was theoretically supposed to drop, but we kept our eyes on the prize anyway. To put it delicately, we ensured that I was receiving regular deposits of complementary genetic material should an egg decide to make an appearance. Sorry, Mom.

I waited the requisite two weeks and had a tiny little period ("could it be implantation bleeding??" I wondered). I was so excited when I took the pregnancy test. It was time for my BFP (Big Fat Positive--that's what the infertility support group sites call it). Except that the test was negative.
I resigned my life to being a childless nun. Sorry, Brandon.

I didn't have a period again, but that's basically standard operating procedure for me. I had just thought so much that I was going to be pregnant, though. And maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, but two weeks later, I decided to take the test again, just in case. Negative.

Awesome.

Several weeks later, something strange started happening. My breasts, which were never small to begin with, started to grow. And they started to HURT. They felt heavy and ponderous, which is redundant because as I use it here, both words mean the exact same thing. But what I really mean is that they were sore and puffy and tired-feeling. Every time I'd take off my bra, I'd feel like I was freeing two morbidly obese felons from the hot box in a prison yard.

I finally talked to my mom about it, because I was starting to get freaked out that there was really something wrong with them. "Do you think it's cancer?" I asked.
"It sounds like how mine felt when I was pregnant."
"O--kay."
During the phone conversation, I was laying with my upper body hanging upside down off my bed so that I could get some relief from the constant downward pressure of my breasts straining to make contact with the surface of the earth. I decided to humor my mom by taking one more stupid pregnancy test and then going in to have breast reduction surgery.

I did not want to take the test. A negative pregnancy test is a great way to ruin your day when you're trying to conceive. I did it the next morning when I was feeling impulsive. I got out my name-brand test (my reproductive endocrinologist said those were most accurate) and prepared to take it. As always, I chose to take a pregnancy test when I really, really, really had to go to the bathroom so it was touch and go there for a minute while I tried to open the package in time.
I peed on the stick, then put the little cap on it and watched as the fluid saturated the test fibers as per the instructions. First the little "test" line appeared. This was the only line I'd ever seen before. But as the fluid continued toward the end of the test area, another line appeared. The positive line. It didn't take two minutes. It took like 10 seconds. The second it was wet, it was blue.

I couldn't believe it. I needed confirmation so I took a picture of the two parallel lines and texted it to Brandon, saying, "so this just happened..." He's never returned a text faster. He drove home while I climbed in the shower and cried. Then we both drove to my reproductive endocrinologist's office for a blood test. I tried to act natural and not like the results of this test had the power to crush my soul. I'd had a number of blood pregnancy tests by this point, too. All of them had resulted in a phone call where a kindly nurse said, "the test was negative," except for once when it was a grouchy nurse who told me the HCG number and was impatient that I didn't already know that that number meant it was negative. So, anyway, I tried to play it cool.

We went to lunch at Indian Flame by Case's campus. It's an awesome restaurant. I had called my mom after the positive urine test, but she was the only other person who knew what was going down. The food was good but I was so stressed that I felt sick. They had said they'd probably get the results to me by the end of the day. Already it was shaping up to be a long one. As we were checking out, my phone rang. I picked it up. My hands were shaking. I wanted to leave the restaurant so nobody would know what I was talking about, but Brandon was paying and I needed him there. The nurse on the line confirmed it was me. I was so scared I could hardly spit out my name.
"We ran your blood test today and....you are SO pregnant." I still can't type it without crying. I couldn't get the words out, so I just looked at Brandon and nodded. A huge grin lit up his face. I was stunned. I started sobbing and saying "thank you" over and over to the nurse. She said she was so happy for me and good luck and that I needed to come in the next day for my first check up because it looked like I was maybe 9 weeks along. My HCG levels were apparently quite high this time.
I wept with gratitude on the way back to the car, and then sobbed and sobbed and sobbed because I was so happy. Brandon called his mom and, over my loud, hooting cries, conveyed the good news. She started crying, too. My mom was in a meeting, so I couldn't get in touch with her for a couple of hours. When I told her what the nurse had said, she started crying and it got me going again.

The next day, we saw Jelly for the first time. From the ultrasound, our due date was amended from December 7th to December 21st. She was six weeks alive in there and was just a throbbing heartbeat. She was so so tiny. I was so afraid I would lose her--but decided to name her anyway. Jelly, because that's really all she was at that point.

Oh, and also, I was sure Jelly was a boy.

Tomorrow: Pregnant.........................................................................................................................

Dear Diary: Just so you know, I hate you all!!

For the past couple of years, I've been fairly diligent about keeping a journal. I will now take a moment to self-righteously pat myself on the back. It's exciting to think that my children, grandchildren and other progeny will be able to read about my life when I'm gone.

Isn't it?

See, my awesome, wonderful grandmother died a couple years ago, and for a while my aunt (basically serving as the de facto trustee of my grandma's personal property) wanted me to scan the journals and share them with everybody. I thought this was a great idea. About a week later, though, she changed her mind. I pressed her, thinking, aren't we all entitled to these records?

My aunt decided not to share them because they were uncensored accounts of my Grandma's life, including expressions of irritation, frustration and anger at various people in the family, that might be uncomfortable or even devastating to spread around for everyone to see.

Honestly, my response to that was, well, she can't have written anything bad about me--because what could she possibly say? Humility is just one of the many sterling personality traits that I demonstrate on a daily basis. My aunt did assure me that everyone was represented at some point or another on my Grandma's cranky list (which as you might imagine I still have some difficulty believing).

I was still kind of kerfuffled about this until I talked to my mom about it a couple weeks ago. She said she wanted to look at the journals, too, but if she saw something negative about herself, it would just kill her. That was the first time I seriously considered how I would respond if something negative had been written about me (no matter how far-fetched that idea is).

If it were up to me, I would love to go through the rest of my life never hearing another negative thing said about me. Probably if my dead grandmother said something bad about me I would go on a chocolate binge so severe that it would only end in my eventual explosion into a million pieces.

I've taken a professional lesson from this experience: it's a good idea to specify what you want done with your journals after you die.

My personal application of this lesson is hard though. Sure, I feel guilted into keeping a journal for my progeny, but if I'm going to talk about my life somewhere, I'm only going to talk about my real life. I don't want my progeny to get the mistaken impression that I didn't struggle, have to work hard, and have to overcome many obstacles. (Probably this fear is also a product of my fabulous humility--I make my life look eas-ay!)

I'm torn between wanting my progeny to know that life is hard and that the myriad negative feelings we come up against are normal, and not wanting them to burn me in effigy when they find out that a lot of those negative feelings in my life will end up coming from them.

Don't get me wrong: neither my grandma (I assume) nor I have filled up every page with hateful vitriol about how much the people in our lives are driving us crazy. But it does come up occasionally--and that just us being honest about life. I don't know if there's any living situation where the people (or things) we share our life with wouldn't sometimes drive us crazy. I super wanted to put the clip from Castaway where Tom Hanks gets into a fight with Wilson here but it's not on YouTube. And now I feel SPOILER ALERT sad about Wilson.

Anyway, as I wipe away stupid hormone stupid Wilson stupid Tom Hanks tears, my proposed solution is as follows: hire a third-party to scan or transcribe the journals exactly as written. Place the original hard copies, one scanned/transcribed hard copy and a reasonably shelf-stable electronic copy in a safety deposit box for fifty years, after which point, copies will be disseminated to any living relative who has an interest. It seems ridiculously convoluted to do this, but it fulfills my need to write candidly now, while giving the progeny an honest account of my life with the distance to handle it.

What do you think? Should you only write things in your journal you'd be comfortable with other people reading right now? What are you going to do with your journals after you die? Should we just scrap writing journals at all and let our selfies tell the story?

The Leak that Ate My Basement

Over the past two weeks, I've learned a very important lesson: If you are sitting in your downstairs bathroom and hear a strange drip noise that you can't quite locate, it's time to pack up and head for the hills.

Sadly, the most exciting parts of this story don't have pictures, mainly because there was too much screaming and crying going on to reach for the camera, so bear with me as I paint a picture with my words.

So the day after I'd first noticed the strange drip, drip noise, I was back on my favorite downstairs toilet. Thank goodness, thought I, that strange drip noise has gone away! It must have been outside after all. My satisfaction at a logical reasoning job well done was short-lived however and my smile evaporated (no pun intended) when I yet again heard a clear DRIP. My business concluded I crept onto the basement landing and peered around for a cause. DRIP. It was clearer now and I began descending the stairs with mounting trepidation. DRIP. I vaguely wondered if an evil serial killer was making this noise to lure me downstairs and kill me. DRIP. Surely the chickens in the next room would make some kind of warning noise if their mommy was about to be murdered. DRIP. A drop landed right at my foot and I looked up and decided to run away from home. The ceiling above me was drooping in, big, wet drops slowly forming and slipping away from the crack at its lowest point and tumbling down to splatter on the last bit of non-Greta-ruined carpet in the house.

I remember saying something that we'll assume was "dearie me!" before I ran into the unfinished basement, grabbed a screwdriver and an old food storage bucket that still had a cup or two of cocoa powder coating the bottom and ran back to face the engorged ceiling. I slammed the bucket on the carpet under the drip and bravely punctured the leak, wondering if the whole house was about to come down on top of me. More exciting words slipped out as a gushing stream of water plowed out the hole and began to fill the bucket. It streamed and streamed, as I ran frantically to the maze of waterlines that line the ceiling of the unfinished basement and began randomly twisting spigots shut. When the stream tapered off, I got up the courage to increase the size of the hole, and was grateful I didn't get to drink from the fire hose.

In the time since my initial adventure, we called insurance, had house dryers come out and put fans in the basement. The house dryers cut open our ceiling and found "the cause."

So...that wasn't just a skylight??

So now we'll play a game: find the hole from the outside of the house. Ready.....GO!!

Check me out--maintaining the weight loss. If I was James Cameron, there'd have been a lot more mistakes in Titanic.

 Give up? So did the house dryers. They stuck a clothes hanger through the hole from the inside to see where it would come out.

There it is!! I bet you feel dumb for not seeing it the first time! (Actually, in this picture and the one above, the hanger has already been inserted through the hole.--Good job using the white one, guys!)

It's like some sort of cunningly camouflaged poison dart--like that Soviet umbrella tip assassination all over again!

 So by now you probably have some questions, like "wait--how did all the water get in there all the sudden if the leak is coming out perpendicular to the ground?" "you know, it hadn't rained for several days before the leak, so how...?" or my personal favorite, "why is the ceiling still leaking if it's not raining and I just patched up the 'leak'??"

Yes, we had just been given the clean bill of dryness health and I had just finished patching that hole to the point that it's the most stable part of the whole house, when I went down to check my work and realized the ceiling was still dripping. Long story short, I began ripping wet handfuls of plaster off the ceiling and revealed--one rafter over, this:

Check out that action shot! Now I'm like James Cameron in Avatar!

So...because this pipe was still leaking, I got out the trusty cocoa bucket, took a bunch of pics for insurance and we got to start over. Only now, we knew that the wall under the leak was also seriously waterlogged. Which is how this:

 

became this:

Greta's deeply enjoyed this process and meeting all the workmen. Here's she's admiring the way the house dryers cleaned and freshened the carpet. Or she's smelling yet another leak that has been the actual problem all along.

At this point, the leak has been fixed (plus a new washer inserted in the spigot outside to help things work better--the spigot issue was unrelated to the leak), everything has been re-dried with heavy duty fans and dehumidifiers. We're hoping a lot that insurance will cover this little project, especially fixing the plaster ceiling, but fortunately, they were able to recover all the wainscoting and trim from the wall before they took it down, so that repair (though it will be horrible) will not be the end of the world.

Now, because I'm sad because my house now has a weird scary crypt corner in the basement, I leave you with Greta's storyline for the past couple of weeks.


I call it Greta Meats Lambchop

Greta's fifth birthday was April 5th, and my wonderful sister sent a giant Lambchop dog toy to celebrate. Greta loved him, maybe more than he could handle...

RIP Lambchop. I want to be clear that I didn't pose him. That's just how Greta left his poor, broken body. Somehow, laying like that, he looks more dead than any actual dead thing I've ever seen.

I want to say this is just how Greta plays, that's she's probably not an evil psychotic murderer, but then I saw the way that she had plucked off his eyes and left them stacked neatly in a corner.

Until next time (as long as Greta doesn't get to us).

Spring Projects!!

 

Honestly, Fall is my favorite time of year. Halloween, leaves changing, Halloween, school starts again, Halloween. But after this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad winter, I am thrilled to see Spring again.

Spring is kind of a challenge for folks with fertility issues. Everywhere you're presented with babies! Baby plants, baby animals, baby humans. We celebrate the earth springing forth with life. We celebrate Mother's day. We festoon our homes with baby chick and bunny décor and chow down on Peeps and Bunnies from the JustBorn company.

The only way I can deal with all of this fertility is to do things that make me feel like a mom. I exercise my own creative power (as in power to create, not imagination). The main ways I do this are raising chickens and growing a garden.

Thus, I proudly present, our newest family members:



The Babies!! They are approximately 1 day old here

We've had them for a week. It's awesome to see them grow, interact and explore their world. They've grown up quite a bit in a week.


Admittedly, their heat lamp is not flattering. This image gives a view of the closest chick's wings, which are starting to feather out. The black chick is developing tail feathers. I will miss their sweet fluffy down!!

Soo...here's the sad part. There are five chicks in the top photo and only four below. We lost one of our easter-eggers (they lay blue, green or even pinkish eggs!) on Saturday. She wasn't doing great for a couple of days and we separated her from the flock, gave her special food and water, and lots of love, but she didn't make it.

Losing these chickens is basically an expectation that you go into this with, but it's still hard to see one suffering. I'm more upset when a chicken is sick than after it dies. That is probably not very motherly of me, but I'm okay with myself.

Right now the chicks are a little mad at me...it could be that every time I go down there they get disrupted, with food, water, or even their habitat changing. Or it could be that Greta the Dog sticks her head in their box and tries to smell all of their bottoms. Greta better get her jollies while she can. Once our last chickens were grown, they would peck her nose when she'd start sniffing around, and even chased her a couple of times. Once they pinned her under their house, one pecking her on either side. She screamed and screamed. And that's how I learned that dogs can scream.

It occurs to me that that story is also not very motherly.

Anyway, the other project: The Garden

My afternoon project. The plants I bought Monday were haunting my nightmares.

We deeply enjoyed listening to the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints today. The messages were so enjoyable and I felt the love of Jesus Christ so intensely. Consider checking out some of the messages here.

My favorite talk can be accessed here. It is by the Prophet and President of the Church, Thomas S. Monson. It's about 15 minutes long and discusses the importance of loving service and help to others.

After a day of watching TV, even if it was spiritually edifying, I needed to get outside. I had bought plants on the same day I picked up the chickens and couldn't deal with not planting them anymore. Some folks today were asking me for garden advice, and I felt like a charlatan knowing my cold weather plants were rotting away. 

My garden wasn't fully prepped the way I'd like it to be. I wanted to till it before I started. But, I also had some surprise garlic and onion holdovers. The garlic is kind of a godsend--for lettuce and other tender plants, nearby garlic can ward off the insect pests that might otherwise attack it. So I'm just prepping as I go. Because I know you find everything I do as fascinating as I do, I have provided a diagram of my plantings for you.

I can honestly say I'm more proud of this diagram photo than of anything else I've ever created. It's another one of my babies!!

I thought I'd try the peas around the edges in the hopes they could climb up the fencing. I'm hoping my cool weather plant friends are not subjected to too much cold--enough cold gives them great flavor, too much of course will KILL THEM TO DEATH. (I'm sorry, I got excited.)

Happy Spring!

April Food's Day!!

So, it's been a bit since I wrote on the blog. For a while now I've wanted to get it up and running and here it is!!

So in the ongoing crisis that is our fertility situation, I ultimately came to a realization: I don't have to "save up" the fun things I want to do for birthdays, holidays, etc. until I have kids. I've got the time and energy now, so why not celebrate myself by doing awesome things?

I will tell you why not: it is incredibly hard work.

Take today, for instance. Today is April Fool's Day (aka, the worst holiday ever that I hate). I play practical jokes a lot. (mainly jumping out and scaring Greta as she wanders around the house). But I'm a firm believer in doing funny things if you're funny and not doing things that you think will be funny but aren't if you aren't funny. (there's no better way to write that). But on April Fool's Day, everyone seems to think they've got carte blanche to do whatever they want. So they end up doing stupid, reckless and hurtful things in the name of humor and it makes me unhappy.

ANYWAY...last year, a clever friend of mine posted a picture of a non-awful trick: she'd made meatloaf "cupcakes" with mashed potato "frosting." That got me thinking and I decided that this year, I'd play a similar trick on Brandon. There are a lot of awesome April Fool's Day tricky foods out there (I saw a picture of a bundle of asparagus that was actually a chocolate cake!!). To be clear: IMHO, the only acceptable April Fool's Day foods are those that are a pleasant surprise. NO laxative brownies, surprise gross mystery ingredients or inedible foods substituted for real foods.

To that end, I decided we'd have pizza and cupcakes for dinner, but not necessarily in that order. The other hard thing about being so whimsical today is that I didn't check the meat or cooking ingredients that I had (I'm kind of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants April Fool's Day cook) and Brando had the car so I had to make due. So instead of the adorable and beautifully presented meatloaf cupcakes, I made twelve small chicken pot pies. (this upped the workload to the point that I literally did nothing but make this food all day).

Here's the result (with a bit of my creative process thrown in).




Pizza and cupcakes or cupcakes and pizza?

Step one: a giant cookie. I used this cookie pizza recipe, but added in 1 cup of milk chocolate chips, 1/2 Ghirardelli white chocolate bar (smashed) and 5 mini heath bars (smashed). The recipe required a much smaller quantity of ingredients, which was good because by the end of the day I was trying to churn Greta milk for more butter (that's disgusting, I apologize--it is not true--I was just very short on butter) 

I made a nice simple fondant while the cookie was cooling and used it to form the mushrooms, pepperonis, green onions, black olives and cooked cheese you'll see later. But the first thing I added to the cooled cookie was the tomato sauce. I made a simple frosting (butter, salt, powdered sugar, cream) added A LOT of red food coloring and a little brown to make it more tomato-ey. I put in red and green sprinkles to make it look more realistic (like herbs in the sauce).

Voila! (Sadly, by this time I was already thinking fondly of taking a nap and ordering out for dinner)

Then came the cheese. The darker is fondant that I colored yellow and brown to make it look more done. I froze it and then grated it over the pizza. The white is white chocolate, also grated. (Fun fact: when dried, the darker stuff looks so much like toasted coconut that Brando couldn't tell that it wasn't even after tasting it!)

Unfortunately, I had squandered all my white chocolate making the giant cookie, so a sacrifice needed to be made.
Sorry, ducky!

All the toppings are fondant. I spent a long time making "realistic" fat and other unidentifiable deposits in the pepperoni. The snakes were intended to be green peppers (which Brandon is allergic to (my only venture into the crueler aspects of the holiday)). The brown and white things are my attempt at canned mushrooms.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!

Okay, so the pizza was mostly fun. The cupcakes were mostly awful. I used this recipe and it was awesome--it tasted ridiculously good. Brandon had 3 cupcakes for dinner. But it was so time consuming.
I did make one fairly major change to her recipe in that I cooked the bottom crusts in the cupcake papers for about 10 minutes at 350F. This ensured (in my mind at least) that they wouldn't be soggy and underdone when everything else went in together. The crust turned out fabulous and the tops and bottoms sealed up fine even though the bottoms were already cooked.


I whipped up mashed potato "frosting" in the spirit of my friend's beautiful creations from last year. Tragically, where her potatoes were stiff and malleable, mine were...gooey. They tasted really good though, so I went with it, dyed them pink and added a few sprinkles (coarse sea salt mixed with blue food coloring).

A close-up.

When Brandon got home, I proudly presented dinner, which he accepted with a HUGE amount of trepidation. I think maybe I was *too* excited. But then he loved them!!

The Funeral

On Monday, my friend Yevgenia died. She was wonderful. A year older than me and with a smile that could light up the whole planet. She was gracious, kind, well-organized, driven and recently we had talked about working together. She was a financial planner and she was going to refer clients to me. We had dropped out of touch for a month or two and I had just been thinking I needed to get back with her when I heard the news.

Her death was very unexpected and even though I thought I'd be okay, I found myself unable to stop crying at work the next day. I left early and took today off, too, since the funeral was in the middle of the day.

The funeral was beautiful and very, very sad. Yevgenia's simple wooden coffin was carried and set above her grave. The family stood and tore their clothing. The rabbi prayed and read Psalms. He spoke on her life and her willingness to live it fully. He said there were lessons to be learned from Yevgenia's life.

She had many serious struggles with her health throughout her life, but she didn't let that keep her from living. The rabbi spoke about her zeal for life and the way she exemplified gratitude in the way she lived. He told us that we should think of her example as we try to feel gratitude in the simple things we take for granted, like eating an apple. He suggested we thank God that despite all over which He has dominion, He has allowed us to be in the same place and time as this apple and enjoy the pleasure of eating it.

He told us to live in the present and keep moving forward. He said that despite what burned out comedians say, Judaism doesn't embrace the concept of guilt. He said that guilt is to morality what pain is to health; a sign that something needs to be fixed. We don't need to feel like we have to vacation in guilt--we need to fix what's wrong and move on.

Then he spoke about an act of true kindness. He said we don't often have the opportunity to do something for someone when they are completely incapable of paying us back in some way. He then offered us the opportunity to help cover Yevgenia's coffin with dirt when it was lowered into the grave. When I took my turn, I tried to shovel in the biggest load that I could because I wanted her to know how much of a difference she'd made in my life. I had known her since my first year of college. She was kind and generous, and felt like an automatic friend from the moment I met her. Every time I'd see her, she had a big smile on her face. She helped me through some difficult times. We reconnected at alumni weekend at Case last fall and spoke, e-mailed and met. She made me feel like I wasn't alone in trying to make a go of it, and in sharp contrast to my serious self doubt, she was consistently encouraging and made me feel like my success was inevitable.

Her funeral was held in a small cemetery. Every inch of the winding road that snaked through it was dedicated to parking for her funeral service, and by the time we arrived, we were diverted to park across the street, along with many others. There were at least 200 people there and given the short period between when she died and when her funeral was held, I know that was just a tiny fraction of the people that she inspired with her love, friendship, unconditional kindness and sharp mind. As I watched Brandon shovel a little more dirt into the grave after the service had ended, I felt a sudden surge of hope and I knew that while her body lay in the coffin below, her spirit lived on and her grieving family would see her again.

As much as Yevgenia's death impacted me, I know there were many people far closer to her. Her sweet husband, her family, her former roommates and her best friends. I feel like an interloper sharing my grief with theirs. But the lesson I learned from Yevgenia's life is that there is no contact so small that it can't make a great impact for good. Her implicit faith in me and her support as we exchanged infertility war stories meant the world to me, even though we only spent a few hours together in the past year. I am filled with gratitude for having known her and thank God for the knowledge that some day I will be able to tell her so face to face.

The Cut (WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES)

I cut my finger today while I was doing dishes. I dropped a glass vase in the sink. Since I have the reflexes of an awesome ninja-catwoman hybrid, I am usually able to catch things that fell, but today, when I tried, I was just a millisecond too late and my hand and the vase became one!
As a kid, you wonder how you'll know if a cut needs stitches--it turns out you just know. There was a lot of blood. Blood on the sink, blood on the vase, blood on the floor. I grabbed a paper towel and put pressure on it. Some very kind friends (including our G.P.) were willing to help us out so I went into my doctor's office instead of having to go to the E.R. I had to keep pressure on the cut and have it elevated. I did so for about an hour--but the bleeding still didn't stop!

My Cut. You can see the hanging flap at the bottom. My doc cut away that flap and used scissors to even out the jagged edges so that my skin would close more smoothly.

Next, he washed it out with a lot of saline solution. It stung a little. Also there was a ton of blood running down the back of my hand--so much that I thought I maybe had another cut I didn't notice before.

All clean? It had been washed thoroughly--even rubbed down with alcohol--but it would NOT stop bleeding.

At this point, the depth of the cut became apparent. At the top of the cut you can see that the subcutaneous fat is sticking out--there was some at the bottom of the cut, too. There was a medical student who was helping. He didn't get the chance to do much except switch out my super bloody paper towels.

Now it got serious. The doc told me that the next part would hurt a lot and that I needed to hold my finger really still for the Lidocaine. Surprisingly up until this point, it really didn't hurt that much. It felt like a cut, but even though it looks horrific I wasn't in agony or anything.

He wasn't kidding when he said it would hurt. He stuck the needle in like a quarter inch (which is pretty deep for a finger) and started to fill it up with Lidocaine. The pain was intense for the first second or two of the shot and then there was just the very uncomfortable sensation of your finger being inflated. To fully numb the site he gave me about five of these shots--some of which he stuck in a half inch or so. The worst part was feeling the skin on my knuckle expand as my finger got fatter and fatter. I was more agitated by that than by the pain from the shot.

It's me and my doctor. The ickiest part of this experience for me was just before this, when he cut off pieces of my skin around the cut. Right now he's starting stitches. He started with a big one in the middle of the cut that he tied off four times. Then he made a stitch on either side. My cut was still bleeding the whole time.

Even with three stitches in, I was still bleeding. Your finger has two little arteries that go up the sides and I swear it was like a teeny, oozing arterial spurt. I could see it coming out with my pulse.

This is what I look like when I'm carefully listening to instructions. No boot camp til Monday. Check. If it starts heavily bleeding or really hurts, call the office because that's a sign of infection. Check. Brandon should take you to brunch. Check. You'll notice I'm applying pressure still, even after being all bandaged up because it STILL hasn't stopped bleeding.

Anyway, I definitely learned my lesson and will not be doing dishes again for a long, long time. Brandon and I went to the Inn on Coventry for an awesome brunch (I specifically asked my doc to recommend it to Brandon as part of my medical treatment).

The bleeding finally stopped (it started again just a tiny bit when I hugged Greta too enthusiastically). In the hour or two after my stitches, the lidocaine wore off and it started to feel like my skin had been cut, washed, poked with needles, cut again and had four nylon threads tied through it, but I imagine that's only to be expected. I took some ibuprofen (I know, bleeding risk, but if I hadn't bled to death out of the cut by then, a few more drops couldn't hurt) and felt fine. Now it generally only hurts if I flex my finger too much.

Special thanks to my very kind, patient doctor and his sweet wife and as always, to my wonderful supporter/dynamite cameraman Brandon. And to med student Nick who tried to clean off my bloodstained hands with an alcohol wipe and was mostly unsuccessful. I mocked him until I tried to do it myself later--suddenly I understand where Lady Macbeth was coming from. BAM! Surgery and Shakespeare all in one day!