Eating Lightning and Crapping Thunder

Well, Happy New Year, everyone. I don't know about you, but I was certainly glad to kick 2010 to the curb, that dirty slut. Although it wasn't quite as bad as The Shit Year That Was 2009, it wasn't the days of wine and roses, either. I guess you can say that it was a year of transition.

Mom's doing really really well with her recovery. She's using a walker and zipping around fairly well-getting herself in and out of a chair, going to the bathroom and such, and is also using a single-prong cane in therapy and practicing movement in the house. The cane makes her a bit more nervous than using the walker, but she's also using a treadmill at therapy, so they're pretty confident that she might not need anything by the summer. Her progress is truly amazing. The only snag is that her CA-125 has been slowly creeping up for the past few months. She's not ready yet for more chemo, so the oncologist put her on Femara to try to lower it. So, this is that awful limbo-waiting period that we need to go through to see what the deal is. Dad isn't good with this stuff, so it's been a struggle to keep him afloat, be the cheerleader for mom and try to manage my own mess of a life. Yeah, what else is new, right?

My brother and SIL (yeah, we starting talking again-that's a post for another day, though) moved to The Sunny Land in the South in September with My Handsome Nephew (hereby known to all here as MHN), which my parents didn't take well AT ALL, but......there wasn't much they could do about it. They did come for Christmas, so that was exciting to have them all here. MHN is absolutely adorable and sweet-natured (yeah, I know everyone says that, but he really is) and obviously has his mother's sweet temperament, which is a relief, considering that my brother can be a horse's ass sometimes.

Work is......work, which I hate to say, because I really like my job, apart from the part-time status. I'm still doing as much work as I did last year, sans half my salary and no insurance. I really think, despite reassurances from colleagues that "things will only be like this for this school year", that they won't bring me back to full-time-I mean, why should they, if they can get me to work just as much and not pay me? Which means that I'll have to look for another job, which BLOWS for teachers right now in NJ. Luckily we have Sean's health insurance, but for all the grandstanding from his employer that they get 100% employer-paid benefits, they really are shitty with the coverages and out-of-pocket expenses. But, it's better than nothing, so for that I must be thankful. We're actually considering moving out of state (perhaps to The Sunny Land of the South?) to get away from the hot mess that is the Garden State right now-I know that it's not better in a lot of places, but for the amount of taxes I'm being raped for here, I'd rather have less of a shellacking somewhere else. Plus, Sean HATES his job-he's never going to move forward in the company, and he's feeling stagnated, which just gets his anxiety and frustration going. Not a good combination, trust me.

Oh, yeah, and about that infertile thing. Well......I'm still infertile. But Dr. Pipsqueak convinced us to do one last college try, with the addition to that trusty little sidekick of PGD. Since it's not covered by insurance, we had to beg, borrow and steal (well, not STEAL, but beg and borrow is more like it) the $5K that insurance won't cover in order to start the cycle. I started Lupron on December 31st-Happy Frickin' New Year! I got to shoot up in a restaurant that was listed in Zagat's as "the fourth most-popular in New Jersey"-that's a first for me. The food was SLAMMIN', though......

So, we'll see about how this develops. Hopefully this will work, and we're done. Or, this won't work, and we'll know that my eggs are shit, and then we'll proceed from there. But, the past year and a half has taught me something important. I'm a strong person. I still have fight left in me, and I won't know if this will work or not if I don't at least try. So, I'll try it.

Now, pass me the Tylenol and a tank top, bitches.....I feel a headache and hot flashes coming on! Yaaaaay LUPRON!!