Month: March 2009

bookmark_borderShoe Shopping

Posted on by PaulaO

I hate shopping for shoes. I really do. And this is why:

If I go to get a pair of jeans and I know I wear 28″ waist with 29″ inseam, then I know that any pair of jeans I pick up that says 28×29 are, well, going to be 28×29. That’s not the way with shoes. This shoe is too small and it’s an 8. This shoe fits and it’s an 8. That shoe is like, way big and it’s an 8. SAME SIZE!!

And now they went and changed the width stuff.

In women’s shoes (which I don’t/can’t wear), size 8D means it is 8 Wide. 8 2E is size 8 double wide. In men’s shoes, 8D means 8 Medium. 8 2E is 8 Wide.

Arrgghh!

At least now that I’m mostly using a wheelchair, I only need to get shoes once every two years or so. Except when a certain Shepweiler (rottweiler/german shepherd pup named Mike) decides shoes are tasty and make good teething objects and really fly when tossed by the string.

For years, I have worn Thom McCans. I love those shoes and they were in Kmart (vs the evil Walmart). But a few years ago, they changed the style and they aren’t as comfortable. When I walked more, these were the only shoes to survive past 3 months. My pronation or whatever it is can wear down shoes in now time flat. Thom McCans make excellent dress shoes and I wore Saucony sneakers. But the place we went to today seemed to be lacking in Saucony shoes in my size (whatever size of the moment they happened to be) so I went wandering about in the men’s shoes while Lorna wandered in the women’s section.

I found some hiking shoes that I fell in lust with. They’re by Merrell. Lorna called (to make sure I hadn’t killed anyone) while I was looking at them and I told her to look to see if there were any in women’s. She found me a few minutes later and had fallen madly in lust with a pair of her own. She got the women’s Phaser Rush and I got the men’s Pantheon. She also got a pair of Saucony’s.

I don’t know how long we were there. We’d shopped together for a while but drifted apart in the madness that is shoe shopping. We like the store (Discount Shoes out on Brevard Road) because they are so freakin’ big that we have a good chance of finding something we like. They ought to have a hot dog stand in there, though.

bookmark_borderI’m A Writer, Honest

Posted on by PaulaO

I know, irritating as heck to some of you that I don’t talk about writing (or, specifically, my writing). Instead, I go on rants and rambles about mentally off-rocker women having 14 babies, the Feds messing with everything including our television reception, and all sorts of stuff in-between.

So, here is a post about writing, or, specifically, my writing.

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There. Happy now?

Okay, seriously now. I am writing again. I am working on Nikki and Ellen’s story. I piddle with it a little each day, reacquainting myself with them and the Lesbian Collective of High Pond. I started reading Lee Lynch’s Morton River Valley today and that helps get my creative brain to begin its end of hibernation. I don’t have a goal set for myself. Just a little at a time, taking it easy and trying to get it all working again.

R and D want me to work on the “Simple Sarah” novel(s) instead. But I feel that if I can get another Butch Girl book out, then I will have oiled the gears enough that I can get to the more serious, more fun stuff.

bookmark_borderFertility Treatment Myths

Posted on by PaulaO

5 Myths of Fertility Treatments

Just as the invention of contraceptives freed sex from the concerns of baby-making, new reproductive technologies have freed baby-making from sex.

Yet despite 5 million such technology-assisted births, plus the recent eight by Nadya Suleman, there remain common misperceptions about “test-tube” and “designer” babies.

The article addresses 5 common myths about fertility treatments.

Myth 1: Designer babies are coming soon

Reports that we will someday be able to artificially choose a child’s traits, “from a scientific point of view, are totally totally made up,” said Sarah Franklin, researcher, author and keynote speaker at The Politics of Reproduction conference held Saturday at Barnard College.

(…)

Myth 2: In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is easy

“The media tends to report the success cases,” said Debora Spar, president of Barnard and author of “The Baby Business,” but failures are the norm.

(…)

Myth 3: Egg donation is common

“It is egg sales,” Spar corrected. Because no one wants to think about money in relation to their child, the baby business talks about “delivering hope” not “profit,” she said, but it is a market like any other.

(…)

Myth 4: IVF increases fertility

Actually, a woman undergoing IVF must first take hormones to shut down her fertility cycle, Franklin explained.

(…)

Myth 5: The children will be fine

“The voice that gets lost in all these debates is that of the child,” Spar said. No one knows the long-term effects of spending, as an embryo, a few days in cultured media or exposed to surges of synthetic hormones, she said.

(…)

The end of the article discusses the recent octuplets births and includes a link to another article.

The Ethical and Legal Implications of Octuplets

We all know about the old woman who lived in a shoe, the one with all those kids and who didn’t know what to do. Well, one thing she didn’t do was have eight more kids. And this wasn’t because nothing rhymes with octuplets.

Having eight children at once — or seven, six, five or four, for that matter — is not healthy for the children. Such human litters rarely occur naturally because, the sad truth is, the children rarely survive to adulthood to mate and to pass along a genetic predisposition to multiple births.

It’s a simple medical fact that the more babies in the brood, the lower their average birth weight. And the lower their birth weight, the more they are susceptible to a lifetime of health and social challenges.

The article, which is much more articulate than my previous post about this, is written by Christopher Wanjek, LiveScience’s Bad Medicine Columnist. He does a good job of discussing the future of those babies and any others in their positions.

bookmark_borderRevisiting Air

Posted on by PaulaO

Ack! I hate that mask! Hateithateithateit! Besides that, I really don’t like it that much.

I tried out the Mirage Liberty from ResMed. It is a cool concept in mask design. It doesn’t cover the nose but goes slightly inside with what are called “nasal pillows”. But it also covers the mouth. This way, if a person rolls onto their back and their mouth opens, they are still benefiting from the treatment. This is called a “full face mask” because it includes both the nose and the mouth. There are only two that I know of that use nasal pillows to do this. The other is called the Hybrid. Users give the Hybrid more “stars” than they do the Liberty but the place I get my stuff from doesn’t carry it. I may ask them to get one anyway, just so I can tell if there is a difference.

I used it Friday through, oh, Tuesday I think. I gave it a good try, really I did. Usually I give a mask a lot of chances because they are all different with different headgear etc.

First problem: the nasal pillows come out of my nose. It got to where I’d fall asleep with my fingers holding the damn things in place

Second problem: when I laid on my back? damn mask leaked all over the place! Chin, cheek, nose. No matter how tight or loose I made the straps, it still leaked.

Third problem: I needed a degree in rope-ology to figure out how to untangle the head gear. What a pain in the, er, head! Every night, I had to figure out how it all went. The clips only went in one way but they came back out far too easily.

Fourth problem: this is probably a full mask problem and not limited to the Liberty but…my lips got awfully chapped. I mean as in bleeding each morning. Yes, the humidifier was on. As the pressure rose (it ramps from 6 or so to the max of 12 over a period of about 30 minutes or so), the air blew my mouth open. You know those idiots that jump from airplanes (skydivers)? You know how their face wiggles in the air and if they open their mouth, it looks like they were just hooked up to an air pump? That’s what my face did. When I got up in the morning, my skin was loose and my mouth was in a deep frown. Having semi-stretchy skin isn’t always a good thing.

So back it will go. If they don’t deal in the Hybrid and won’t/can’t order it, I’ll just stick with the ComfortLite 2. I’ll ask if there’s any others she’d recommend.