NaNoWriMo and Wordcounts and Bears, Oh My!
Yes I did…
Today I donated $10 to NaNoWriMo’s Office of Letters and Light… bringing my total donations to $20. Aside from that my activities chiefly consisted of sleeping all day and trying to allow my body to generate enough energy to beat off the flu I seem to have been infected with. I woke up, saw that it was the last day for registering for Night of Writing Dangerously, and went to check out my fundraising page on StayClassy. Still $10 – which I personally donated to show my commitment to these things. I reflected then, suddenly, upon how extremely unlikely it is that I will raise $240 in the next couple of hours.
Okay… not suddenly. I just wrote that to convey more excitement to the blog reader – but in all reality, I knew that there would probably be no more than $10 because I haven’t been promoting this very well, and these things do not promote themselves.
What have I been doing instead? Well, yesterday I spastically completed an eight page textual analysis regarding Milton and his physical infirmity – that is, blindness. By the end of the semester, it will need to become a term paper. For now, though… I managed to add about 1500 words to my pitiful NaNoWriMo word count, and as I approach the 10k word mark and think “wow, in half the month I can probably reach 1/5th of the writing assignment for NaNoWriMo”, I exhaustedly squeeze $10 out of my personal finance and I decide, rather than immediately passing out, I will try to blog and swallow more coffee.
Tomorrow, there will be an interview posted.. I have the interview. It is with Howard Brad Halverson. It only needs to be posted. I, tired, write funny. I babble write. My writing, it doesn’t make sense. I iz tired. I have no choice but to resort to lolcats.
Courtesy of (http://www.relaxedpolitics.com/2009/11/iz-tired/)
Depo Provera. Yes. I need it for medical reasons.
Screaming Me… me.
Just so you know.. I don’t work a Catholic employer. I currently work for the county, so my employer is a government body… I’m working as a care worker these days. So I was surprised when I got a weird call regarding birth control coverage yesterday.
I posted this on my personal Facebook page… and I usually don’t like to post political stuff here, but I think I will make an exception, because, you know, it terrified me. It was like something I’d been having nightmares about while reading all of the pissed off comments on political pages about birth control and sluts and stuff. So, this is me quoting myself…
Yesterday I received this nightmarish call from my doctor’s medical billing office about my Depo Provera shot. Like a Twilight Zone episode based upon the Election year debates regarding birth control, there I was, being interrogated about my shot. Do these people not have access to their own charts? “I do not use Depo Provera for medical reasons,” I explained calmly but irritably. “It is a treatment for my endometrios. It is a replacement treatment for the Lupron Depo I used to be on. It is has fewer side effects than Lupron. Part of my ovaries and all of my fallopian tubes have been surgically removed due to endometriosis and I couldn’t get pregnant if I wanted to.” Finally the woman said “okay, so it’s a medical treatment and should be billed as such.” “Yes,” I said grumpily, “it is a medical treatment and should be billed as such.”
Now, some of you may not know what endometriosis is, but I have it. I’ve been diagnosed with Stage 4 
Endometriosis since the age of 21, when they were able to medically confirm it by sticking a microscope into my bellybutton and looking around – this is called a laparoscopy. Endometriosis is the number one cause of female infertility. Rather than describe it, I will provide a nice, concise definition via link:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/endometriosis/DS00289
So, yes.. it hurts like hell. I always compared the pain to being dissected like a frog – you know, it felt like someone was slicing into my abdomen with a sharp object. The endometriosis also caused me to get ovarian growths called chocolate cysts, which is why I had surgery. Twice. A normal ovary is the size of a Greek olive, but with the cyst inside my ovary grew the size of a softball. The birth control helps prevent this kind of issue also. As you can imagine, I am happy to be out of pain and free from random internal cyst grown. Yes, they have found an effective treatment for me. The thing is – my effective treatment is most commonly used as a form of birth control, and now birth control has become politicized so apparently, I actually have to make sure that my medical health care provider (known as a “midwife” because – well, probably because my medical clinic is in Berkeley, CA – but an ob-gyn to the rest of us) accurately lists it as a medical treatment not birth control. Although the last time I met with my doctor she explained that it is actually serving a secondary purpose as birth control, because, well, the fact that my fallopian tubes are tiny little nubs now doesn’t 100% rule out the possibility that I could become pregnant with one of those tubal pregnancies or other pregnancies where there is a fetus growing somewhere outside of the uterus who can’t be carried to term but can kill you and stuff.
But no… not the main purpose. The main purpose is to keep me from being bent over in excruciating pain and throwing up ten out of every thirty days, the way I used to be before they put me on Lupron. Lupron, my prior injection solution to the condition, puts your body into temporary menopause by shutting down estrogen production. I was on it for two years, which might have something to do with me starting to show symptoms of joint issues like arthritis lately. My bones have been prematurely aged by treatment for a condition so painful that – well, it was worth it, let’s put it that way.
I will have to receive treatment until I naturally or unnaturally reach menopause.
Without the shots, the next solution would be surgery to remove both of my ovaries, which would send me into menopause immediately because – well, no ovaries, no estrogen production.
This is my personal nightmare, and if you’re read my books, you probably understand the repeated appearances by angsty infertile chicks now. You know.
But enough of that for now. /rant, off
Sumiko Saulson 
Wow, thanks for sharing that.