random babble…

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A couple of weeks ago I asked my PCM for a referral to OB/GYN to replace the IUD that I had to surrender over the summer. She and The Guy and I have been talking for some time about the options and realities of having another child with my condition, and the answer we came up with is that we will wait for a little longer and see if I am still doing well with my current regimen.

Usually these things take weeks to schedule, but they called the next day, and I had my referral appointment on the second day. No matter what your history in the OB/GYN clinics you have to have counseling in order to get birth control through the MTF (all the ones in which I have been treated anyway), and the idea is that you get to talk to your OB/GYN about all of your birth control options, what you want from your birth control, take his or her advice, and decide on what is best for you. That is the theory, anyhow.

Some people (like me) have an idea ahead of time what they want or what is best for them. I, for example, due to my medical history and ongoing condition, am not able to use a hormonal birth control. Because of that I know that the copper IUD (ParaGuard) is the best option for me. Also because of this, I often read up on ParaGuard and IUD use in women, and try to keep abreast of any information regarding IUD usage, risks involved, etc. The IUD has such a bad reputation from so much misinformation that I feel the need to stay on top of this. Some would say this makes me a big smarty-pants-know-it-all. I say that sometimes a woman can’t trust that her doctor is going to take her word at face falue, and in the off chance that her doctor isn’t as awesome as mine she needs to be prepared. I am privileged to have information available at my fingertips.

I did not realize that my appointment would not be with my usual kick-ass OB/GYN, Dr. K, the same one who saved my fallopian tubes and life this summer and who promised to give me a shiny new IUD whenever I was ready for it. Not panicking when I saw the face of a woman I didn’t know I sat down as she introduced herself as Nurse Midwife V and told me that she had been looking over my file. Great. Maybe she was doing her background reading too, because I really tire of bringing every doctor up to speed constantly on my condition when it is right there on the computer screen for them to see. I don’t have a bunch of degrees and I can keep up with the required reading.

Before I had even the chance to say anything she told me that I was “not a candidate for an IUD” because of my ectopic pregnancy, and that she was not going to refer me for one. When I started to say that I understood that there were some risks she cut me off and told me that my pap was also past due and kept talking. I tried to assert myself past her obsession with people rooting around in my vagina, to let her know that I was aware that there were risks involved with the IUD, but that I knew that not only was what happened to me rare, but that I knew it was rare that it might happen again. But she wasn’t having any of that. She kept right on talking like I wasn’t even there.

I told her that my regular doctor had already said I was fine to have one. She responded by saying that it usually took weeks to get in to see him, as if this was supposed to deter me somehow. I also tried asking if the new ACOG regulations had been implemented yet, thinking this might distract her and get me closer to my goal (also, I am in the lag area none of them know what to do with, being 29, soon to be 30) and all she would say was that my pap was past due. Is it? I don’t know. I had a normal one in late 2008. I am in a mutually monogamous relationship…

When I left I told the front desk that I would no longer allow Nurse Midwife V to treat me. I am currently in the process of filing a formal complaint against her. What shouldn’t have happened here was having everyone from the desk staff to the NCOIC (that’s Non-commissioned officer in charge) tell me how nice Nurse Midwife V is and how everyone likes her so much, and that she is well known for being very good at what she does. That might well be true, great. My experience is that she was condescending and rude, and didn’t help me with my medical needs to my satisfaction. I think that people forget that sometimes, that doctors and nurses are also here to provide a service for us. I have a medical need, and she didn’t meet it. I shouldn’t have to settle for that. No matter how nice and great she is to work with. I also shouldn’t have my experience erased and dismissed by everyone in place to help me when things go wrong for me. That is not good patient advocacy.

I am rather privileged, however, in that I was able to make another appointment, and I saw Dr. K the next day. Had I been someone who had to drive a long way to a clinic, I might not have been able to. Had I had to pay out of pocket for this visit, or if my insurance limited the amount of OB/GYN visits or birth control counselings I was allowed per year, I would not have been able to. Had the travel cost me money I did not have, this would not have been possible. Had I not had the type of job I do where I set my own hours, I might have had to miss work. These are the kinds of things that women face when they come up against providers like Nurse Midwife V, providers who don’t want to listen to women, who won’t talk to women about their own bodies and medical histories. Providers who don’t trust women to be actively involved in their medical processes. Providers who can’t be bothered to involved women in the partnership that should be their own medical care, especially when it comes to their reproductive health. As it was, having to go back a second time was already taxing on my spoons, and stressful, because now I have be on my game. Suddenly I have to come in educated on something that my provider should have known the first time.

Thanks to meloukhia’s indominatable Google-fu I took in the information I was looking for, backing up what I had already said, that an ectopic pregnancy did not preclude me from having an IUD (or, that a previous ectopic pregnancy was not a contraindication for an IUD). Dr. K was impressed that I was so prepared. He told me that he had heard that information, but he himself had been so busy that he hadn’t had time to read any of the journals for himself. He told The Guy (who went with me this time, because they like to banter back and forth in Korean) that I should come in from time to time to keep him updated on current women’s health, and said he wished more people came to him so informed. He said that whomever told me that I couldn’t have an IUD was wrong. I was prepared, but I shouldn’t have had to come in as if I was fighting a war.

Two weeks later I have my IUD.

Nurse Midwife V didn’t care to ask why, after having one IUD failure (as rare as they are, b/c they are pretty much the most effective form of reversible birth control out there, with a fail rate of less than one percent), I would want another IUD. She didn’t bother to find out anything else in my medical history that might affect my decision to make that very personal choice about birth control, like that I am on medication that might have contraindications with hormonal birth control, or that previous specialists had determined that hormonal birth control is a migraine trigger for me. She simply asserted her own opinion (as wrong as it turned out to be) and called it a day. But all of that information is in my medical record if she cared to look. The same record she said she reviewed when she made her initial judgment.

And now, I can’t trust her.

After almost a month of correspondence and petition signing, Congressman Stupak finally got around to having one of his aides respond to me. In fairness, this letter is fairly well tailored based on what I actually wrote, and yet, it is ridiculously condescending, and predictably skirting of anything that I said. Thanks for that.

It should also be noted, that my Congressman hates me. Yes. Me, specifically. He hates me as a Native Woman. There is no place for people like me in his world, because my health care needs won’t matter to him. Lest he forget, also, that there is a whole bunch of Michigan yet above the Mitten. “Northern Michigan” isn’t “above Traverse City”. There is a whole Peninsula left. It’s on the quarter and everything. HA!

So, Thanks for nothing, Mr. Stupak. Thanks for mansplaining that one. I’ll be sure to include this as the intro to your new Broadway show “Fuck You!: The Musical.

Letter after the jump. Read more…

Great episode (sorry, can’t embed *coughWordPresscough*). *

Are you back?

Read more…

Moderatrix note:  This is a piece I wrote two years ago which was previously posted at the Liquid Words blog, The Outlet, which is no longer online.  I am re-posting it now, because I think it rocks, and because I want some meatier pieces back up here, even though I am still traveling.  This was a baby project of mine for a while.  Enjoy.

I was eleven years old and it was the summer before I began the sixth grade. I woke up alarmed. The bed was wet, and I was so embarrassed thinking that I had wet the bed. I got up out of bed and turned on the lamp to make my way to the bathroom connected to the bedroom. My younger brother and I were staying the summer with our dad, who was at work, so we were spending the night at our grandparent’s house. “Crap,” I thought, “Grandma is going to be so angry that someone my age wet the bed. It wasn’t uncommon, as I had grown up with a small bladder and many infections, I had wet the bed before. As I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror alarm turned to panic. In a very My Girl moment, I freaked out because there was blood everywhere. It couldn’t be good for that much blood to leave my body all at once. My bed looked like a murder scene. I was dying. There was no other option. I ran up to my grandparent’s bedroom, and hurriedly and woke my grandmother. I told her something was horribly wrong. She got up out of bed and followed me to the bathroom. I remember the look on her face, something mixed between amusement and annoyance at having been woken up. She handed me a towel, a clean night gown, and a thick white thing. She told me to shower up and change while she changed my sheets. When I finished, she showed me how to stick the thing in my underwear, and sent me back to bed, still bewildered and half crying. In the morning she told me I had just “become a woman”. She gave me some books, which I am certain were written circa 1965, and told me to read them, and that tampons were bad for my body (and it was years before I was convinced otherwise). She took care of explaining to my father when he arrived to pick us up after breakfast the events of the past night. I spent the next few nights holed up in my room reading about female and male anatomy, puberty, necking and petting, snickering to myself and re-reading the part about intercourse and ogling the scientific drawings of penises. The books were full of pictures of sanitary napkin belts and never even mentioned STIs or contraceptive. I am absolutely sure it taught that one should abstain from sex until marriage.

And that was that.

That was my big sex talk.

My big lesson on the “birds and the bees”. Read more…

Some time in May I got my period just like normal.  No big deal.  When I was younger my periods were erratic, coming whenever they felt like it (or not at all, I frequently missed them during Track and Cross Country), and lasting however long, usually between five and ten days.  Ten was the longest ever.  After I had The Kid things settled down nicely, and since then I have pretty much been able to set a watch to my periods and track them easily.  Every 28 days, lasting about six days, with day two being the hardest, and things trailing off from there.

This time, day six came and left, and things picked up intensity.  I went through twice as many tampons as normal by day nine, including a whole box of the highest level absorbency available, which I never use.  By day ten I was cramping, a lot, something which is pretty unusual, as I usually suffer some back pain, but nothing like this.  By day twelve I was lightheaded and lethargic.  I was also a little worried.  But each day I went to bed thinking it would be over with the next day…and I am oft reluctant to involve a doctor for fear of being ridiculed for worrying about trivial things.

Day fourteen we called the doctor. Read more…

I am staunchly Pro-Choice.  I will vehemently defend the right of a woman to decide for herself what happens w/in the confines of her own body, no matter the circumstances.  I believe that women, and I include teenage young women in this too, have the mental capabilities to weight the pros, cons, and all the nuances in between for themselves, to understand the choices that she has, and to make the right decision for her own personal situation.  I believe that all of this should be free from binding laws of government and the religious morals of a minority, w/ the exception of having that right to choose federally legislated and protected free of any caveats.

I haven’t always felt that way.

There was a time when I was young and blissfully ignorant of anything but what was fed to me.  There was a time when I honestly felt that my being icked out by something should negate the right of a separate and autonomous person to make decisions about her own life.

But a few things happened that changed all of that.

One of them was one of my best friends from High School.  We’ll call her Alyson. Read more…

Dr. George Tiller, a man who has put the health and safety of women above his own countless times was shot and killed, fucking gunned down, as he walked into church Sunday morning.  From Cara:

Dr. Tiller was one of the few late-term abortion providers in the country.  He had previously been shot, his clinic burnt down, harassed by ideological anti-abortion attorney generals, and threatened with death countless times.

He has survived this long to continue doing the important work that he believed in.

He and his commitment to women’s health will be dearly missed, and I grieve for his family.

At this time the suspect is not in custody, but here is the info for anyone in the Wichita area:

Police were looking for a blue Ford Taurus with a K-State vanity plate, license number 225 BAB. Police described him as a white male in his 50’s or 60’s, 6′1,” 220 lbs, wearing a white shirt and dark pants.

Jill has some info on several Pro-Choice organizations where you can donate in Dr. Tiller’s name.

Rest In Peace, Dr. Tiller.  

And thank you.

UPDATE:  Apparently an arrest has been made.

Cliche?  Yup.  You betcha.

Almost as cliche as the war between moms and non-moms.

I didn’t come into the feminist sphere until well into my motherhood days.  Sure, the ideals were all there but there was this huge disconnect in my brain about feminism and what I believed.  I had this bad movie stereotype in my head, and I wasn’t ready to trade in my bras for cami pants and bongo drums.  But I knew from very young, from the day my mother drove her car through a puddle to splash a group of anti-choice protesters, and I knew the day that I held my new daughter in my arms for the first time that shit wasn’t right in the world, and that the world wasn’t made w/ women in mind.

And once I grew a little and learned to connect what I believed w/ what feminism really meant (to me) it was easier to identify w/.  Over the last few years I have come to see many canyons and precipices w/in the world of feminism.  I see divides between women and allies all over the place.  One of the divides that confuses me the most is the great gaping crater between mothers and the childfree.

As I understand things a fundamental principle of feminism is freedom of choice, especially reproductive choice;  the freedom to have children when and if you are ready, the freedom not to if you aren’t.  I see the fight that goes on to protect women’s lives and to ensure that they will continue to have (or try to gain) access to birth control, to abortion services, to basic health services, to OB/GYN services.  I see the struggles to keep comprehensive sex education in schools in order to protect children from the things that some parents, clergy, and other adults shame them into being too scared to talk about.  We toil to keep choices and information available so that people who are not ready, prepared, or willing to become parents do not have to do so.  As a mother who claims that pregnancy was the single worst experience of her life, I don’t want any one person entering into parenthood of anything but their complete and total free will.  Not by chance of failed birth control or accident or other circumstances beyond their control.  Complete and total free will. Read more…

Renee has graciously invited me to join her this weekend w/ Monica Roberts of TransGriot on their Blog Talk Radio Show!

We are going to be discussing reproductive choice, and how Motherhood is an active choice that is sometimes overlooked in the womanist/feminist community.

I am very flattered to have been invited, and really pretty nervous (I have never been on the radio before, and never like the way my voice sounds outside my head).  I hope you will tune in, and give us some support.

I also just realized that this will be Monday for me, so I have to set all the appropriate timers to make sure I am available on time.  This time change thing is still kind of wonky in my brain (yes, I said wonky).

Looking forward to hearing from some of you out there.

ETA:  Renee and I have finally smoothed out the details of time, so it will be Saturday for those of you in the States and Canada, and 4PM, EDT, which is Sunday, 5AM for me, and most of my friends here in the East.

Can we knock this shit off for the love of gods?

Calling Nadya Suleman “Octomom” still makes you a big misogynistic ass hat, and an all around jerk.

She has a name, and a nice one at that.

And I don’t give a flying fuck what the hell you think of her reproductive choices, b/c frankly it’s none of your fucking business. You don’t like her, big deal. That is your problem, not hers.

Get the fuck over yourselves.

Nadya Suleman might not roll off the tongue as nicely as, say, Mary Smith, for some of you, but it is still her name.

Hugs and Kisses,
OYD