I intend to keep this blog 100% politics-free. There will be no discussions here of health care reform, or health insurance reform, or even life issues. I have very strong opinions on all of those issues and more, but this isn't the correct forum. We may ultimately get into certain moral issues, particularly around collection time (I'm endlessly fascinated by the detailed questionnaire we must fill out in order to pre-specify the fate of our embryos in every possible circumstance). We'll keep this totally separate from politics though. For instance, when I tell you that our doctor can only transfer two embryos for us because Sarah and I would never consider "selective reduction", please don't assume that I've implied or am willing to discuss any position on selective reduction as a political issue. Again: I do have such a position, and if you're interested you can go over to BQ, where I say bad words and scream at people. But for this blog, I'm trying to create the least-contentious atmosphere possible.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Setting
My wife and I live in the small town of Oxford, Mississippi. Oxford is famous for three things:
1. We're the home of the Ole Miss Rebels. The University of Mississippi is the state's flagship university, a charter member of the SEC, and the center of life in Oxford. The town has ~12,000 year round residents, many of whom are directly or indirectly dependent on the University, and another ~11,000 students who are here seasonally. If you're not affiliated with Ole Miss in some way, here's what you need to know: virtually everything you've heard about us is wrong, or at least outdated. Except that bit about how much we like to party.
2. We have a truly extraordinary food scene. Oxford is home to at least two restaurants of the very first rank: City Grocery on the town Square and Ravine out in the county. Taylor Grocery, the world's preeminent fryer of catfish, is a five-minute drive from my house south of town. The famous Yocona River Inn burned down last year but has reopened as "Yocona in Exile" ~15 minutes north of town. Other great choices abound. IMO, none of the world's great metropolises has a per-capita density of culinary excellence that exceeds that of tiny Oxford.
3. Oxford was (and is) the longtime home of William Faulkner, and most of the settings in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha can be mapped to real-world places in Oxford and Lafayette (luh-FAY-ette, not LAH-fay-ette) county. The primary difference is of course the University, which Faulkner excised from the town. You know the creepy old house in "A Rose for Emily"? Drive by it every day; it's across the street from my gym. And of course Faulkner himself is buried here, and his home, Rowan Oak, still bears his scribblings on the walls.
Sarah and I went to school here, and have four UM degrees between us. Though I'm originally from California and she was born in the upper Midwest, we both consider Oxford our home. I, for one, have no ambition greater than this: to live a quiet, productive life here in the hills of north Mississippi. So far as I'm concerned, they'll bury me here.
Of course there are some things a town of 12,000 people doesn't have, and one of those is a a group of doctors specializing in assisted reproductive technology. For that we have to travel to Memphis, TN. It's just an hour and a half away. Virtually all Rebels (I refuse to say "Oxonians") know Memphis well. We travel through Memphis International Airport. We go to Beale Street to party and the Rendezvous to eat. We have our (foreign) cars serviced at Memphis dealerships. We get their news on TV and radio. And, yes, we use their specialized medical facilities.
Sarah's parents live in the suburbs of Memphis, and we always have the option to stay with them. By and large, though, we go through IVF in our own home; the proximity of the doctor's office is such that the benefits of sleeping in our own bed, with our own dogs, simply overwhelm the costs of traveling back and forth.
1. We're the home of the Ole Miss Rebels. The University of Mississippi is the state's flagship university, a charter member of the SEC, and the center of life in Oxford. The town has ~12,000 year round residents, many of whom are directly or indirectly dependent on the University, and another ~11,000 students who are here seasonally. If you're not affiliated with Ole Miss in some way, here's what you need to know: virtually everything you've heard about us is wrong, or at least outdated. Except that bit about how much we like to party.
2. We have a truly extraordinary food scene. Oxford is home to at least two restaurants of the very first rank: City Grocery on the town Square and Ravine out in the county. Taylor Grocery, the world's preeminent fryer of catfish, is a five-minute drive from my house south of town. The famous Yocona River Inn burned down last year but has reopened as "Yocona in Exile" ~15 minutes north of town. Other great choices abound. IMO, none of the world's great metropolises has a per-capita density of culinary excellence that exceeds that of tiny Oxford.
3. Oxford was (and is) the longtime home of William Faulkner, and most of the settings in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha can be mapped to real-world places in Oxford and Lafayette (luh-FAY-ette, not LAH-fay-ette) county. The primary difference is of course the University, which Faulkner excised from the town. You know the creepy old house in "A Rose for Emily"? Drive by it every day; it's across the street from my gym. And of course Faulkner himself is buried here, and his home, Rowan Oak, still bears his scribblings on the walls.
Sarah and I went to school here, and have four UM degrees between us. Though I'm originally from California and she was born in the upper Midwest, we both consider Oxford our home. I, for one, have no ambition greater than this: to live a quiet, productive life here in the hills of north Mississippi. So far as I'm concerned, they'll bury me here.
Of course there are some things a town of 12,000 people doesn't have, and one of those is a a group of doctors specializing in assisted reproductive technology. For that we have to travel to Memphis, TN. It's just an hour and a half away. Virtually all Rebels (I refuse to say "Oxonians") know Memphis well. We travel through Memphis International Airport. We go to Beale Street to party and the Rendezvous to eat. We have our (foreign) cars serviced at Memphis dealerships. We get their news on TV and radio. And, yes, we use their specialized medical facilities.
Sarah's parents live in the suburbs of Memphis, and we always have the option to stay with them. By and large, though, we go through IVF in our own home; the proximity of the doctor's office is such that the benefits of sleeping in our own bed, with our own dogs, simply overwhelm the costs of traveling back and forth.
Dramatis Personae
Brian: me. I'm what's called a "computational chemist" by training, but now work in "high performance computing". I'm 32. It's not entirely unreasonable to believe that there may be a Bigfoot or two somewhere in the old family tree.
Sarah: my wife. I'm not going to say "long-suffering" but I could. We met through her sister, who was then dating (and is now married to) one of my fraternity brothers. She's a Kindergarten teacher.
Ainsleigh: our firstborn, conceived by IVF in 2006. Ainsleigh was born in March 2007 and died in September 2007. The story is told elsewhere.
Daisy: our beagle. We adopted her from the shelter the first Spring we were married. (That would be 2001, if you're counting.) She's been through it with us, for sure. She's lazy and grumpy and a little too fat, but we do love her so.
Jack: our whatever. We got this mutt fourth-hand in 2008: from Sarah's sister, who got him from a friend of hers, who got him from a pound in Tupelo. He's hyper and undisciplined and a little to shaggy, but we do tolerate him so.
Dr. Ke: our very excellent fertility guy, based in Memphis, TN, about 1.5hr from our home (more on this in a moment). He ran our first (successful) IVF cycle in 2006 and will run this one as well. If you're stumbling on this blog because you need a fertility doctor in the Mid-South area, drop me a line and we can discuss it, but the short version is: I can't recommend him enough.
Not sure who else you need to know. I guess I'll update this post with additional characters as they come up.
Sarah: my wife. I'm not going to say "long-suffering" but I could. We met through her sister, who was then dating (and is now married to) one of my fraternity brothers. She's a Kindergarten teacher.
Ainsleigh: our firstborn, conceived by IVF in 2006. Ainsleigh was born in March 2007 and died in September 2007. The story is told elsewhere.
Daisy: our beagle. We adopted her from the shelter the first Spring we were married. (That would be 2001, if you're counting.) She's been through it with us, for sure. She's lazy and grumpy and a little too fat, but we do love her so.
Jack: our whatever. We got this mutt fourth-hand in 2008: from Sarah's sister, who got him from a friend of hers, who got him from a pound in Tupelo. He's hyper and undisciplined and a little to shaggy, but we do tolerate him so.
Dr. Ke: our very excellent fertility guy, based in Memphis, TN, about 1.5hr from our home (more on this in a moment). He ran our first (successful) IVF cycle in 2006 and will run this one as well. If you're stumbling on this blog because you need a fertility doctor in the Mid-South area, drop me a line and we can discuss it, but the short version is: I can't recommend him enough.
Not sure who else you need to know. I guess I'll update this post with additional characters as they come up.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Howdy
Welcome to my third (and likely final) blog. Yes, this means I've got two others. The older is Broken Quanta, which you should visit if and only if you have a very high tolerance for snark and nastiness (chiefly about politics and college football, but touching on other subjects as well). The younger is the ill-fated Great Expectations, an incomplete chronicle of the short happy life of my oldest daughter, Ainsleigh.
This blog is modeled after the latter. To recap: in October 2006, during my wife's second semester of pregnancy, I decided to create a "baby blog" and move all of the pregnancy and baby-related posts from BQ to the new blog. I stated a variety of reasons for this, but most of them boiled down to: my masculine vanity demanded that I compartmentalize and quarantine that portion of my online persona that looked suspiciously like a mommyblogger. The result was a sort of disorganized mess, where most of the "fertility" stuff and the first few pregnancy posts were on BQ, then most of the pregnancy and baby posts were on GE. I always intended to go back and create a "story so far" series of posts on GE, so that the one site would have the complete story of Ainsleigh's conception, gestation, birth, and early life. But I never got around to it, and time slipped away, and then she was gone and I couldn't bear to do it and it just never got done.
So, this time around I'm not making the same mistake. I'm going to tell the story as it happens. Mind you, I know very well that nobody's hanging on every word. But the story isn't for the contemporary reader (though you're welcome to it!) so much as it's for me, and for the adult version of the baby we're hopefully going to have one day.
This blog is modeled after the latter. To recap: in October 2006, during my wife's second semester of pregnancy, I decided to create a "baby blog" and move all of the pregnancy and baby-related posts from BQ to the new blog. I stated a variety of reasons for this, but most of them boiled down to: my masculine vanity demanded that I compartmentalize and quarantine that portion of my online persona that looked suspiciously like a mommyblogger. The result was a sort of disorganized mess, where most of the "fertility" stuff and the first few pregnancy posts were on BQ, then most of the pregnancy and baby posts were on GE. I always intended to go back and create a "story so far" series of posts on GE, so that the one site would have the complete story of Ainsleigh's conception, gestation, birth, and early life. But I never got around to it, and time slipped away, and then she was gone and I couldn't bear to do it and it just never got done.
So, this time around I'm not making the same mistake. I'm going to tell the story as it happens. Mind you, I know very well that nobody's hanging on every word. But the story isn't for the contemporary reader (though you're welcome to it!) so much as it's for me, and for the adult version of the baby we're hopefully going to have one day.
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