Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Netflix, Buffy, Harry, Doctor

A lot of nothing has been happening in these parts lately, hence the lack of updates. Perhaps the most exiting new development is this discovery: Seasons of television shows, on DVD, through Netflix! Oh, my. For someone with a slightly addictive personality, this is so dangerous. For example, Don was out of town most of last week (business trip), and I may or may not* have watched 12 hours of Gilmore Girls** within four evenings. Because you can get whole seasons! In order, from the very beginning, with no commercials... it's lovely. The difficulty is in remembering that you can pause the show, instead of subconsciously waiting for the commercial break to visit the bathroom or whatever, and finding yourself desperately having to go much later, not having realized that there are no commercials. It's like watching a PBS documentary-- you don't want to walk away, and yet there are no breaks! I'm working on adapting to this "DVD" concept.

Don and I are working our way through the first and second seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer too, a show that featured prominently in the early days of our friendship and thus has a nostalgia factor that's almost as appealing as the show itself. I think that any Harry Potter fan trying to come to grips with no more Harry, would do well to rediscover Buffy. Almost a year after the final book release, and I'm still saddened by the End of Harry Potter. Oh, sure, we can always re-read the books. There are movies still to come, but... whatever. To me, the movies were always a pleasant diversion, nothing more. Certainly not cannon. And yes, that encyclopedia sounds great, but it could be years more in the making. I miss that feeling of anticipation for the next book, the hours spent theorizing, analyzing details of plot and character, the heated discussions in person, on the phone, online. It's hard to close that chapter-- the chapter in which Harry Potter was this ongoing, alive thing-- even a year later. I have yet to find something that engages me the way it did.

Almost all of the lab results are back from the RE's office now. The doctor (!) called me this morning to let me know that Don's chromosome analysis was normal, and we had a chat in person about what's next. Which turns out to be... nothing. They have exhausted their battery of tests, and everything is normal. The only thing left is the progesterone, which they drew for this morning. I've been supplementing the stuff for the last two pregnancies, though, so it's probably not our issue. Especially considering that previous tests have showed it in normal range. Still, the doc said he'd write me a new prescription for it anyways, since it can't hurt. Either way, we're free to start trying again whenever we'd like. Since we have the daring to hope for a baby by next Mother's day, that means pretty soon.

You know, the weirdest part of the whole paragraph above is that the doctor called me. That has never happened before. Nurses call me. Receptionists call me. Doctors do not call me. And they do not say, "Well, if you're coming down for a blood test now, I'll rearrange some things so that we can sit down and talk for a few minutes while you're here." I finally find a doctor like this, and now I am essentially leaving his practice because they've done what they can. Ironic, yes?

Before, we had three completely unexplained miscarriages ... they could have been the result of any number of common problems. Now, we have the same three; completely unexplained, that are the result of anything except any of the usual causes of miscarriages. It's not my blood-- not a clotting disorder, nor bad antibodies. Not my genetic material, nor Don's. Not my uterus, not my tubes. And most likely, not my hormones. It's hard to wrap my mind around this bit of failure by modern medicine. Most definitely, a problem exists: three consecutive losses, no babies, it falls outside the probability of chance. And yet, the problem is undiagnosable. According to the doc's statistics, we have a 60% chance of carrying the next pregnancy to term without any kind of medical intervention. Considering that the chart lumps together everyone under 35, and combines those with 3 and those with 4 losses, it's probably a bit higher than that. He said, I can take a baby aspirin every day; even though all of the bloodwork came back normal, "It can't hurt and you never know". I can start supplementing progesterone even earlier, starting days after ovulation instead of waiting until we know we're pregnant.

I can just hold my breath, and hope that that "60%" actually applies to us.


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* I definitely did.
** Don likes this show too. I'll bet that a lot of men do but don't admit it.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Isn't netflix great! Amanda and I are working our way through the first season of Angel. Not a very good show but for some reason horribly addicting.

Bella said...

Hey! I was about to say that and you beat me to it!

Mara said...

For some reason, I never really got into Angel as I did Buffy. I've been thinking of giving it another shot, though, since they're so interrelated.

ayla said...

If you're going to watch Angel, I suggest you do it alongside the same season as it happened with Buffy. DH and I have the first six seasons of Buffy (we stopped watching when it got depressing for a while) and we used to love watching it. Now, our guilty pleasure is Farscape.

We don't have any kind of television reception, so DVD is the only way we watch television shows. I like it, because we don't have to deal with commercials. When watching shows together, we try to watch only one episode at a time, to spread out the couple-time. However, I have been known to episode-glut when the mood takes me.

When you get the whole season, does it count as one DVD? I've thought about doing netflix for some shows I watch that DH is not interested in, but I feel like it'd be cheaper and less time-consuming to just buy the DVDs. Except perhaps for Law and Order. There's so many f*ing shows/episodes now that I could do a year of Netflix, only get Law and Order, and never see the same episode twice. Yikes.

Mara said...

I love Law & Order! Especially the original series. As far as Netflixing TV episodes, each disc in a season counts as one disc. So if Buffy, Season 2 has 6 discs, each one comes separately, you don't get all six at once.

It's OK, though, because you can intersperse the show with other shows, or movies. I still have Gilmore Girls coming, too...