Stress.....

Today I went to East-West University in Sunnyvale for my acupuncture treatment. I try to go three times a week but here it is Thursday and it's my first visit this week. The New Year holiday really threw me off schedule.

I've been seeing the clinic supervisor "Liu" and two ladies that are studying to be acupuncturists (I-Shen and I forget the name of the other, the latter of the two is graduating and I won't be seeing her much more). They're a wonderful group of ladies and they've really taken my infertility situation to heart. They are trying to ready my body for the IVF procedure in general and today I asked them to try to suppress my immune system (Dr. Z's advice) in order to get my NK levels down. They also treat me for stress and my constant low back pain. Today I had probably 5 needles in my head, I think those are for stress...and there was a trickle of dried blood left in my hair...very Frankensteinish. But after one of these treatments (for stress) I feel so calm and relaxed. It is as if someone slipped a valium, or two, into my mouth while I wasn't looking. If I avoid stressful situations the feeling can last me a few hours. Otherwise, it's gone within an hour max.

I'm not normally a total stress monkey. I do run a bit "high strung". I'm great at multitasking, optimizing, getting a shitload of stuff done quickly and efficiently. This ability to move at high speed is often interpreted by others as me "being stressed out". This isn't stress, to me. But talking or dealing with J can send me over the edge in a nanosecond. He knows how to push my buttons much too efficiently.

Me: "When you speak to me in that tone it sounds like yelling to me. When you yell at me I get stressed out. I'm not used to living with people that YELL."



J : "I'm not yelling! I'm just trying to be ULTRA CLEAR!!!!!"



Me: "Well, tell that to your face, why don't you?" Grr...!"

More stress:
Dr. Z's office, just today, decided to change my calendar without reason or warning. Oh my god. Okayk, so they don't know that we're in the middle of trying to move into a new rental, orchestrate the move of my 88 year old mother up here, and then J's got a gig in Arizona RIGHT at the time my frigging eggs are due to be removed, and they just went and changed the whole schedule by a few days!?!?!? I mean WTF? <<>> Then J's lab tests are all screwed up. He has Kaiser insurance so we took Dr. Z's lab requisition to them and asked them to run the tests. Today, over a week later, we found out that they didn't do the cystic fibrosis test, they ignored the sperm test, and for the sperm culture tests they stuck a rather painful q-tip up his penis to collect who knows what, and it turned out that this was, ahem, the incorrect way of gathering said specimen and now it will need to be redone. But the burning question that I have is this:

What the blazing hell did Kaiser do with my lover's semen??? Don't these idiots have any accountability for the human products that come into their laboratory?

Well, anyone with an IQ of 100 could look at the lab requisition from Dr. Z, look at the results from Kaiser, and infer what is missing from the Kaiser results. But, NoooOooOoooooOo, J won't do the calculation himself. He won't let me do it either. I asked him twice to fax me the results. He refused. He wants to fax the results and the requisition from Kaiser back to Dr. Z and have them tally a new test requisition. Well, we've got that, miraculously, but how long is it going to take him to get anything done.

Maybe DAYS later he'll finally get to doing his tests.

We hope.

All I know is that I've got a refrigerator drawer filling up with drugs and I do NOT want to have to do a 10 day course of doxycillin ONLY because J's semen cultures are missing.