Firedrill

I'm a real estate broker by day and I'm currently trying to sell my mom's house in Whittier (Los Angeles) from the Bay Area, which is about 340 miles south of us.

I can't be there to hold open hold open houses each weekend...so I've got an agent down there that is doing open houses for me in exchange for all of the buyer leads that come in on my signs and advertising. IT's a damned good deal for her. The only reason agents do open houses in the first place is to get buyer leads. You thought they did it to sell your house? Nope. They don't. Serious buyers find your home online or thru their agents and they already know about you. It's the lookiloos that show up at open houses. They're "warm leads". Not quite ready to buy, but maybe they will one day. But a lead is a lead is a lead...and they're quite coveted. So my giving her my leads in exchange for holding my house open is quite generous on my part.

So I left two lockboxes with keys so agents can let themselves in. One is electronic, one is a combination lock box. So my agent calls yesterday and says that neither key opens up the front door. I'm blown away. I opened the frigging door myself with the key. I had her check each key in each box. Each key in each door. Nothing worked. I panicked and thought, "Fuck, I''m going to have to fly to LA last minute, as in tomorrow morning, and fix this crap!" But after I calmed down I figured hiring a locksmith was much more economical, and less stressful.

So this morning I hired a locksmith in Whittier to pop the front security door and cut two new keys to the front door. I just don't get it. When I get down there if I find out that this agent was fucking with me just so she could say, "See how hard it is to sell this house remotely? You really should just let me list it for you", I will kick her in the ass so fast she won't know what happened.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have agreed to let her sit my house open if I'm now thinking I can't trust her but I am a bit paranoid in that respect though. I have a very hard time trusting people I do business with upfront and I have to force myself to just go to just "go with the flow". I usually tend to think that most people have an agenda. That there is no altruism. There is always something to be had for people at the end, even if it's a good feeling inside. I got into an argument with a professor over this one once and he dropped my grade from an A to a B in a graduate level seminar for arguing this point with him. But wow am I digressing.

So the door is fixed, but now I have to worry if dimwit agent can figure out to put one of the new keys from the combo box into the electronic box. She might not be able to figure it out. Honest Injun.

Before I get too far into my real estate nightmares, let's get back to infertility, which is why we're all here anyways. Oui?

So yesterday I went to see Dr. Persian over near Stanford. He was recommended to me by Dr. Moustache as someone who would be willing to cut out my fibroid if Dr. G would not do it for me. While I'm in the waiting room, Dr. G's nurse (Dr. G is my OB/Gyn), Nurse L, calls and says that Dr. G and Dr. Moustache are going to have a phone call tomorrow (which is now today) and chat about the merits of taking out my fibroid. Dr. G thinks it's way too small, in an area where it won't cause problems of ANY kind. Dr. Moustache thinks taking it out might be a key in why we're not getting implantation. So Dr. G has conceded and said to Nurse L, "If he is adamant about me taking it out I will take it out." But no one bothered to tell her that we're also considering taking out my Fallopian tubes, which is another argument in itself and one that I'm sure she'll gripe about yet again.

The phone call finished, I was whisked into a nice exam room and told to get into one of those crunchy paper exam gowns. I waited for quite some time and a young woman came in and introduced herself as Dr. R, a fellow of Dr. Persian. Dr. R was really really sweet, very young (kind of unsettling how young she looked), and looked very much like Penelope Cruz. I liked her immediately. She did my U/S, said my fibroid had grown to 3.4cm X 3.4cm. It was 2.9cm x 3.2 just 30 days ago, so it's still on the move, growing rapidly. She found a second fibroid in the posterior area of my uterus. So now I've got two.

While she drove the dildocam, she smiled and said, "Wow, you've got nice plump ovaries! Not at all like I usually see in women your age. Women your age usually have tiny little ovaries, sometimes I can't even find them! And look, you've got a couple of follicles on this one!" She was so positive and upbeat that her comments gave me a hopeful feeling that I really did have a lot more time on my side that I had previously thought.

I showed her an odd growth that I had noticed growing in my nether region. I thought it might be an ingrown hair. She immediately said, "Hey, I can take that out for you right now. Right here. You want to do it?" I was like, "Well, sure. Why not?" So she very casually started pulling out gauze pads, betadine, a punch, sterile scissors, lidocaine, and a syringe. Lidocaine in one's labia is one of the most frigging painful experiences one can have. You thought heparin hurt sistah? You haven't felt burning til you've had this shot. Ouch. Luckily it kicked in fast and she was done in less than two minutes. She said, "Cool! Look at this!" and handed me a vial. Floating in it were a chunk of tissue with a bunch of strange black things at the bottom. She said, "I'm not sure what it is, it's not an ingrown hair. It looks like a blood vessel got clogged and died. But the pathologist will check it out and let us know if it's anything more serious. Good thing we did this now because if it's something serious, we can take out a wider margin during your surgery."

Yes, if you are cutting into my labia again, I will certainly require general anesthesia to get through it. A clogged blood vessel? That makes me think that maybe all those tests saying I've got a clotting disorder are probably right on target.

It took some while for her to get the bleeding to stop. I felt a couple of trickles of blood make their way all the way to the table. I shuddered to think if I would have any scarring from this. She said, "You might see some black stuff on the wound when you get home. It's just what we use to stop the bleeding. If it starts bleeding when you are home and it doesn't stop, CALL US." Okay, now I was getting more concerned. But it was a tiny punch into the skin. Not like I'd bleed out from it.

She stuck around for a bit discussing the merits of removing the fibroid, my blocked tubes, and also scar tissue, adhesions, and any endometriosis that they might find. She said that if I truly realized that the only way I could get pregnant was via IVF, that I should realize that taking out my Fallopian tubes would only be beneficial to me. Dr. R explained that there are all sorts of components in diseased follicular fluid that can tamper with implantation (cytokines and other substances). She said this with such empathy that I could see and feel that she really knew how depressing this idea was to me. We left it at that, and I knew at that point that I would agree to have my tubes removed. There was just no point of keeping them because keeping them was merely to keep the dream alive that I was fertile. And I'm not. Even if I do have big, plump ovaries. With that she said that I should dress and then I'd be taken to talk with Dr. Persian in his office over the findings.

I waited in his office for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time. He would walk by, pause in the door as if he was going to come in, and then he'd be distracted by something and he'd be gone again. This went on for about 15 minutes. Finally he came in and sat down. In a very soft and slow voice he asked me, "Why do you think you are here and what do you think I can do for you?" It was an odd question. Didn't he review my chart? But I think it was more of a way for him to start a conversation about my issues. He had a very pleasant and calm manner. He asked how I felt about having my tubes removed. I told him that it was like giving up a dream of becoming pregnant on my own. Even if it was an unrealistic dream, one that I'd never meet, that the fact of removing them utterly destroyed that dream. I furthered by saying I realized that they might have to go. I'd like him to take a look and to see if they were repairable before removing them. He replied that of course he'd try to fix them, but if they looked at all diseased that he would remove them. He said that the tiniest bit of fluid leaking from the could be detrimental to IVF success.

That sounded reasonable to me.

He led me out to the entry where I met with Dr. R once more, paid my bill, and then I was off.

My surgery is scheduled for June 20th at Stanford, June 9th if a particular cancellation comes through. I'm nervous about having this quiet, aged Persian doctor operate on me, but he is quite famous for the work he has done, so I have to try to trust that he is capable and will try to do the best job on me that he can.