Game

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one." ~ Albert Einstein

Yay! After three months I finally had a period.

So, the last blood work done showed just what my doctor had said, that I had ovulated just prior to that blood draw, and I was going to have a period.

It's been proven that stressors on the body can cause significant hormonal changes, and those changes can have adverse affects on your menstrual cycle. So, I have no doubt traveling to New Zealand, my month there, and the 48 hours getting back home definitely got my body out of whack. I was so behind in my sleep that month that when I look back on that time, I'm like, how the hell did I do that?

Anyway, it feels great to have my period and of course now I can use my OV Watch and be clued in as to exactly when I'm going into the ovulation phase of my cycle. Which, at this point, at least until I find a freak'n guy, is pretty much just keeping me upbeat about how my body is working for me. When I do finally find, "the guy" knowing exactly when I'm ovulating will, of course, be crucial.

And, yes, I am still looking for "the guy" and I still expect to find, "the guy." Maybe not the "whole enchilada guy" but at least the one to make a baby with.

My Chinese doctor and my General Practice doctor are close to panic mode for me, but I just try to let them feel the panic, while I keep focused on the faith.

My Ami or Your Ami?

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." ~ Mark Twain

I got back from my trip to Miami and the Ultra Music Festival, one of the biggest EDM (Electronic Dance Music) events in the world. The part of Miami I mostly saw was gorgeous; a really beautiful city.

I got to Miami on Thursday evening and went to two different events. The first was outside at the old R.C. Cola Plant and of course I got lost trying to find it. I stopped in this sketchy-seeming area on Miami Ave., I parked my car, and walked hurriedly across the street into a small, corner bar with graffiti painted all over the outside of it, to inquire about directions.

When I walked in, and mind you this was about 10:30 at night, there were only three guys in there: the bartender on one side of the bar serving drinks and two guys on the other side of the bar receiving them. All three of the guys were Latino and all three looked at me in my bright, blood-orange, top and pale green, gingham skinny jeans, with red kicks as I walked toward them, and I just thought, I hope they're cool with me.

In my mind it coulda gone either way: they would go out of their way to help me, or they wouldn't. And it all had to do with territory. 

Every place in America, the world for that matter, depending on where you might go, there are pockets where you can be discriminated against... and it doesn't necessarily have to do with race... it can be gender, rich/poor, small town/big city, gay/straight, whatever. It's one of those cases where, you're like a fish-out-of-water, and the feeling you get from the rest of the people in the bar is, what are you doing in our pond? I had the same feeling at different times while I was in New Zealand; I walked into a place where the initial feeling I got was, what are you doing here, and why are you here? Hell, I sometimes get that same vibe from my best friend's husband and/or twelve year old daughter when I hang out at her house!

Anyway, I think my point is, it felt like foreign territory to me: in the sense that it was a hole-in-the-wall, graffiti-covered, bar in a sketchy part of Miami and I certainly wasn't looking like I "fit" in with that scene.

But, I ordered a beer like I was meant to be right where I was, introduced myself to the guys and then pronounced I was lost... which garnered a good laugh from them. So, I asked the guys if they knew where the old R.C. Cola Plant was 'cause I was going to an event there and one of the guys said he did. At that point I pulled up a seat to the bar, and got the guy to write the directions down for me. When he did, and assured me it would be easy to find, I ordered another beer for good measure and chatted with the guys some more. I told them that I was going to this club called, Space, after the first event and asked if they thought I should just leave my car at the R.C. Cola Plant event and take a taxi to Space. They said if I left my car at the old R.C. Cola Plant that would probably be the last time I ever saw my car!

Then, one of the guys, who I later found out was the owner, told me to come back to the bar after the first event and he would let me park my car in the back lot of the bar. He told me that by the time I got back from Club Space the gate to the small lot would be closed but I could just pull open the door and get my car.

So that's what I did. After the first event, which ended at 12:30 AM I went back to the bar - and at that point there were about ten more people in there, all guys, but for one girl, but the door was locked - they came and unlocked the door and let me in.

It turned out that all of the guys in the bar at that time were prolific and infamous Miami graffiti artist and so the talk going on was all about graffiti and artistic expression, etc. It was pretty interesting to find myself randomly in the middle of this group of people, learning their culture... the culture of being talented (but illegally "defacing" property!) graffiti artist.

And the discussion of making money at something they started off doing just for expression purposes and then, also, about the artist that they thought weren't the "real deal" who were making money at it, but only because they knew the business side of it, not because they were particularly talented. And, even though these guys' artistic medium was something I couldn't really fully fathom, I did understand completely the point about artistic talent versus business talent. And most artist have the one, but don't have the other, mostly because the business part takes too much time away from the love of doing the art. So, it was a good conversation, one, that in a million years, I wouldn't have been expecting to be in the middle of, in some small bar, in a "sketchy" Miami neighborhood, with its most talented and famous graffiti artist.

But I needed to be at my next event, Club Space, by 2:00 AM so I pulled a Superman. However, instead of the telephone booth, I went into the bathroom and totally changed my outfit into a little black dress, wearing my grandma's sixty year old hat from the '50's, and put on some blood red lipstick. I was ready to go clubbing... something I literally can not remember when I did last!

And the guys at the bar couldn't have been nicer when I was ready to leave, two of the beefier guys went out and hailed a cab for me and told the taxi driver, straight-up, to take me to Club Space... kinda making sure to let the cabbie know not to screw around with me. 

So, that's kinda how my whole time in Miami went with everything outside of Ultra. Because everything outside of the actual Ultra event didn't necessarily go too well, but I always seemed to have an "angel" type of person come into my life and make it all better. 

However, everything about Ultra was fantastic, worth every penny, and I had an amazing time. I even had some young guy ask me if I wanted to get up on his shoulders. I told him, as I am 6' tall, that I was pretty heavy, and he was like, no worries, so he bends down, I wrap my legs around his head, and the next thing I know I'm sitting atop his shoulders above the crowd. And it became even crazier because it was just at that moment that a rain shower hit and everyone in this massive crowd of people were jubilant because we were all so hot and sweaty and the rain felt so good and cold hitting our skin. 

Ultra was definitely a young-persons "game," but I'm glad that I got to play it for at least that one time in my life. 

Oh, and it was really funny about that sixty-year-old hat of my grandmother's that I wore to this hip Miami Club (which I didn't leave until after 4:00 in the morning... after having traveled to Miami earlier in the day!) because the hat was like an event in itself! I had so many twenty-something, hipsters come up to me and tell me how awesome my hat was I felt like I could definitely hang in the, Hipsterville club scene, with no problem.

Here's a video that shows what Ultra's about. You can get a feel for how crazy (but for me, super fun!) this festival was... another video of one of the main headliners (just skip the ad) and a few photos from the event... 

Like I've said before, traveling solo is often hard because you go to a place you aren't familiar with, where you don't know anyone; there's no one to rely on but yourself... but as difficult as it sometimes can be, the rewards of setting out into the unknown and conquering, in triumph, whatever comes your way, is where I get to find out who I really am, and its mostly by way of the random people, I fatefully meet, that I do...

Bad News, Good News

"So, yeah, I think anything is possible. I know it because I’ve lived it. I know it because I have seen it. I have witnessed things the ancients would have called miracles, but they are not miracles. They are the products of someone’s dream..." ~ Whoopi Goldberg

I had my doctor's appointment yesterday. I was anxious to have it, and anxious about having it.

I was going to get the results back from both blood and urine samples that had been taken; the blood was going to let my doctor understand what was going on with my fertility; basically if I was still in the game or on the way to the bench, so to speak, and also find out how my thyroid was functioning - if the the meds I'm on for that were doing their job of keeping that hormone balanced. The urine sample was going to tell her about my brain functioning - neurotransmitter levels - and how that might be affecting me.

Because I had told her that it wasn't just my fertility that was on my mind, but I was constantly tired. I've been sleeping for 10 1/2 hours - at least - each night and still feel tired during the day. I mean I've always needed at least eight hours of sleep each night, nine being my optimum, but ten to twelve hours was not normal by even my need-for-sleep standards.

Also, my nausea had come back with a vengeance over the past month-and-a-half. The nausea has not left me these past four years, but there are varying degrees of it, and the degree I have been in of late is the one that does more than challenge me physically, it challenges me mentally. It's the kind of illness that makes me have to want to live... and if you've followed this blog, you will know, that sometimes, when it is at its worst, it has made me not want to...

Anyway, I had written in that previous post that though my OV watch had said I ovulated in late January, I never had a period. My last period, in fact, was January 5th. And when I never had my period in February, but felt like I had ovulated, Dr. M. did some blood work on me that was, as I said then when I got the results back, disheartening: my FSH had gone out of the normal range... it was high.

Well, the bad news I got yesterday when I went in for my doctor's appointment was that all of my brain neurotransmitters: serotonin, dopamine, epinephrine, with the exception of my, norepinephrine, where so vastly depleted that Dr. M. was "baffled." I am taking both pharmaceutical medications and supplements which had gotten them to higher levels and she just was confounded at how drastically they had dropped.

So, on that front, I will have to go back to my neuropsychiatrist and have her do what she is trained to do: fix my neurotransmitters. I remember, years ago, where I used to live, I would drive a couple hours to the "big" city and see this integrative medical specialist and he had told me that serotonin was like the God of the body; if it was depleted its negative repercussions could go far and wide throughout the body... a trickle down effect, affecting everything.

The next bit of bad news was that my thyroid wasn't functioning well either. But the good news, as my doctor told me, was that all of those bad news problems were fixable.

But the very best news I got was that the blood work done to monitor my fertility hormones, FSH, included, were right back where they had been... really good. When I asked Dr. M. if she was surprised by the results, she said that her feeling seeing the levels being so good wasn't of surprise, but of relief... "extremely relieved" she told me.

She told me that according to the blood work I had probably just finished ovulating and she was/is sure that I will have a period coming up.

When I asked her why she thought I hadn't had a period since early January she said that probably, first and foremost, was that my going to the other side of the world, traveling there for a month, being so sleep-deprived, and then returning back to this side of the world could easily have caused my body to go haywire. And she said, once again, that older woman can tend towards ovulating twice in a month and when that happens the body just keeps producing the progesterone (I think that's the hormone) and so the communication is that there isn't any need to shed the uterine lining.

And, now that I know, not only has my thyroid been thrown off, but my neurotransmitters have been so drastically depleted, all of which is a major stressor on the body, I feel pretty sure that that is the source of why my body has felt like it has - tired - and why it hasn't worked like I wanted and needed it to.

Of course, my doctor wasn't the only one that was "extremely relieved" at finding out the good news regarding my continued healthy fertility... I was more than feeling that, I was, I am, feeling blessed.

Ultra

"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience. " ~ Henry Miller

I'm heading to the Ultra Music Festival in Miami tomorrow - Wednesday. I'm super excited... I've never been to Ultra and I've never been to Miami! I literally think this five day solo excursion is making me even more nervous than my whole month solo, on the other side of the world, in New Zealand!

Traveling solo is just hard in and of itself, but then when you're going to a electronica/dance festival over four days where the average age is probably 22 years old it makes me that much more nervy.

But the bottom line is, I love this genre of music. I love everything about it... especially the high, joyful energy of it. So, I'm not going to let anyone (even me!) make me feel like that at my age I shouldn't be there. Not only am I planning to be there, but I'm planning to have one of the craziest, funnest, craziest times of my life! And that's what keeps me feeling young... that I allow myself to do things that are out of my comfort zone, but that I feel fully alive for.

I will be couchsurfing... which I first learned of before I went on my trip to New Zealand and though I didn't do it very much while there, the little I did do, was very interesting. So, needless to say, I will be staying on South Beach in Miami with a stranger! But, hopefully, that stranger feeling won't last for long and it will be a good situation! *crossing fingers*

So, couchsurfing is strange, and different, and a little intimidating... a challenge of sorts, though with the possible rewards of meeting new and varied people, but nothing is intimidating me more than the schedule that I am going to be on for the time I'm in Miami.

I start Thursday (the day before Ultra) at 4:00 PM - 1:30 AM participating in one event, then get to the next event around 2:00 AM - 6:00 AM (though I'll probably leave by 5:00!), sleep a few hours, and then Ultra starts at noon and goes to midnight each of the next three nights. It is one non-stop party and I have been trying my best, over the past month, or so, to get my body to move, this way and that, so that I'm not needing a walker to go from one music stage to another at the event site, Bayfront Park in downtown Miami.

Anyway, I can't believe I'm actually going and, like I said, I have that nervous anticipation of stepping out into that great big world and not having a clue of what comes next...

Taking Flight

“If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance.” ~ Orville Wright

So, as you know, several of my last few blog posts were about randomly hearing stories of women who, later in life, had babies. The people who were telling me the stories had no idea I had any vested interested in what exactly they were telling me, i.e., that I want to have children now, at such a late age, so they didn't know what they were telling me was way more important to me than they knew.

However, my sister does know I want to have a biological child of my own now, at age 50, or even later if it should take longer. So, when she dropped by the other day she had to tell me of a something that happened in her biology class that she thought I would be interested in hearing.

My sister teaches biology at one of the public high schools in our town. She told me that in her classes, for the past two weeks, she had been talking about genetics. She said that she began telling the class about amniocentesis. She told her students the procedure was normally done on high risk pregnancies, especially she said, if the woman was over 40.

When she told her students that, about the high risk pregnancy aspect that can come with a woman over 40 having a baby, a boy in the class told her that his mom was 50 when she had him.

She thought that I would be excited to hear that information. And I was. I was extremely excited and thought it was a fantastic piece of news to hear. It felt like another sign had just been given to me.

But I wanted to know more about this boy's mom's pregnancy and so I asked my sister, if she would be willing to inquire of him if he was conceived naturally, or by IVF? And if his mom had used her own eggs or donor eggs? I mean, having a baby at age 50 is awesome, but there's a huge difference between all the variables.

So, today she said she asked him if his mom had him under natural conditions? I think she used the words, "were you born normally?" And my sister told me that the boy confirmed to her that, yes, he was a natural baby.

I'm going to take the kid at his word. I mean, in this day and age, most parents are pretty up front about things that relate to anything that might be biologically significant for their child to know, especially when their as old as fourteen or fifteen, like the kids in my sister's classes are.

So, yeah, like I said, I take whatever signs I can get, whenever I can get them, and this one came just as out of the blue as the others.

It was a good sign day...

Exercise

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is. " ~ Albert Einstein

Another video that makes me marvel at the "miracle of life!"

I think this is a video that I will try to view daily with the understanding that it is exactly what is going to happen inside my body.

Watching it before I go to bed each night will just be one more "exercise" that I think will help in letting my subconscious mind know, what it needs to let my body know: to get ready for this miracle of life to happen within me!

Art

"I'd rather be optimistic and a fool, than pessimistic and right." ~ Unknown

I've had a hard couple of weeks... mentally.

Surprisingly, my latest meltdown didn't happen during all the Valentine's Day hullabaloo... the single persons no-mans-land of holidays. It happened more than a week after that. 

I feel like I go for long stretches of time and my faith is strong; lifted up by the signs I ask for and receive. 

Faith never feels like an easy thing for me to hold onto... I always feel like I'm grasping to keep it. But I try to remind myself that I don't have to have faith in abundance, but rather just the tiniest bit... the mustard seed size. And I usually feel like, yeah, I can have at least that amount, that's not beyond the realm of belief that I am capable of, that should be doable. And it is doable, until something happens wherein even a mustard seed's size of faith seems daunting to hold tightly to. 

And the thing that happened is really something that didn't happen... I haven't had my period since January 5th. And I should have... at least according to the OV watch that I wear. 

I can't find, in searching my past blog posts, that I have written anything about the OV Watch. I'm perplexed as to why I wouldn't have written something about having bought the watch nearly a year ago and been using it ever since.

The OV watch is a ovulation predictor watch. The watch is able to "read" through sensors that touch your skin, when you are beginning your ovulation process. It gives you an alert to the four days leading up to ovulation, the actual day of ovulation and what they call, the two less fertile days after ovulation. The watch and sensors are pretty expensive, but when I bought it I thought that the ovulation test kits you buy at the store were really expensive, too, and they didn't give nearly the insightful information that the watch gives me.

My doctor has, several times, gotten blood work done during the time my OV watch says I'm about to ovulate, or am ovulating, and the results match up pretty well. That is, my doctor can see through my blood work what is happening and it has correlated with what the watch is indicating is happening. The only minor difference is that sometimes she thinks my ovulation day is actually the day before the watch indicates it is, but that is not a concern for me as the watch lets you know the four days leading up to ovulation, anyway. 

So, the watch had told me I ovulated on January 19th. And for me I usually have a 16 day luteal phase of my cycle so I would have expected my period around February 3rd. But I told my doctor that I felt like I was having symptoms of ovulation on January 22nd. My doctor told me that for older woman it's not uncommon to ovulate twice in their cycle. But if I did indeed ovulate twice (the OV watch only works for the one ovulation period) then I would have expected my period around the 6th of February, but it never came. 

I was concerned at that time, but I wasn't worried, mostly because I kept thinking my period would come! I mean, how can you ovulate and not have a period? 

But my body has been acting strangely of late, wherein I felt like everything that I was aware of, those little clues that tell you what stage of your cycle you are in, seemed to be happening a lot! 

For instance, throughout all my years of menstruating, I rarely ever had symptoms alerting me that I was about to have my period. No bloating, no cramps, no change emotionally, nothing. My period almost always came as a surprise to me. 

However, maybe once a year - some years, possibly twice - I would have some of those symptoms I mentioned above, most notably the feeling of bloatiness and emotional change, i.e., I'd find myself impatient, or even crying over something I normally wouldn't cry over. But often those symptoms wouldn't occur at the same time. So, then my period would surprisingly start and I'd be like, oh, that's why I cried, or that's why I was so impatient. But on the rare times I had the bloaty-feeling I would be made aware that my period was about to start... I didn't particularly like the bloaty-feeling, but I liked that it allowed me to prepare for my period, as in, you're out of Tampons, you better go buy a box now!

But in the past two months I've had that bloaty feeling a lot, which made me think I was going to start my period any day. And, also, because I have a cyst on my right ovary, I often feel when I'm ovulating, I guess because it "inflames" the ovary with the egg, or something. And I do "feel" that kind of achyness in my ovary that tells me what's going on... at least what I had thought was going on, i.e., I'm ovulating. 

Also, my Chinese acupuncturist, whom I think is really very accurate and good at what she does, twice, in the past couple of weeks, has felt my pulse (she feels the pulse at the wrist on both arms) and she said that she thought my period was about to begin. And yet, it didn't. It hasn't.

When I told my doctor in February I thought I was ovulating she did another round of blood work and when she got the results back I felt disheartened for the first time in a long time because she said my FSH was higher than it had been - not in the normal range. Previously my FSH had always been right within the normal range at 9-10. But on this sample of blood work she told me it could have just been that I wasn't in the stage of the cycle I thought I was. 

Then she (and remember this is my GP who had her last child at 45 years old) prescribed an rx for progesterone capsules for me to take over a ten day period to "jump start" my menstruation if it didn't occur by this past Friday. She then gave me a requisition form for another blood draw on day  three of my period to get a better idea of what my FSH level is. 

Well, I didn't take the pill on Friday night because my acupuncturist felt like I would have my period come by Sunday. She said if it didn't, then I should start the progesterone pills. So, I waited and it didn't come Sunday night, but I still didn't take the pill. I so didn't want to have to take it. I so wanted my body to naturally "stay in the game!" But on Monday night - now well over two months since my period  - I did as my doctor prescribed. 

So, I guess I did feel real down over all of that happening... or rather not happening. It was the first time in my life where, when filling out a medical form, and asked the question: do you have regular periods, I had to mark, no. It felt like such a disappointment.

But, again, I think it is just still all a part of my Hero's Journey... 

The part where Joseph Campbell, whom I have written of in earlier posts regarding The Hero's Journey, when asked what the significance of the trials, and tests and ordeals of the hero were, he answered, “If you want to put it in terms of intentions, the trials are designed to see to it that the intending hero should be really a hero. Is he really a match for this task? Can he overcome the dangers? Does he have the courage, the knowledge, the capacity...?" 

And I knew all along, from the moment I started writing this blog, that I was going to be faced with "slaying dragons" and having faith in that seed of a thought; the thought that I believe God put into my heart, and mind, and soul, of finding a husband, getting married and having biological children of my own (our own!).

And, really, I had been super-duper fortunate that at the age of 50 my fertility was still going strong. So, I've been blessed that I wasn't really having to "fight that battle;" I wasn't having to think so much about that part of the game. I was actually more concentrated on how I was going to find the guy to get me in the "big leagues." That was where my faith was always being tested... finding my guy. 

But now I do have to face that dragon - of hanging onto my fertility. And somehow I have to slay that dragon, too. And at this point, I think the only thing I can add to all the positive things I've been doing is to just keep believing in my creative ability. After all, I do believe God created me in His image, hence my belief that I have the same ability: to create something from nothing but the pureness of my desire.

I'm not a trained artist, nor am I a trained writer, but I do both, I guess, because I'm sort of just a creative type of person. I have visions of things that I feel the need to express. And I think the one thing I've learned about undertaking a creative endeavor, is that there are stages to the process, and most of the time you find yourself at a stage you were hoping to avoid, but rarely do... the lost stage. 

I guess it's kinda like a sculptor, for instance, who has a huge block of marble sitting there before him. He has a vision of what he wants the final result to be, but he would need to chip, chip, chip away at it until he had what he desired, a statue, say, like the famous, Venus de Milo! 

But that chipping away took time and patience, and during the process the block of marble probably looked pitiful; he might have even had a worry that it was going to turn out ugly... nothing like his final artistic expression. But in the end, all of his creative effort, vision and attention to detail had the result that, 2,000 years later, despite being damaged and broken, we're still in awe of it...

I think what I'm trying to say is, I'm at the "ugly" "hard" stage of the creative process now, but if I press on - keep chipping away - keep working at seeing my "vision" - at some point I'll get to that place where I will see the fruits of my labors... start seeing everything coming together, and finally, achieving my desired result: my husband, and my children; my family! *faith* : )