Moolies

...and relax

Cait you must learn not to post when you're feeling up against it. Although of course it actually makes posts more dramatic, it doesn't exactly help in any way does it.

I do not need this.

St George's hospital is so oversubscribed, they can't see me until week 18. WEEK 18.

I said to this fucking midwife - well what am I supposed to do? I need to discuss my fucking options. I need to see if I can have it at home, if the anti-coag blood stuff comes back as clear. I just want to discuss my fucking options with a fucking professional. I do not want to be sat here trying to make up my mind about one of the most extraordinary things that is going to happen in my *life* on my *own* with my only support being a fucking book. What about booking in to anti-natal classes? What else do I need to know? They're not taking my weight, my fucking blood pressure - ANYTHING.

When I said I wanted to discuss birthing at home she more or less didn't even want to know. She said I need to talk to St Thomas's and I could just about piss off. Well - jesus... I need to talk to someone about a home birth, not make the bloody decision on my own!

Fuck fuck fuck I'm all upset now. Why is all this shit happening to me. Fucking typical typical typical that it should fuck up when I'm involved.

The blood clinic didn't call back yesterday and I called them again this morning and they were on answerphone so there's no information coming from them.

I Really Do Not Need This Aggro. And now I haven't even got my own Doc to help, I've got a completely overworked bloke who doesn't know me, cocked up getting the referral letter to the ante-natal clinic in the first place and I don't trust as far as I could throw him. So it's almost pointless turning to him for any assistance.

Help save Fantagraphics

Totally forgot to say this.

Buy some Fantagraphics comics online from them today.

Sounds like they may have been partially screwed by the same distributor going phut that really screwed up Top Shelf last year. Fantagraphics is a *powerhouse* of a publishing place. Not only is it the home of Robert Crumb but more importantly (to me at any rate, not being a Crumb fan - I know, so sue me) Dan Clowes of "Eightball" fame, "Hate" which is a godlike glorious thing and "Love and Rockets" which is one of the best comics ever written.

So not only must they not go under, but they must also be saved for their championing of newer artists like the gross and repulsive Dave Cooper, who I love. They're a brilliant company.

YOU WILL PURCHASE COMICS NOW! LINK THROUGH AND BUY!

Back at work

Back at work and bleeding slightly yesterday at the hospital, or rather - old bleeding. A slight secretion.

Another this morning.

Stressed out about it? You fucking betcha. In hospital yesterday I stood, in time honoured fashion, scratching my head nervously asking "Why would that happen?"

"Oh, it is nothnig, it is very normal for his point in your pregnancy"

It may be normal to *you* mate...

Other news: the blood clinic very kindly phoned me up this morning and said all the right things, and said we will call you back. Then they didn't. Which is nice. Still no word on the modwife fucking front so that'll mean ....nnnnggggg an appointment at some time next week one would fucking hope.

Loathe that this is happening. It makes me very angry and stressed. Thank God I can actually deal with it in a sensible fashion, however.

Meanwhile in even more different news:

The weapons of mass destruction within Iraq appear to solely be cluster bombs delivered by the UK and US. Sadness and disgust. Sadness and disgust.

Scan shenanigans

Blimey.

Full story below.

Tuesday, all's well

Week 12.

Still no word from the blood Doctor about the clinic visit I'm supposedly having next week. I suspect another round of slightly more difficult phone calls.

I am just not well. I slept most of the weekend, took theday off sick and said I'd work at home but I can barely keep my brain together to watch the Powerpuff Girls.

Meanwhile, amusing to see that a weekend where people were asked to go and visit a uniquitous American coffee house and take photos (because apparently they get very uppy about people taking photos on the premises) resulted in a weekend of people who ordinarily go in to the aforesaid place grudgingly because it has wifi or just plain (bad, by all accounts) coffee, going in not only willingly, purchasing products but also taking each other's photos, grinning away and posting them on the web!

Perhaps the whole thing was a plant on behalf of the company in the first place - you never can tell with marketeers these days.

Johnny Cash, etc... musical musing

As is fitting for a day in which I am beset by coagulation and snots in all orifices of my head, I have been listening to the American Gothic of Johnny Cash's "American" album/s (I actually only have one - the Solitary Man one). Whilst some of the songs work, and some don't, it's worth getting the album if only for the extraordinary, hairs on the back of the neck rendition of Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat". If anyting, I much prefer it to the Cave version. This, much more sudbued cover is of an old man, almost relieved at last to be taking off the burden of the pathalogical life he has lead, the tattoos stretched and wrinkled with on his knuckles. Cave's is an angry, bitter, gritted teeth entry in to the afterlife. Both men astoundingly holding on to the assumption that they are now shuffling off the mortal coil to embrace heaven or an afterlife as opposed to Hell.

I'm now listening to an old Cave live album, and whilst his songs are great, he does pale in comparison to Cash as an emoter, or teller of tales. I was saddened recently to hear that June Carter had died. Not only was she a great singer but by the sound of that BBC report, she provided the rock that kept Cash from falling on many occasions. His illness being so pronounced now, such a major loss in his life will be difficult to get over. I'm supposing he won't be long for this world.

I don't really want to be writing his obituary early, and I'm hardly qualified to do so, but it's a measure of the man that so many good people hold his work in such esteem and have him as a major influence. There are not many american singers who can so powerfully draw upon that very central-european blackness of the soul.

Anyway. He's a good man.

A man

Was being chased down Turnmill Street by a loosely connected newspaper. Two men in fact, one, a wiry, tiny bloke with a face like a rat, short black hair, tanned as a gypsy, kicking the conversational newspaper away from his feet. He seemed to be acting as minder and lookout to a much larger lad who was not too furtively attaching club A3 posters on cardboard to lampposts, swiftly yanking them, already half stapled out of the courier bag, wielding the stapler like a gun. 3 quick snips and on to the next, but before he went, dutifully taking a picture with a digital camera he had been provided with to prove he had been doing his job correctly.

The club looked *terrible*.

Meanwhile, after phoning the Doc's at 11 yeterday, they still had not bothered to look at the fax machine or moved on the letter sent through with URGENT written in a box to add emphasis at the top. Explaining the whole deal twice over the phone and asking please, please could you call me to let me know the outcome of course they didn't. An hour or so later I called again. Bright and breezy, "Oh, ante-natal said they'd be getting in touch".

Bullshit am I waiting for any such nonsense so I phoned myself and they weren't going to be looking at any faxes received that day, they only work a day in arrears. So I cajoled and was terribly polite. Hence, an appointment will be arranged with a midwife at some point next week and I now have my first official scan at 11.15 on Wednesday morning, although I am double booked so there will be a wait.

I say first official because when we thought I might be losing it, we had one to check then, and saw a tiny, ovoid lump of blood and tissue, in the middle of which was the 3mm long concept of a child. This time around, it will have grown to about 60mm long, and rising.

Apparently there are now fingernails and movement. Swimming around. Even drinking amniotic fluid for added nutrition, *and* extraordinarily, the creation of its own hormones through a tiny pituitary gland. Lorks.

Meanwhile I've been having what feels like a stitch just above my crap left ovary for about 3 days now. I'm sure it's nothing but it does disturb me not really understanding what my body is doing when I have spent my whole lifestime getting to know its nuances.

Werrit

It disturbs me how much like my mother I can become.

The ante natal clinic still haven't been in touch from St Georges and neither has the blood clinic.

I just tried to phone St Georges to find out when the appointment is next week, having phoned the Doc's yesterday and they just rang and rang. Having made the stupid mistake also of calling from my desk and suddenly realising that I had to say "antenatal clinic" in to a phone before I could rush to get anywhere private.

Hmmm. And my beloved application has died on me today, which is nice. Many pissed off Managers mailing asking what the hell is going on. Sometimes when I'm depressed I feel like we're flogging a dead horse but I'm so determined to get it past this period.

Myeh. I'm really, really overtired and depressed and worried today so don't take any notice of me.

Oh... God, I've just remembered why my mood is so fucked. I had a truly awful dream last night during which I was bleeding really heavily, but it was... if I can remember correctly, it was as if I'd missed 3 periods so it was that much "stuff", rather than that I was miscarrying. I woke up incredibly stressed.

Later I dreamed that Sally Phillips was making my tea out of cornflakes and cheese, in a kind of tower, and that I owed her £212, which she thought was £450 for no apparent reason. You see, dreams - they really tell you deep stuff.

UPDATE later in the day:

Well. It transpires that the lovely new overworked doc *didn't* send the anti-natal clinic the letter they need to give me an appt. They've never received anything, and they'd never heard of me when I rang. So, they said they'd accept an appointment request over a fax.

Of *course* when I phoned the surgery it was closed, so I had to send a fax over and will have to ring them again first thing tomorrow and ask them if they received the fucking fax and act on it as a matter of urgency purlease since last time I sent an urgent fax they didn't bother putting it in front of the Doc for 2 days.

CUNTS!

Blimey

Some bloke linked to my moaning ramble, amazingly. Someone I've never heard of and have no idea who he is. How very weird.

I take it all back! I'm never going to mention it ever again! Heh.