Time to get the chop

I was sitting in the Park in Bellingen under a massive Bunya Tree with Ellie when the call came through on Steve's mobile phone.

I knew that I had accidently left my phone at home even though I assured Steve that I had it with me as we left the house earlier that day.  As it turned out I had picked up Sarah's phone instead, which looks identical to mine. When Steve's phone rang I figured that there was a reasonable chance that it was for me.  I answered.

"Hello, Steve's phone"
The person on the other end greeted me by name and then informed me that she was "Jenny, from day surgery and that Steve was ready to receive visitors.  He's dozy but doing okay."

My first thought was that I didn't want to see him when he was all out of it and groggy from the anesthetic.  I liked my husband vital and full of life, that was the way that I wanted to see him.  I felt myself starting to drag my heels.  I had to coax Ellie back into her pram and then hike back up the steep hill to the hospital.

As I commenced my walk I felt a wave of depression descend upon me.  Steve had been 'fixed up'.  This wasn't some corrective piece of surgery, this was a mutilation, a severing of a key part of him.  And not only did it effect him, it was of direct consequence to me. This operation signalled the end of our child bearing days, and even writing about it now, some hours later, that fact still makes me sad.

We are old enough and have four beautiful children to be able to legitimately call it a day.  But it still makes me sad to finally say unequivocally that this is it.  No more chances of feeling that wonder of a new little life forming in my belly.  It is one of the most amazing and incredible things that can happen to your body, and now that will never happen again.  I feel I need to mourn.  As I walked back to the hospital that is what I did, I felt tears welling up in my eyes, and they weren't from climbing that bloody steep hill either. (Why did they put the hospital at the top of such a big hill?)

I/We knew that the day was coming.  After the birth of Ellie, we felt we had to make a decision, that really we can't keep doing this and having babies.  Particularly after the hoo ha with me clotting up this time.  To have another pregnancy would really be a risk.  Logically, the decision is easy.  No more babies, lets get 'the chop' and be done with it.  Move on, know that there wont be anymore surprises in life.  We can plan our future, blah, blah, blah. But, emotionally it is a whole other story.

I left the decision and the logistics to Steve.  I really didn't want to have anything to do with it.  I knew that the outcome was going to make me sad, so I preferred to sit with denial instead.  Then just as it started to look like they had forgotten Steve and his name was never going to come up on the waiting list, we got a call three days ago.  Three days ago.

Three days, is not long to finally and emotionally face that this is really going to happen.  Three days is way not enough time to get a decent amount of mileage out of teasing and stirring Steve about, manscaping performed by burly Mr Sisters, and what if the surgeon slips? And myriad of other jokes that I and others could make at his expense.

That's what Sarah and I did last night, making jokes about Bellingen and what type of drug fuelled hospital stay he was likely to encounter.  Our hilarity brought Evan out to the living room, wondering what we were talking about.  When we told him that dad was having a vasectomy tomorrow he was quite taken aback on two fronts.  I think he was keen for another baby brother or sister, and he made the comment, that did that then imply they were all mistakes?  I get where he is coming from, because I had the same thought myself.  By surgically rectifying this having babies thing, it sort of sends a message that our children are a medical problem that needs fixing.  Of which they definitely are not.

So now it's done.  Unless one escapes before the pipes are clear, no more babies in this family, until the kids decide to start the next generation.

Happy First Birthday Ellie

 Today, just one year ago our darling Ellie was born.  As with each of the kids, their first birthday has always marked a very special and emotional time for me.  It has always been natural for me to remember the amazing thing that was unfolding exactly one year ago. The fact that my body was in labour, our baby had decided that the time was right, and into the world popped another beautiful, much loved baby.

When babies are only one year old they aren't really old enough to understand what's happening.  Why do these crazy people hand me parcels and then open them for me? But the things inside the parcels are pretty cool.  Why are these crazy people singing at me and actually letting me have cake? And why does that mummy person keep getting all misty-eyed and gooey over me? - well more than normal.

For me the first birthday is a celebration for everyone else, me in particular.  As bub is hardly aware of what a birthday is, that first birthday is a very poignant moment.  This newborn life that in the space of just one calendar year has changed and developed so much into an active lively toddler.  One that can walk, communicate, have opinions, feed herself, laugh, cry, play and pretend.

What an amazing year it has been, and what an amazing addition to our family she has become. So very much loved and adored. Now we look forward to her next year of life, where I guarantee that by her second birthday she will have a pretty good idea of what's going on when the celebrations roll around again.

Happy First Birthday, my beautiful baby girl.  I love you so much.

Mum xxxxx

Food for Thought

When I was a child growing up in the 1970's I envisaged a future of food where we all would be eating a single pill that would provide our complete nutrition and thus do away with the need to eat food.

How different the actual future is.  With more variety of food than ever before and cooking shows amongst the most popular shows on TV, eating is still well and truly alive.  Kitchens are getting bigger and fancier, there are more places to go out and eat, and the access to foods from various cultures and the proliferation of super foods has shown that in no way are we ready to give up eating for a nutrition packed pill.

Imagine life, though, if this future had come to pass.

Firstly, all that time spent shopping for, preparing, eating and cleaning up after food would vanish.  That would amount to enormous hours of the day that we could reclaim to do other things.
Secondly, imagine the extra storage space in our houses. Plates, bowls, pots, pans, casserole dishes, cutlery, the "good" crockery, could all go, freeing up mountains of cupboard space.  Also the pantry would be a thing of the past, and who would need a massive fridge anymore?  The oven, the cook top, the microwave, the dishwasher, could all go.  There would be just so much stuff we could get rid of and then have so much less clutter to deal with and so much more cupboard space.  Now that's something I definitely need.
Thirdly, it would eliminate that whole issue of trying to eat a balanced diet and the weighing up of the pros and cons between various ways of eating.  But here is the crux of the matter.  How could any responsible scientific organisation possible come up with the perfect diet encapsulated into a nutrient rich pill when they can't even agree on what constitutes the optimal diet for humans?

For the past 30- 40 years we have been fed the mantra of low fat, high carbohydrate as being the way to live a healthy life.  I believe it, I've grown up my whole life being taught this.  It hasn't stopped me from having an 'apple shape' rather than a pear shape, which is now deemed unhealthy and a precursor to syndrome X and it's attendant diseases of modern living such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Nice.  But to a certain extent I feel a bit powerless as my father and his mother before him had the same 'apple shape'. Was it diet related or was it genetics? At least they didn't have to suffer the indignity of being told that they have a waist to hip ratio that is going to kill them.

It is tempting to basically ignore any government health warnings from this day forward.  It seems that no one really knows what they are doing in the field of nutrition. Hundreds of billions of dollars are thrown at all manner of studies trying to prove which is the optimal diet for us. All that seems to happen is that the studies are either inconclusive, are interpreted according to whoever is reading them's bias, or are instantly disproved by another study.

The bottom line is, there are just too many variables in the modern diet because it is such a cornucopia of variety.  To scientifically isolate one variable is well nigh impossible. People have slightly different genetic make up and respond differently to different diets too, which further complicates things.

I have come to the conclusion, after much reading about how the caveman diet is our optimum diet, that although that maybe true on an individual basis, on a population basis a high carbohydrate diet is better.

Think back, 10,000 years ago, we switched from predominately eating meat to growing and eating grains.  We may also have introduced a bunch of chronic degenerative diseases that became more apparent as we became clever enough to eliminate the other major killers of misadventure and infectious disease.  But these chronic diseases of modern living, still allow us to live long enough to reproduce, so they are not bad enough to impact on our survival as a species.  And this is the point.  Our population got to the point where it had to evolve to move further up the evolutionary scale.  As a population, we are incredibly healthy and successful. Perhaps as individuals not so much.

But, agriculture allowed us to guarantee a food supply that had never been guaranteed before.  It lessened our day to day reliance upon capturing or picking fresh foods because now we could store vast quantities for long periods of time.  It also meant that less people were needed to be involved in the actual procurement of food and that freed others to go and progress civilisation.  In the last 10,000 years not only has our population sky rocketed but our civilisation has moved ahead in enormous leaps and bounds that just wasn't possible while we were existing day to day on a tenuous food supply.

So in order for the human race as a whole to make the next development leap and form societies, government, religion, culture, science, technology, the list goes on and on, we had to free ourselves from the grip of the hunter gatherer lifestyle.  This is evidenced by the hunter gather cultures still in existence in the last few centuries, who were primarily living very primitive lives until they were introduced to Western civilisation.  Their rates of chronic disease were low, to the point of non existence, but their populations were relatively small and isolated which impacted their ability to develop technologically.

Reverting to a hunter gatherer diet is a luxury that affluent Westerners can embrace.  It may make their individual health outcomes more positive.  But for the entire world population to revert to such a diet is unsustainable.  We just don't have the capability to feed the whole world on a predominately meat diet.  That ultimately means that the third world and poorer populations will be fed with the cheaper high carbohydrate model and be prone to chronic disease, while the affluent will live long happy lives.  There is an inequality here.  Our success as a species has meant that we are destined to be less healthy individually.  It's a small sacrifice we all make to ensure the species remains strong.  Like herds who have their strength in numbers and can afford to sacrifice the weak few, so that the herd as a whole survives.

If this be the case, then governments trying to control what we eat and haranguing us about our health to do it is futile.  Basically we are damned if we do and damned if we don't.  Arguably Western nations have the wealth to manage expensive health budgets that deal with chronic disease.  It may be the pay off we have to make to avert the greater evil, that of starvation and malnutrition.

As I ready myself and the family for an experimental dietary change to explore the hunter gather diet epitomised by the Paleolithic diet I find myself reducing cupboard stock of carbohydrates and legumes.  I am starting to feel slightly unsettled by this, and we haven't even begun the diet yet. As the large fridge in the shed which houses the 'staples' of rice, pasta, bread mix, flour, dried beans and legumes becomes emptier and emptier I start to feel a small pearl of worry forming. It is ironic that the very carbohydrates that supposedly store themselves as excess fat on our bodies are the same carbohydrates that we store in stockpiles outside the body in order to protect ourselves in lean times.  With an empty 'store' of carbohydrate staples I feel vulnerable.  What if there is a truck strike, or we have an event that wipes out the electricity for a few weeks?  Focussing our diet on just meat and fruit and vegetables is a predominately fresh food diet.  It is extremely reliant on me being able to access the supermarket, butcher and greengrocer.  We grow a few of our own vegies, fruit and herbs and have our own eggs, but in reality, these will not go anywhere near providing adequate calories or nutrition for our family of 6 if the need should arise.  By having a fridge and pantry laden with carbohydrate foods, a short breakdown in the food chain supply, although inconvenient, would not be catastrophic.
As the one who is primarily responsible for the provision of food in the house and the mad one who is proposing we trial this diet, I feel a small sense of responsibility here.  Obviously the likelihood of some disaster occurring and interrupting the food supply is slight, but it is not entirely out of the question either.  Should I cover my bases and stockpile some emergency food in case of need?  After all the advent of agriculture cemented our survival as a species because it insured as against this very thing. But as the Paleolithic dieters advocate, all carbohydrate (particularly refined) needs to be gotten rid of in order to avoid temptation.  Refined carbohydrate is the evil one in all of this, the most likely culprit of chronic disease and obesity, but it is also the food that is least perishable and so the most useful in times of food shortage.

It is a dilemma. Oh wouldn't life be so much simpler if we just had a pill to take and all these decisions would not need to be made.

A Day in the life of a toddler

I have made a couple of signs to pin on the toilet door.  Because yes we are at THAT stage of every toddler's development when the lure of the toilet bowl is just too great.
Yesterday I poked my head round the door to the toilet and noticed a toilet brush, a full roll of toilet paper and the toilet paper holder were all shoved expertly down the toilet hole. Now it takes an expert toddler to manage this feat.  Most of us mere mortals would only be able to fit one thing at a time down the hole in the bottom of the bowl.  But with the rugged determination that only a toddler can muster, Ellie managed three sizable items.

In addition to this she had also unrolled most of the roll of toilet paper, strewn the empty rolls both inside and outside the toilet area and deposited the toilet brush holder down the hallway where she had also emptied its contents of old toilet water onto the floor.

This all occurred while the whole family (excluding Steve, who has to go to work in order to keep us in the lifestyle we have come to expect) were lounging around inside, zonked out by the heat, in quite close proximity to where this was all happening.  Ellie obviously decided that the best way to beat the heat was for a spot of water play, and what better place than the handy toilet bowl.

So the signs have gone up, reminding everyone to close the doors and keep the rampaging toddler out.  Whether they will have any effect will remain to be seen.

Sign inside the door:

Remember the rampaging toddler

Please remember to close the door when you are finished :)

and on the outside of the door:

You know what I want to do if I get in here

So remember to keep the door closed....just sayin

Attack of the killer cockroach

When you have house guests you like to at least try and put up a façade of cleanliness.  Just before they arrive you put extra effort into making the house look presentable.  Some of those cleaning jobs that you have put off because you are either too lazy or bored to tackle, suddenly need to be done as a matter of urgency.  You maybe a lazy disorganised slob, but you don't want your house guests thinking that. So either successfully or unsuccessfully you give the whole place a spit and a polish and hide away the worst of the clutter behind bulging cupboard doors.  As long as they don't look too closely or open the wrong doors you should be able to fool them for a little while at least.

Not so when the cockroach that  you had disturbed and frightened under the fridge earlier in the day while you were cleaning the floor makes his grand appearance especially for you house guest.

Steve has his brother Al up visiting us for a few days.  We picked him up from the airport and deposited him in our dining room for a catch up chat and a cup of tea.  Now Al is from Queensland, so no cockroach is going to faze this guy. But his most recent jaunt has seen him stop in and visit us after having spent a week in Canberra.

Now I can only guess, as cockroaches don't normally charge out from under my fridge and assault my house guests.  In fact I can't actually remember it ever having happened before.  Sure late at night the odd cocky would make a quick dart across the floor from one protective piece of furniture to another, but in broad day light and running straight at someone? No never.

Well this cockroach was a fool.  If it thought it could wreak its revenge on me from being forced to cower under the fridge in terror earlier in the day by attacking one of my house guests, it had another thing coming.  I can just imagine it eyeing Al off from amongst the dust and grime under the dark fridge.  It would have put on its hyper sensor alerts and determined that here was a fella from Canberra.  An area that rarely sees cockroaches.  It would have plotted its dastardly plan to dash out and scare the crap outta the house guest, hopefully making him leap onto a chair in sheer terror.  Then the cockroach could have strutted around like Arnold Swartzneigger before resuming its sentry under another piece of furniture.

Now this evil plan would have worked if it had chosen a true Canberran like, perhaps, my sister.  He would have got himself a good deal of squealing and arm flapping to accompany the assent of terror up upon the chair. But Al, is a Queenslander, he eats cockroaches for breakfast.  And big ones too.  Not these pathetic little mamby pamby ones we have in NSW, but big muscley Queensland ones. So when the smart arse cockroach made his brave dash for Al he met his demise in a spectacularly rapid fashion. 

If cockroach stomping was an Olympic sport, Al would be a world champion.  This cockroach never stood a chance. The moment Al noticed the tell tale movement in the corner of his eye, he moved with lightning speed and stomped down with his bare foot fair on the cockroach's back. Splat. Cockroach got flattened and guts went spurt.  It was so second nature to Al I don't think that he even realised he'd done it at first.

As I tittered with slight embarrassment, muttering something along the lines of 'Oh I don't know how he got there, we don't normally have cockroaches' I bent down to wipe him from the floor with a tissue.  In true cockroach form, this is why they will one day rule the world, he got up (with no guts) and tried to run away.  You have to give him credit for his tenacity, but this creature was never going to survive, not when we had the world champion cockroach stomper in the house.

That was one cockroach who should have chosen his quarry more carefully.

Yummy Moist Chocolate Cake

I have made this amazing wheat free chocolate cake before, it is so moist and delicious.  This time I have varied it slightly to try and make it a bit more healthy.

Emma's version of Red Kidney Bean Chocolate Cake

 

 

 

 

Ingredients

1 Can of red kidney beans (420g) I use my own from the freezer that I have previously soaked and cooked.
1 egg
1 tablespoon of water or coffee
1 tablespoon of vanilla
Put all the above ingredients into a food processor and process until smooth.  In a mix master bowl place the following ingredients  and beat them together:
200g dextrose
5 eggs
1/2 cup of light olive oil
Once they are light and fluffy add in the red kidney bean mixture. Beat or mix to combine. Then fold in the following ingredients and mix well:
80g of cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon of bicarb soda

Pour the mixture into a lined spring form cake tin and bake for approximately 50 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius. When cooked it will pull away from the sides a bit. Remove from oven.  It will contract slightly as it cools.
Serve with yoghurt.  Delicious.

Notes

Now most people sift their cocoa, and that is a very good idea.  I am a lazy cook so I rarely sift mine.  I do get a few lumps of cocoa in my finished cake, but I prefer to think of them as unsweetened chocolate chips.

This cake turns out very moist and the kidney beans are not noticeable in the finished cake.  It is very chocolatey and tastes far more wicked than it is.

Driving their parents crazy

Evan had his birthday yesterday and today I took him to the motor registry to get his Learner's permit.  He said that he is the first of his group of friends to get their L's. He was a bit nervous and would have been quite happy to plod along and not do anything about it unless I told him that I was taking him.

I remember when I got my L's I was keen to get them and I don't remember any assistance from my parents.  I could be wrong and maybe they did help get me to the motor registry as it was all the way over on the other side of Canberra.  But back then we were all quite comfortable with catching buses to get our way around to where ever we wanted to go in Canberra. So I think I was responsible for organising my own way there.

I gave Evan his first driving lesson this afternoon at low tide on Boambee beach.  I was pleasantly surprised at how well he did.  I have to admit though, it was Steve who gave Sarah her first lesson on the beach. It was up to me to teach her on the road, and that was one hair raising experience.  The first bit on a deserted piece of road was quite good.  She stalled the car a few times as expected and did the regulation bunny hops of a learner driver.  The positioning on the road and timing stops at intersections needed a lot of work, but that was not a problem as there was hardly any other traffic.  It was the bit where we got out onto the streets proper that scared me, and the speedy driving up Orara Way, looking at just how terribly close the verge was and trying hard not to imagine us going over the edge.  Of course the practise at this sort of driving is so essential so that they can be good drivers once they get their licences.  It is just harsh on the poor instructing driver.

Now I get to do it all again with Evan.  Those first few weeks of getting him positioned on the road are going to be terrifying. It is the job of the instructor to remain calm (outwardly) at all times.  So while uttering words of encouragement and constructive advice there is an inner turmoil going on where you are imagining hefty insurance claims and possible medical emergencies.  Breathe and relax.........

It really is wonderful to see them grow up and become more and more independent and responsible.  It is also nice to be a part of their growth and development.  And this time instead of just a couple of months break from having a learner driver, once Evan gets his license I have nice long wait of three years before it's Harry's turn to step up to the plate.

Who has got a sweet tooth?

I'm reading about sugar at the moment particularly in relation to the Paleolithic diet.

Sugar, or sucrose is made up of glucose and fructose. Together they have a glycemic index of 65 which is similar to white bread which is about 70. When separated out however they have glycemic indexes of 97 and 23 respectively. The interesting part, though, is that fructose tastes way way sweeter than glucose.  So measuring the glycemic index of food through your taste buds and making a judgement based on what tastes the sweetest is fraught with danger.

The theory with the glycemic index is that the higher a food is on the index the more it causes your blood sugar to spike. Spikes in blood sugar is what is supposedly causing us to develop insulin resistance and laying the ground work for metabolic syndrome.

So here we have fructose that tastes incredibly sweet, yet has a low glycemic index value, so presumably causes a smaller rise in blood sugar levels than glucose does.  Wouldn't that make it a good thing to eat then?

Apparently not.  The story gets stranger.  Even though it doesn't trigger blood sugar surges it is the component of sucrose that is driving our propensity towards diabetes. David Gillespie in Sweet Poison postulates that the problem with fructose is that our body just doesn't recognise it. We happily consume it in our table sugar along with glucose and it has a way of by passing all our systems and getting itself into the blood stream by barely registering on the bodily Richter scale.  We notice it on our tongues and then later it appears in our blood stream rising triglycerides and turning up as fat. It's like our body doesn't know what to do with it, doesn't quite have the mechanism to deal with it, so it just  shoves it off into our cells.  And it is here that it starts to cause us the health problems related to diabetes and syndrome X, aka metabolic syndrome.
Loren Cordain advocates a diet free of refined carbohydrates, grains, dairy and saturated fats. Basically it is a high protein diet based on lean animals meats and tons of fruit and vegetables, because this is what our stone age ancestors ate.  A typical meal looks something like this: a piece of steak, 2 cups of steamed broccoli, 2 cups of lettuce, 1 cucumber, 2 tomatoes, 1 grated carrot, followed by half a rockmelon filled with diced strawberries That's a lot of vegetable matter. Every meal requires that level of vegetable matter because fruit and vegetable are now your prime source of carbohydrates.  Corn and potatoes are not permitted.

So based on this meal, Cordain's take on the Paleolithic eating pattern was that they slaughtered a big animal, butchered it, and then ran around finding a large salad of a wide variety of vegetable and fruit to go with their meat. Now I haven't studied the subject to the extent that Corbin has, but I still wonder whether personal bias has intervened here.  I can draw on what I have learnt about the indigenous people in my own country.  The gathering part was pretty hard.  There were bits and pieces here and there, but they were focused on finding dense sources of food like nuts, berries, seeds and tubers.  Some of these required specialist preparation back at camp, some were just plucked and munched on as they went about their business.  Meats were seasonal.  In certain seasons those with access to the beach would gather and gorge themselves on shellfish.  The hunting and eating of the bigger game and trapping of fish were times of plenty.  They would have been subject to periods of feast and famine.  I don't really see where masses of leafy green vegetable would have fitted into their diet, they just wouldn't have been abundant nor able to pack the nutritional punch they needed.

The other premise of the Paleolithic diet is that over just 333 generations we just haven't had the time to evolve to be able to handle the high levels of refined carbohydrate and sugar currently in our diets. That's why we are seeing so much ill health in the way of chronic diseases. Well evolution works on a principle of survival of the fittest.  Our problem is that the refined sugar and carbohydrate diet is not killing us off quickly enough.  The chronically ill are healthy enough that they get the opportunity to reproduce. The diet needs to either make them infertile or dead before reproduction age so that those who cannot adapt to the new lifestyle get weeded out.  Some people seem to have the metabolism that can cope with a pretty crappy diet of refined carbohydrates and resist chronic disease.  Presumably these would be the ones which natural selection would keep, and the majority of us with various syndrome X diseases would get weeded out of the population.  Mother nature is pretty harsh.

Again looking at indigenous Australians we can see an example of this.  If non- indigenous Australians have had 333 generations to adapt to our change in diet, the indigenous population have had about 10. Now if this diet was bad for us, we would see, you would think, greater evidence of it's impacts on the indigenous people. And guess what? We do. They love the sugary sweet stuff and they are seriously over represented in the diabetes statistics. So if you are nodding your head agreeing that this proves we are not adapted to our Neolithic diets, you also have to accept the premise that as rates of disease are higher in the population that has had less generations to adapt, we must be adapting, all be it slowly. The human body is pretty amazing and can take a serious amount abuse. But if we are adapting then a complete reversal to a Paleolithic diet would be a retrograde step.  There were undoubtedly sound reasons why we adapted agriculture to feed us.  I would like to examine some of the whys in a future blog.

But for now, I just wonder whether we really need a strict all or nothing approach?  I can accept that we ate way more protein and fat, and way less refined carbohydrate than our current dietary pyramid recommends. But being the ultimate omnivore we would have been eating some forms of seeds and starchy carbohydrates when we could get them. Predominately we ate meat, also when we could get it.  We couldn't store it, so we had to eat it a lot, and fast if we didn't want to get sick.  Similarly, if we came across fruit, we ate the whole lot.  We couldn't store stuff and when fruit is in season and is ripe you either take advantage of it and eat it all or miss out on its bounty.  This is where I suspect our bodies adapted to not recognise fructose in our bodies.  The fruit was so rare yet so important that when we saw it we needed to eat it.  The pay off was a sweet treat brimming with essential vitamins and minerals. We couldn't afford to be conservative and have our bodies worry about silly things like saiety. We needed to bypass the regular systems and make sure that we loaded up on this good stuff, and yes to the point of storing some of it as fat if need be. Now we have the situation where sugar is abundant and our bodies are still operating the same way by hiding the fructose component from our saiety registers.

The reason children love sweets so much?  It was even more important for them than adults to load up on the fruits and store fat as they were growing. While the harvest of wild fruits was abundant they needed to fill their bodily stores because being smaller with a greater surface area they were more prone to the cold of winter and they needed to ensure that they grew into adulthood in order to reproduce and keep the species going. So maybe that's why evolution hasn't weeded out the sugaraholics yet, maybe they are the ones that have ensured our survival and got us to where we are now.

medical dilemmas part 3

By the end of 2007 I was a medical mess both bodily and mentally and the medical profession didn't know what to do with me.  After investigating all the usual things that could or should be wrong with me given my crazy medical history, I was sent off to a psychologist to see if it really was something related to my mind.

I related my terrible sequence of events to the psychologist: miscarriage, death of father, adjusting back into 'normal' life after having travelled Australia, sibling fighting, mum's condition, the dizzy spell and my fears of stroke...... It all sounded like I had stacked up enough mental stresses to qualify as a mental patient.  Then I described the extreme nature of my diarrhoea.  Yes stress and anxiety can cause some diarrhoea but not to the extent that I was experiencing.  This aspect of my health was definitely medical.  So she sent me back to the doctor with the recommendation that I be tested for gut parasites.

This was getting close to Christmas time and the last thing I felt like was having the usual Christmas eating fest. As it turned out I was barely capable of it anyway.  The only thing worse than having a terrible gut bug is the treatment for it.  The doctor immediately tested bloods and stools and prescribed me the medication for giardia.  I took the course, which amounted to just a couple of days medication.  I felt awful at first as the antibiotics took effect, but I did notice a slight improvement in my anxiety levels.

Then the results of the stool tests came back showing that I did indeed have a nasty gut bug.  Blastocystis Hominus.  Normally a fairly benign bug but presumably in me it had gotten all out of proportion in my gut and was wreaking havoc.  I was prescribed more antibiotics, a stronger dose and this time a ten day course, as this particular bug was a whole lot harder to kill.

I barely made it to the end of the course as the medication made me feel so sick.  This little bugger of a parasite was determined to hang in there.  Mentally, however I was starting to feel better.  Still, though, I was not all together there. So I consulted doctor google and looked up if anyone else had battled this parasite. One site spoke about needing a cocktail of about 3 different antibiotics taken simultaneously to kill it.  I got myself an appointment with a paediatrician who had a special interest in gut parasites and asked him for his treatment plan also.  It consisted of a cocktail of 3 antibiotics, slightly different to the three that I had researched on the net.  Armed with this information I went back to my doctor and asked for another prescription of antibiotics more resembling what I had researched.  I was definitely feeling better, but still did not feel like I was completely on top of my bowels yet.  So I started this new regime, another 10 day course that made me again feel incredibly sick.  What a way to see in a new year, taking cocktails of antibiotics.

I had improved to a point, but there were still moments of having to manage anxiety, some days it felt like it took an enormous mental effort to stay on an even keel.  The gut was ok, but not fantastic.  2008 saw me managing both gut and mental health trying various things like probiotics, garlic and Echinacea, and olive leaf extract to try and heal my gut from the bug or the sustained assault from the antibiotics. Also meditating, drinking camomile tea and yoga to try and heal my mind.

The photo shows me in 2008, thinner and seemly happy, but underneath I was desperately trying to hold it all together.  Finally after sheer exhaustion from trying so hard everyday to feel normal I asked the doctor to again try and prescribe (a different) antidepressant for me.  I just needed a break from myself.  I'll blog about the antidepressant journey another time.

Apart from putting on a stack of weight the antidepressants smoothed out my anxiety, and other emotions.  After Steve telling me one day that I never smile anymore, I decided to ask the doctor to let me come off the medication. As I slowly decreased the dose, my world brightened step by step, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, I started to feel again.  It was joyous. I was so focused on not being anxious anymore, I had forgotten what it was like to feel the other happier emotions.  As they flooded back, the anxiety didn't!  My gut was healed and my mind was healed, I was finally well again after a couple of years of utter struggle.  Now I just had to deal with the weight gain caused by the antidepressants.  That's a story in itself for another time. The photo opposite shows how fat I got while on antidepressants.


Just when I thought that I had my bowel problems sorted, I found myself referred for a colonoscopy after passing a bit of blood one morning.  The colonoscopy came back clear, but did pick up on some polyps.  More weird things growing in body.  I wonder why I have a tendency to grow things that are surplus to requirements.  I guess we all need a hobby.  The problem with growing polyps is that then becomes another 'thing' that needs keeping an eye on.
Not long after I found myself back at an endocrinologist.  My hair started to thin and fall out in clumps.  I was worried that again I had invented some strange disease for myself, as if I didn't already have enough.  Not being a fan of being on medication though I wasn't keen to take anything to treat it.  The endocrinologist, talked a whole lot, listened very little, and sent me away with few solutions and a renewed diagnosis of PCOS. She declared that given my age, I was unlikely to fall pregnant and indeed if I did want another baby it would likely involve fertility treatment. Well that was a challenge that couldn't go unanswered and six months later, probably because I thought it was relatively safe from falling pregnant, I found myself with child. One good thing, though, the pregnancy fixed the problem of my thinning hair.
The final chapter in this story is that I fell pregnant with our fourth child, baby number five.  I was 42, so if 32 was considered geriatric by the medical profession, I wondered how they felt about 42.  This time my DVT history reared its ugly head again and demanded managing.  After my eight week blood tests I started to feel a suspicious pain in my arm where they had drawn the blood. I thought that it felt like a blood clot.  The pain grew as the clot grew.  Then one night a few days later I developed a pain in my chest.  Thinking that it might be a heart attack I called 000.  I was taken to hospital and put into emergency for some tests. An ultrasound revealed that I had indeed developed a clot extending from elbow to shoulder.  It was inconclusive about whether a clot had lodged in my lung aka pulmonary embolism.  The heart attack had been ruled out.  I had all the symptoms of a PE, the medical history, the smoking gun in the clot in my arm.  Now it just needed confirming by way of tests.  Unfortunately as the ultrasound was inconclusive I had to have a more extreme test, involving radiation and radioactive dyes.  This totally freaked me out.  Having already lost one baby, I knew the pain it caused and the last thing I wanted to do was risk this one.  I was already so scared about making it into the safe second trimester without adding this complication.

We were convinced by our doctor that to do nothing was riskier than to do the test, so I duly submitted. This test came back inconclusive as well.  I was not about to submit to anymore tests.  For my mind with my symptoms and medical history I was 90% sure I had the beginnings of a PE.  It just wasn't big enough to show up on their diagnostic tools.  being hyper aware of my clotting tendency and keen to avoid excessive amounts of pain I tend to act early on these symptoms.  Most people would present to hospital with further progressed disease than I would.

So no diagnosis, no medication.  Medication was always going to be problematic anyway, given my allergic reaction to heparin, and being pregnant, warfarin was out of the question. Oh well, I had been here before.  Self administered Aspirin.  I took a few full doses over the ensuing days and reduced the pain in my chest.  The clot in my arm however was harder to shift. It took on a life of its own and started to extend down to my wrist.  The pain was intense.  Then if that was not bad enough, the other arm started to clot up too. The clot in that one started at my forearm where the catheter had been put in during my hospital stay. There I was clotted in both arms from wrist to shoulder and in grave pain.  I took a few doses of aspirin and gradually the pain and clots receded.

Again I was referred to a specialist who did not endorse my aspirin taking, but took an intellectual interest in my condition.  He told me in all his practise he had never seen a homozygous factor V Lieden patient before.  Yet statistically he reckoned that he should see us all the time, given our increased tendency to clot, compared to the regular population.  He told me that he went to a conference with other haematologists and asked them too if they had ever seen a homozygous Factor V Leiden patient.  All answered in the negative.  He delightedly told them that he had one that he was treating now.  How nice to be a medical oddity.
He started to speculate as to why we were so rare. One thought was that it doesn't really increase our rate of clotting as much as one would think.  My experiences with clots would tend to discount that hypothesis. And just the fact that we exist should have us showing up at hospital with clots at least as often as heterozygous factor V patients.  His second hypothesis was that maybe homozygous don't survive the womb.  So there are actually not that many of us out there.  How nice to be told that I shouldn't actually exist.  I was feeling mightily healthy for someone who shouldn't have made it into this world....... Surely there must be others of us out there......

I survived the remainder of the pregnancy with no more clots.  The birth was wonderful and we now have a gorgeous baby girl for our trouble.  Ah for a life free of medical dilemmas.

Medical dilemmas part 2

So to recap, I had fat kid syndrome in Primary school.  This photo shows a comparison between me and my sister, I was in year five when this photo was taken.  Then I trimmed down in High school to the point where I would actually be seen in a bikini, though I still preferred to wear a one piece swimming costume in public.  We did like to sun bake a bit, so this second photo with my sister shows us in the backyard trying to get a bit of colour into our skin. I am guessing I am in about year eight, so maybe 14 years old.  I never achieved the slimness of my sister, so always saw myself as fat unfortunately.  But looking at this bikini shot now, I wouldn't call myself fat.  What a shame us girls are always so hard on ourselves and are always so obsessed with looking fat.  It wouldn't surprise me if even my skinny sister thought that she had a few troublesome fatty areas that could be fixed with a low fat diet.

Also through my teenage years I remember being quite susceptible to colds and runny noses, and in late High school I wore braces to straighten up my crooked teeth.  Funny though, I can't seem to find any photos of me actually wearing braces even though I wore them for two and a half years.  I might have to scour some other people's photo albums and see if I inadvertently allowed myself to get snapped while showing my braces clad teeth.

So, by the end of year twelve, a strict low fat diet and the wonders of hormones that produce those lovely womanly curves, I had a body that I was pretty happy with, but it was going to be a short lived affair. Because it was at the end of that year, just before I turned 18, that I discovered my melanoma. Interestingly, I can't see the offending mole in the bikini shot above, so I guess it hadn't grown yet.

Oh and by the end of my first year of University I had stuffed up my eyes and now suffered myopia. I got my first pair of glasses, a trendy red pair, but cannot find a single photo of me wearing them.  In fact to find a photo at all of me wearing glasses I have to fast forward to 1993, almost five years later. I must have worn contact lenses for a long time, because during the intervening period there are plenty of photos of me, just none of them involve me wearing glasses.  This photo is of me and my truly beloved holidaying in Bali. Most Bali photos have me glasses free, this is a rare one where we are both wearing glasses.  'I will if you will'. Plus, of course, I had been diagnosed with PCOS.

My twenties saw me diagnosed with hashimotos thyroiditis, flat feet (ha ha), and I suffered three DVT's on separate occasions. Following on from part one, the third DVT I self treated with a bunch of aspirin and went back to tell the doctor.  Naturally he wasn't happy with me, I have found during the years that doctors don't really trust the blood thinning properties of aspirin for DVT's, maybe because it's too easy and cheap. He prescribed me a prophylactic dose of heparin, clexane, to be exact. This was designed to prevent me from getting another clot through out the remainder of my pregnancy.  Now this was pre doctor Google, so I headed off to the pharmacist and sat in his back room reading his text books in order to get a handle on what I was prescribed and its relative risks.

I wasn't that happy about taking it, but with a long haul flight in the near future, I decided that maybe it would be prudent.  So began my almost 6 months of daily injections.

 

Now these needles, are fat.  Heparin has a relatively higher molecular weight (or is it lower? I'm not sure as I'm not a chemist) compared to other injectables, so it needs a fat needle to deliver it.  It was Steve's job to inject me each day into my abdomen.  This became quite tricky as my belly grew throughout pregnancy. Sometimes when he hit a small blood vessel I would bruise up terribly.  It was not a good look, a pregnant woman looking like she had be battered and beaten around her belly.  We duly took all the heparin I needed on our 3 month overseas jaunt, injecting in airport toilets and the like.  Feeling guilty about transporting a small bag packed with syringes and dreading being searched at customs and having to try and explain ourselves.  Luckily we were never detained, so did not have to test our translated letter explaining our unusual cargo.

By the time that I got back from our overseas trip I had less than the last trimester to go. But, I had developed a sensitivity to the clexane. Every night I broke out in itchy hives all over my body.  We tried another heparin called fragmin.  It did the same thing.  As I was so close to the end of my pregnancy, and now in the highest danger period for developing a clot, I had no choice but to continue with the heparin, but counteract its side effects with an antihistamine.  Poor baby, being assaulted with two drugs now, it somehow did not surprise me that by 6 weeks old this little baby was riddled with eczema and highly allergic to dairy and oats.

I got through the pregnancy and birth and was given a different clot prevention drug in hospital.  Another type of very expensive heparin that I was only allowed to take for the short time that they got me established on warfarin as the heparin was so expensive.  I did my time on warfarin, again, along with all the accompany blood tests that keep an eye on the viscosity of blood, and then settled down to mothering my two young children.

 

Four years later, at 32, and regarded as geriatric by the medical profession, I had baby number three. This time I was a bit naughty and avoided the whole heparin thing altogether.  It was kind of in the too hard basket for the medical profession. I was at heightened risk of DVT, but allergic to the preventative treatment.  So it was easier to ignore the situation.  Any time that I felt "clotty" I took a dose of aspirin, but otherwise made my way through the pregnancy unscathed in the blood clot department.  It was about this time that my father suffered a pulmonary embolism.  Here finally was a family connection to my odd tendency to develop DVT's.  He saw a specialist for his PE and had a blood test that showed him as having a genetic mutation called Factor V Leiden.  This was a relatively new discovery in medical science that seemed to explain why some people are more prone to developing blood clots than others.  I decided to go and have my blood tested too, as it was reasonably likely that my blood would show something similar. What I didn't expect was that I would also have the genetic mutation, but I would have it in spades. Where my father was heterozygous for the gene, I was homozygous, meaning that both mum and dad had supplied me with the offending genetic mutation. Funnily, mum wouldn't believe that she too had the gene and went and got herself tested, I guess she didn't fully understand the science of genetics.

 

Now homozygous for factor V Leiden is a big deal  in the medical profession.  Anytime I mention this little genetic quirk I get instant attention and fascination from my medical practitioner. The specialist who diagnosed me with it pronounced that if I was to get one more DVT he would see me on warfarin for life.  This bothered me a bit, so I decided to take low dose aspirin instead to try and ward off any potential clots. While he readily agreed with this approach, he informed me that there was absolutely no evidence that aspirin worked on thinning venous blood.  I took aspirin anyway.

 

So if having a rare genetic mutation that increases my chance of DVT's to 800 times the rate of the rest of the population wasn't enough, my thyroid was ready to rear its ugly head again. Over the years I had had the odd thyroid ultrasound, and it was steadily growing slightly larger and had decided to start to grow some interesting things called nodules. At first this was no cause for concern as nodules in the thyroid are reasonably common. However at one scan one of the nodules started to show itself as being rather large.  This was a bit of a worry as it could be a precursor to cancer or it turning 'hot' and hence my sluggish thyroid may swing to being overactive by being powered by one of these rampant nodules.  Now my semi regular thyroid scans, turned more regular and were accompanied with find needle biopsy.  One doctor sent me off to a specialist about it and I obediently went along thinking that I was seeing an endocrinologist.  It was with some shock that I realised he was a thyroid surgeon and he was busily explaining to me how he intended to cut out my entire thyroid gland.  He explained the operation, the risks, and the life time dependence I would now have upon synthetic thyroid hormones.  This left me a little shocked to say the least.

 

I went back to my doctor and asked for a second opinion and this time got to see an endocrinologist who agreed to a more conservative regime of regular thyroid scans, biopsies and blood tests. That I felt I could life with much better than having my throat cut and risking loss of my voice and damage to my parathyroid glands.

 

I was starting to feel like a bit of a freak with these weirdo medical conditions in a body, that by most accounts actually felt quite healthy.  I was later to find out about what feeling unhealthy was like, when at the end of 2007 both my mind and my body cracked up completely on me.

 

As I have previously been blogging, we had an amazing family trip, camping our way around Australia. During the trip I fell pregnant with baby number four. Unfortunately not terribly far into the pregnancy I miscarried and managed to time it to coincide very closely with my father becoming incredibly sick and subsequently dying.  Not two weeks after suffering the trauma of losing my baby I was on a plane flying away from my loving family and support network to go and attend Dad's funeral. On top of the funeral was the realisation that mum was pretty sick with what was either depression, or dementia or both, and there was a nasty family feud brewing between the siblings about what happened during dad's last weeks of life and how mum's care should proceed from here.  This was pretty serious stuff.  I stayed in Canberra for a week helping with funeral arrangements, burying dad, and then I flew back to re join my family in Darwin and continue our Australian trip, while trying to pretend that everything was ok.

 

The end part of the trip was to put us in Canberra where I stayed with the kids in mum's house while Steve returned to Coffs to go to work.  Somewhere along the line I had picked up a nasty gastric bug that was slowly getting itself established in my gut.  Sibling relations were pretty low with some pretty intense moments, mum was slowly losing her marbles and I think I was starting to lose mine too. Just before leaving Canberra and heading for home I experienced a prolonged dizzy spell that frightened the hell out of me. Particularly as I have a tendency to blood clots, my first thought was stroke.  This was like the straw that broke the camel's back.  I still had to hire a car and drive me and the three kids all the way back to Coffs while suddenly having lost my grip on my calm state of mind.

 

I made it back to Coffs, but here started some months of extreme anxiety and total discomfort with being inside my own skin.  It was absolutely terrible.  To feel so horrible and not know what was wrong or how to fix it.  I went to various health practitioners looking for help, doctors, naturopaths, alternative health people.  I was running around looking for help from where ever I could find it.  Nothing helped.  Finally, I relented and allowed my doctor to prescribe me antidepressants.  This took quite a shift in my attitude as I never thought I would ever be a candidate for antidepressants. 

Well they were a disaster.  My symptoms worsened, and I didn't think that it was possible to feel any worse than I already did.  I couldn't stop crying and shaking and I was ready to completely crack up.  I rang the doctor and was advised to stop taking them straight away.  The symptoms improved.  One of the major symptoms that I was suffering was a severe case of diarrhoea.  I had no appetite, yet anything I did eat was pouring straight through me not even digested.  I started to lose a stack of weight.  As the antidepressants didn't work, I asked the doctor to refer me to a psychologist.  Another treatment option I never thought I'd see myself needing.

 

I went to see the psychologist and I will continue the saga of what happened there in part 3.



 

Medical dilemmas....part 1

I have an interesting medical history that always seems to make Doctors salivate with a kind of awe.  They seem to be amazed that I am still alive actually sitting there in their office and slightly nervous that I may actually keel over while I am sitting there.  I think that intellectually I am a bit more interesting than the regular offering who walks through the door, but it isn't long before they tire of me as I have not performed any new amazing near death experiences for them.

I have had doctors tell me all sorts of things over the years, like I'll be pretty much infertile after 30, so will have to have all my children in my 20's.  I am only alive because of the wonders of medicine, and most recently, I had a specialist tell me that I should not really have even made it through my mum's pregnancy, I am lucky to be here at all.

Well at 44 and having had 4 children, two of them after I turned 30, I guess I am doing pretty well.

Around about the middle of primary school, I went from being one of the biggest kids in the class, height wise, to being one of the chubbiest too. 

Kindy I am wearing a red cardigan

This continued until I hit my puberty growth spurt in High school and I dropped the weight whilst gaining height.  That gave me a few good teenage years where I wasn't exactly wrapped in my body, I wasn't totally disgusted either. Oh I wish I had that body now, why did I spend so much wasted time thinking that I was fat?

AS you can see from the school piccies I was relatively similar in size to the other kids in my class, until around year three when the

year1 up the back in the brown cardigan, year 2 RHS of teacher

chubbing up became much more noticeable.  Then the next few photos are individual ones of me that track me through the remainder of primary school and into high school. I'm guessing I was biggest in year 6, I think I remember wearing size 16 women's clothes.  By the end of year 7 I had lost most of my weight and although I was 10cm taller I was down to between a size 10 and size 12.  Those glorious hormones, it all pretty much happened by itself.  But being a teenager, I got into the whole dieting thing and like most teenage girls of my era, I was often on some sort of a diet or another.

The most successful diet was one where I decided that soup was the go and that I would go and swim laps.  I had been given a beautiful formal dress that I wanted to wear to my year 12 formal.  When I first tried it on, I

year 3 next to teacher 2nd front row

was inches away from getting it zipped up at the back.  By my formal, though I had lost the required amount of weight and was able to fit into it.  I was so proud of myself.
It was about this time, the end of my final year at High school, 1987, that I was diagnosed with a malignant melanoma on my abdomen. I had gone to the doctor to have a rather large mole removed from my back.  While I was there I asked him to look at a mole on my front that I had started to scratch at.  He looked at it and decided that it looked fine.  I pressed him to remove it anyway.  A week later I got the results.  It was malignant.
He immediately sent me off to see a specialist in Sydney.  Not really realising the gravity of the situation, after seeing the specialist and being told it was going to cost a bucket load of money to have the area excised and that he wanted me to go straight into hospital for the operation, we (mum, dad and I) declined and returned to Canberra.  Upon learning this the doctor nearly had kittens, and promptly booked me into a surgeon in Canberra and within weeks I was having an operation designed to excise the area surrounding the site of the melanoma.  That turned out all fine.  The melanoma had not spread to the surrounding tissue, and my lymph nodes were clear, so I went onto a watch list, where I would travel to Sydney twice a year to be checked over by the specialists in the Melanoma unit in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.  I got the all clear and was able to cease visits after my five years.

This also coincided with the time that I started University.  I had my excision operation in the week before lectures started.  So while the others were getting to know each other in various O week activities I was laying in hospital being chopped up.

While at University two notable doctor's visits had me diagnosed with flat feet (so jogging for sport was ruled out) and polycystic ovary syndrome.  This was the first time that I was told that I would have to have children in my twenties, as conception would be difficult if I left child rearing too long.  Being about 19 at this stage, having children was the furtherest thing from my mind.  In fact I am pretty sure at that age  I had declared that I was never going to have any children.  So I again down played the whole polycystic ovary thing and put it on the back burner.

Not long after finishing University, I would have been around 22 by this stage, I went to the doctor about a minor matter.  This doctor was far more interested in the state of my throat.  I wasn't quite sure why she was taking such an unusual interest in my neck.  She told me ( I had never noticed this before) that I had a goitre.  After blood tests and an ultrasound of the offending area, I was diagnosed with hashimotos thyroiditis.  I had never heard of this before, but upon investigation found out that it was an autoimmune disease where the thyroid starts to grow and produce less thyroid hormone.  I was duly prescribed thyroxin for the condition and told that I would need regular blood tests to measure my thyroid levels and have my dose adjusted accordingly.  I stayed on thyroxin until just after the birth of my first child in 1996.

All was going along fine for the next few years.  I met a bloke and fell in love and we became vegetarians after reading Fit For Life.  I turned 25 and then not long after developed a pain in my calf.  The pain increased to the point where I was worried that I had burst a blood vessel.  I went to the doctor and described the pain.  She told me that I wouldn't have burst a blood vessel, but I could quite possibly have a blood clot, a deep vein thrombosis, or DVT.  I was sent off for tests that confirmed it.  This was a very strange thing for a 25 year old girl to suffer.  This was something that normally happened to old people.  Oh well, we medicated me with heparin, followed by warfarin and got the  thing fixed.  Then we just wrote it off as some weird anomaly and I got on with life.

Not long after I had finished treatment I fell pregnant with my first child and soon there after I married the perpetrator. Following the birth I was taking a low dose aspirin as I had been made aware of the increased risk factors of suffering blood clots due to pregnancy hormones.  I was living in Bombala at the time and the local pharmacist was not happy that I was taking aspirin and breastfeeding.  He strongly advised me to stop the aspirin.  I did. And sure enough I developed DVT number two.  At first the doctor ( a different one to the one I had before) would not believe me.  I announced that I thought that I had a blood clot and he disparagingly said to me, oh you're a nurse are you?  I quickly informed him that it was not that long ago that I had had one and that I knew exactly what they felt like.  He sent me home with a swat behind the ear telling me that it was just fluid on the knee.  Two days later I rang him and told him I was in great pain and was barely able to walk.  He told me to go and check myself into hospital.

With a 6 week old baby in her capsule I drove my self to hospital and then hobbled my way up to admission to check myself into hospital.  The pain got a whole lot worse before it got better, but with heparin and warfarin I was again returned to free flowing blood again.  Bombala hospital was mainly a geriatric hospital, so the presence of a new mum with her 6 week old baby was a boon for the staff.  Unfortunately they had no idea how to feed a starving lactating mum, so Steve had to smuggle food in for me.

It was during the time that I was completing my course of warfarin medication and slowly reducing my doses, that I decided to do the same with my thyroxin.  I kind of wondered if it may have had something to do with me getting these blood clots.  I wasn't a big fan of the idea of being medicated all the time, so I decided to ditch the thyroxin along with the warfarin.

That little experiment didn't work.  Less than two years later I found myself pregnant with baby number two and felt another blood clot developing.  By this time we were living near Oberon, so I was faced with another new doctor unaware of my medical history.  I also noticed that far from having to try too hard with my supposed polycystic ovaries, I was managing to get myself pregnant rather easily.  I went to the doctor with my suspicions of my impending clot to be faced with a similar situation as before.  Doctors do not like you walking into their offices with a pre- self made diagnosis.  This failure of the doctor to believe me left me with three dilemmas. Firstly, I didn't want to develop the full blown clot.  They hurt a whole lot and I now had a toddler who needed looking after, I couldn't just nick off to hospital. Secondly, we were planning on travelling overseas very shortly and long haul flights are notorious for causing DVT's.  Thirdly, in order for the doctor to confirm my diagnosis I was told to go and have an x-ray with radio active dye injected into my veins.  I was PREGNANT, there was no way that I was going to go and do THAT.

So what did I do?  I left the doctor's surgery and crossed the road to  the chemist.  I bought a box of aspirin, went home, had a glass of red wine and a couple of aspros. Over the ensuing couple of days I had a full dose of aspirin three times a day. And guess what?  I cleared it.  Maybe it was not the most responsible thing for a pregnant woman to do, but it seemed a hell of a better option than pumping radioactive dye into my veins.

And that my folks is the end of part 1.  Stay tuned for part two.

My big day out

I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep.  I felt like a little kid who had ‘had a big day’.  And I had.  It was one of those rare days that just turned out amazing, but was totally unexpected.  Much like a kid who has their entertainment pre-organised by an adult, they just turn up and have all the fun. My day kind of worked out the same way.

 

There were three things that we wanted to do when we came to Canberra: visit my mum, bike ride around Lake Burley Griffin, and sail on Lake Burley Griffin.  We also bought the kayaks with us, so having a kayak on the lake would be pretty cool too.

 

We are staying in the Yarralumla Sea scout hall.  It is right on the foreshores of Lake Burley Griffin.  The view is amazing and the hall is really neat and clean and beautifully set up.  Although we are essentially camping, the location is fantastic.  Most of Canberra has vacated the city, so the whole place is quiet and easy to get around.  It is brilliant, definitely the best time to visit, in my view.  I hate crowds and the most crowded place in Canberra at the moment are the cycle ways.  Canberrans are cycle crazy.  And well they might be as they have a fabulous network of cycle paths to enjoy.  The Government has built the infrastructure and the populous are flocking onto in droves, proving that if you provide the community with a good place to recreate, they will automatically get out and avail themselves of the opportunity to live a more fit and healthy lifestyle.

Avail us of the cycle ways we have. They extend in both directions from the scout hall and give us the choice of a number of picturesque walks to take.  Weston Park is very close by and an easy walk from the hall.  Unfortunately we are not allowed to take the dog, but the play ground is a big hit with Ellie (and Harry).

The mornings by the lake are just beautiful.  Canberra starts its day in a cool way, with barely a puff of wind.  The lake is still and serene, the air clear and fresh.  We started our day with a walk to Weston Park.  The walk was lovely along the picturesque lake, and it was shown off to its best.  I found myself yearning to get the kayaks out and get onto it.  The walk meandering along the foreshores of the Weston park peninsula and took us longer than expected, so my anticipation levels were rising.  I had to tell myself to relax and enjoy the moment.

For lunch we had left overs from the big barbeque that we had the night before.  We had invited Steve’s parents and my brother and sister in law around for dinner. There was plenty leftover to last a few days for lunch, so the kids made themselves sandwiches.  Then we headed out to find out about how much it would cost to hire a bike and a sailing boat. 

First stop was Mr Spokes bike hire on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin.  Mr Spokes has been there forever, I certainly remember it being here when I was a child growing up in Canberra.  We were immediately pleased that their rates for a family were very reasonable.  They seemed not to be too picky about the children’s ages and accepted our hoard of 2 adults, 2 teenagers, 1 primary schooler and a baby as a family.  How often do you go to places and a family is defined as 2 adults and 2 kids?  So for just $90 we were able to hire bikes for four hours for everyone, and a trailer for Ellie.  They weren’t busy, so we decided that tomorrow we would definitely come and hire bikes.  So tick, that was the first thing that we wanted to do covered.

Second stop was the Yarralumla Yacht Club.  Here there were sailing boats galore of all sizes and shapes. With much excited anticipation we walked around to the sailing hire place to only find that it was closed for the entire period that we were going to be in Canberra.  What a major bummer.  There were people on the Lake flaunting their sailing and here we were only able to look on with forlorn longing.

If we couldn’t sail the lake, the next best thing was to get the kayaks out.  Hiring a sailing boat could be something that we could leave for next time we visited Canberra.  We headed back to the hall and dropped off everyone except me.  I headed to the shop while the others either kayaked or walked around to Yarralumla Bay swimming area.

After finishing the shopping I met them at the bay and got to go out on one of the kayaks.  The water was a bit choppy, not quite the serene glassy ambience of the morning, but still heaps of fun.  Harry had a ball racing the kayaks between the pontoons.  He would swim and we would paddle.  At times it was quite challenging in the choppy waters.  We continued to gaze longingly at the sailors, but had reconciled ourselves to the fact that we would make sure we sailed next time that we came to Canberra.

Steve and Sarah paddled the kayaks back to the hall, Evan walked Ellie back in the pram and I drove the car back with Harry. As we walked into the courtyard area, Harry noticed that the shed door to the sailing boats was open.  I dropped the shopping on the ground and rushed into the shed calling out a friendly hello.  The shed was set up with an amazing array of sailing boats, canoes and boards.  The life jackets, masts and paddles were all arranged neatly around the walls.  This was one very well organised and well cared for outfit.  I missed the people who had been in the shed as they had already gone out the lake side door and closed it having already got their boats out.

Harry and I hastened around to the lake to find that Dad and Sarah had already made it back to shore outside the hall and had already started talking to the people launching the scout boats.  We introduced ourselves and wistfully mentioned our desire to have a go at sailing.  They hinted that they might let us have a go a bit later.

With hopeful anticipation we entered the hall and settled down to a game of cards.  Ellie was asleep and we were basically killing time until we were going to go and visit mum at the nursing home.  The kids taught Steve and I how to play Governors and Convicts, and just as I won my first hand and was starting to get the hang of the game, Ed the scout leader we had met earlier popped his head in the door of the hall and said that there was a boat free if we wanted to have a sail.  Steve, Sarah and I looked at each other for about a nano second, slammed our cards on the table and said ‘yeah’.

We rushed around to the front of the hall and donned life jackets.  Ed helped us get into the boat and gave a few pointers to help us navigate this new boat.  It was a bit bigger than the lasers we had learnt to sail in Urunga.  This one was called an Envy and it had a centre board rather than a dagger board and had much more room under the boom.  This was also to be the first time that we would be setting off from and returning to a wharf.

Being under pressure and being watched by complete strangers Sarah and I put Steve at the helm.  He wasn’t going to come at first because he wanted to stay behind and look after Ellie.  We convinced him that Evan and Harry were quite capable, so he jumped in with us.  We manoeuvred our way out into the lake and under the watchful gaze of Black Mountain we started to randomly tack and gibe our way around the lake.  We didn’t head too far from our setting out point in case we’d have trouble making our way back.  Rule number one: head off into the wind, so that it is easier to get back home.  Once Steve had us under way, I took over the helm and had a few laps of the lake between the tower and the willows.  It was pretty gusty, so we alternated between almost being becalmed and ripping along quite fast.  At one point I sent the boat into a 360 degree spin and nearly capsized us.  I still don’t know how I did that, but Sarah instructed me to let out the main sheet, and I think that that helped right things.

Sarah took over the helm and did a few more laps, then brought us back to the wharf.  Originally we were going to make Steve do that bit as it had to be done very carefully, and in front of an audience.  But Sarah stepped up to the mark and did an absolutely superb job of skippering the boat into the dock and pulling up ever so gently at the wharf.  I was so proud of her.

It felt like we had been out for about half an hour, but Evan said that it was actually closer to an hour and a half.  We were so lucky to have a sail, especially after we had thought that our chances of getting one were dashed.  I felt so excited about it that I felt pumped all night and then had trouble settling down to sleep.  Yay, we managed to cross off a major TO DO from our list of things that we wanted to do in Canberra.