Texas! Who knew?
Aug 19, 2002 Read/heard/seen
According to Wired, the top ten most creative cities include Austin, Houston, and Dallas. One of the ways they figured this out was to look at “gay population concentrations” to measure “tolerance and diversity.”
A little known fact is that Columbus has an incredibly high gay population concentration. It’s 6th overall (according to a 1998 article in The Advocate) and it’s ranked third in the top ten best places to live if you’re gay.
I’m trying to find out why it’s considered a gay-friendly city and I found this article quoting Jeff Redfield, executive director of Stonewall Columbus:
Redfield agreed that the size of the gay population is a plus–estimating that 120,000 to 150,000 gay people currently live in Columbus–but also said that the small town feel and low cost of living are an advantage. “Columbus is a typical all-American city with a hometown feel and all the options,” he said. “There is the ability in many parts of the city to hold hands over dinner and go out shopping with friends.”
But the article is primarily questioning the gay-friendly assumption in Columbus because we “have the country’s fifth highest rate of hate crime violence against the gay community.”
There’s still a lot of work to be done.
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A different kind of statistic
Aug 18, 2002 Blogging
This article, Wise-Women: Alphabet Soup: Web Site Statistics helped me make sense of my site statistics. According to my stats, I get an average of 1,548 hits a day. Zowie! I was so impressed with myself! However, the article explained that page views are slightly more accurate and I only get an average of 360 of those each day. Hmmm, not quite as mind-boggling but still pretty good. Then I saw that sessions are the most accurate of all and I only get about 132 a day of those (again, that’s an average). Oh dear, my popularity is diminishing rapidly.
You know what sociologists say about sausage and statistics, right? You don’t want to look too closely at how either of them get made.
I’m content with that 132 number but I’m still looking for a way out of that damn 6%.
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Wandering around
Aug 18, 2002 Writing
Isn’t this a pretty blog? She’s funny, too, and Noah loves the goofy cat up in the corner. Please note that she’s also got a kicking funny romance blog here. But you know what’s even cooler? I got my bookmarklets set up so I just clicked a button and wrote this entry without ever entering my MT space. How did I run my journal for so long without this software??? And why am I not working????
I have three articles due in the next month; one on the 6th, one on the 15th and one I’m not so sure about and am afraid to look at my calendar to see but I think it’s the 1st. Two of them are kinda huge in regards to research and organization so really I need to get going on them. I also have a roundtable to do (Thursday) and edit (over the weekend) and an essay to write and my usual blurbs to get done. So why oh why am I trolling the net instead of working?
I’d blame Brett somehow if only I could get away with it.
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IUI Report
Aug 17, 2002 Infertility
Don’t you love Rhapsody in Blue? I was listening to it on the way home from the IUI.
The procedure itself was no big deal; less invasive than a pap smear, really. The doc was right impressed with Brett’s sample. In fact, I believe that the word “stupendous” came up. I was so proud. No, really, it’s strange how these things work. Your doctor says, “Now *that* is a beautiful uterine lining!” And you can’t help but feel tickled. The doctor insert 58 million sperm making that the high for today at the clinic. I wish they had given us a ribbon or something so we could show Brett’s parents. We could hang it next to his half-marathon medals.
I asked the doctor about the 6% success rate and he said that I had to compare that to Mother Nature’s success rate, which after you’ve been trying for as long as we have is about 1 in 300, not exactly encouraging. Of course, you have to remember that statistics are tricky things. All sorts of stuff can happen to skew a stat, right? Well, that’s what I’m telling myself. I’m just going to have to take it easy for the next two weeks and remember that I’m feeling a bit fragile.
It would be poetic justice to get pregnant on this the Last Treatment Cycle but poetic justice is not one of the things that seems to affect statistics. If I was writing a novel, I would make the heroine get pregnant after she’s made some great emotional leap. You know, decided to stop now, decided to move on. Like in Mad About You where they had make-up sex after a marriage-shattering crisis and got pregnant even though all those infertility treatments in previous episodes didn’t work. Alas, life is not a sitcom (thank goodness, who would want to deal with all of those commercials?) so I can’t make plans based on appropriate endings.
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Tags: Infertility
Tomorrow…
Aug 16, 2002 Infertility
Tomorrow morning at 7:30am, Brett arrives with his (ahem) sample at the lab where they perform magic tricks over it and then I will show up at 9am where I will become intimate with various utensils and the (ahem) sample will be inserted.
I actually have no idea what they do with the sperm. They told me they do something like “clean it up” and they mentioned the word “debris.” Who knows what Brett’s got floating around in there. Let me see if I can find something. Ah, here we go. My beloved Google found something at iVillage!
Semen is made up of sperm cells, seminal fluid and debris (dead sperm, white cells, mucus and fat globules). When we do intrauterine insemination (IUI), we are most interested in getting motile, healthy sperm cells into the uterus.
However, we can’t just shoot raw semen right from the cup directly into the uterus. The sperm swim in a liquid called seminal fluid, predominantly produced by the prostate gland, which contains chemicals called prostaglandins. … When semen enters the vagina during sex, the prostaglandins cause no problem. But if we injected raw semen directly into a woman’s uterus to try to get sperm to the egg, she would experience severe pain and perhaps even vascular collapse and death.
Hmmm, kinda yucky. Who knew that this stuff could kill you.
Anyway, I like to think about Brett’s sperm being in a happy, pristine, totally girl-friendly environment and all of this talk about “debris” and “vascular collapse” doesn’t exactly get my engine running. Fortunately, the very nature of an IUI does not require any sort of engine running whatsoever. This is a totally clinical thing where words like “debris” are entirely appropriate.
The stats for someone with one follicle (I had one big follicle at yesterday’s ultrasound, a few little ones but they triggered the one) are only about 6% success, so I’m not exactly hepped up about this but I welcome good thoughts none the less.