25 Firsts

Nancy & Jenny both answered this meme on their blogs, & I couldn't resist trying it myself!

1. Who was your first prom date?

We never had proms in the small Canadian Prairietown where I grew up in the late 1970s, at least not as you would think of them in the States. And I hardly had a date of any kind all through high school.

We did have a grad cruise -- just my graduating classmates & dates, on the River Rouge cruise ship on the Red River in Winnipeg. I didn’t have a date & neither did my girlfriend Terry, & we wound up table hopping. Ended up sitting with a bunch of Jeff Spicoli types, and one of them told us, "Hey, you guys are a lot of fun when you're drunk." lol

2. Do you still talk to your first love?

No.

3. What was your first alcoholic drink?

Cheap wine at the cast party for my first high school drama club production when I was in Grade 10. ; ) Either that, or the rum punch my aunt made for Christmas (& my sister, cousins & I got into) the year we celebrated with them in Minneapolis -- both around the same time, when I was about 15.

4. What was your first job?

Summer weekends behind the concession counter at the local drive-in theatre. I was only the alternate/extra, but I worked more weekends than not, for minimum wage, which was $2.65/hour at the time. Two of my friends from school were the regulars, & we had a blast working together, especially the dawn-to-dusk extravaganzas on long weekends. The drive-in was owned by a family from the city who would come out on weekends in the summer to run the place -- and they had two good looking sons who were around the same age as we were. They were great to work for, & the dad gave us all a little bonus at the end of the season. And every night before I left, I would set aside a tub of freshly popped popcorn, topped with real butter to bring home to my mom. Yum!

5. What was your first car?

I've never owned a car myself because I don't drive. Dh's dad gave us his old VW Rabbit when we were first married. The first car we bought on our own (after that one got totalled in an accident) was a 1993 Nissan Sentra Classic. We drove it for 10 years & then got our current car, a 2003 Toyota Camry.

6. Who was the first person to text you today?

I don't text.

7. Who was the first person you thought of this morning?

Probably dh, since he was there beside me. ; )

8. Who was your first grade teacher?

I don't normally name full names in this blog, but I can't resist sharing this one: her name was Miss Melody Middlemiss. (You can't make stuff like that up.) She got married that June after school ended & changed her name (this was 40+ years ago, eek). We helped make Kleenex flowers to decorate her wedding car in art class.

9. Where did you go on your first flight in a plane?

I went for a short ride in a small plane with my mom, sister & a family friend (the pilot) when I was about 14, in Saskatchewan. My first actual trip in a jet was from Winnipeg to Ottawa when I was 18 & in Grade 12.

10. Who was your first best friend and do you still talk?

Adele, & sadly, no, although my mom & dad recently visited the town we lived in then, & ran into her older sister.

11. Where was your first sleepover?

I think it was at my friend Jill's -- she lived down the back alley from my grandmother in Smalltown Minnesota. We used to play with our Barbie dolls together. I still see her occasionally when I go there to visit.

12. Who was the first person you talked to today?

Dh. Besides him, the girl at the coffee shop downstairs, en route up to my office.

13. Whose wedding were you in for the first time?

The first & only wedding party I've been in (besides my own) was dh's brother's. Dh & I were the matron of honour & best man.

14. What was the first thing you did this morning?

Got out of bed & had a shower.

15. What was the first concert you went to?

Bay City Rollers, August 15, 1976, Winnipeg Arena. Tickets were $5.50. I was 15. Yes, I wore tartan, lol. : )

16. First tattoo?

I don't have any.

17. First piercing?

My ears. My sister got her ears pierced when she was 13, shortly after we moved to a much larger (albeit still small, lol) town. In our old town, only the really slutty girls had their ears pierced, so I was horrified -- the big town was corrupting my baby sister!! Of course, within a few months, EVERYONE was getting their ears pierced... and after awhile, I thought it might not be so bad, lol. But after the fuss I'd made, I absolutely refused to ask my mom if I could have mine done, because I knew she'd laugh at me & tell everyone the story. So I waited until we went into the city shortly after my 18th birthday, & I didn't need her permission to do it anymore, lol. ; ) I got them done at Eatons Polo Park. They're still my only piercings.

18. First foreign country you went to?

Outside of Canada, the United States. Which seems weird to say, since I was born in a border town, & my mother is from Minnesota. I still haven't visited anywhere outside of our two countries, sadly. Hoping to remedy that over the next few years…!

19. First movie you remember seeing?

"Help!" starring the Beatles, with my mom, when I was about 4 or 5. I had dreams for years afterward about falling through trapdoors into cellars with prowling tigers, and having Ringo's ring stuck on my finger.

20. What state (province) did you first live in?

Manitoba.

21. Who was your first room mate?

Aside from sharing a bedroom with my sister when we were younger -- my first-year roommate at university residence, Anna. (If you're talking opposite sex roomies, never had one until dh & I got married.)

22. When was your first detention?

I don't remember -- I think it was in high school. It didn’t happen very often, but I did get detention a few times for not having assignments finished.

23. (Nancy didn't have a #23, but Jenny added this one:) When was your first kiss?

His name was Jeff & I was 15. It was after a dance at a student council conference in Winnipeg in the fall of 1976. He was also the first guy I slow-danced with (song: "Make it With You" by Bread).

24. What is one thing you would learn, given the chance?

How to take photos with a digital SLR camera on a mode other than automatic. And how to use Photoshop.

25. Who will be the next person to post this?

I don't know, but be my guest…!! And let me know if you do -- I would love to read your answers!

Article: "My scattered grandchildren"

Interesting article from Monday's Globe & Mail. Beware the comments.

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My scattered grandchildren

Their children may consider it a personal decision, but parents of egg and sperm donors rarely see it that way. Many struggle with longing for branches of the family tree they may never meet

Alison Motluk
The Globe & Mail
Sunday, Sep. 13, 2009 07:53PM EDT

When Kathie Harris spotted a newspaper ad a few years back recruiting egg donors, she passed it on to her daughter. “I was kind of joking,” she says.

But her daughter, Melissa Braden, ended up donating six times. Now Ms. Harris, 53, has mixed feelings about it all.

“It's kind of hard,” she says. There are grandchildren out there that the family will never meet, she says. “They're a part of you. Because they're Melissa's eggs, they're a part of everybody in Melissa's family.”

It's estimated that about one million donor offspring worldwide have been born, most of them through anonymous donations. But when people choose to donate their sperm or eggs, they think of it as a purely personal decision. They forget that their DNA is a family asset, not a private one, experts say.

“The practice has grown up in a consumer context,” says Juliet Guichon, a bioethicist at the University of Calgary. “You think you're purchasing a factor of reproduction, but you're not – you're receiving the genetic heritage of a family.”

And grandparents, often the oldest surviving progenitors, can feel quite differently about trading away the family code.

This feeling recently intensified for Ms. Harris when one of Ms. Braden's recipient couples sent her daughter a photo of the new baby. At first, Ms. Harris didn't want to see it. Her daughter has two boys of her own, but this couple had had a girl. When Ms. Harris did finally look, she was overwhelmed. “That little girl looks exactly – I mean exactly – like Melissa,” she says.

Ms. Braden, 30, insists that she has no maternal feelings for the little girl and that the recipient mom is the only mom. But her own mother feels differently. “In my heart,
I think of her as my granddaughter,” Ms. Harris says. “I carry her picture in my purse.”

Shana Harter, 31, had a similar difference of opinion with her mother. She donated eggs twice when she was in her early 20s. But her mother was not happy with the choice. “I caught a lot of flack,” the Atlanta resident says.

Almost a decade later, her mother still thinks about them. “I wonder all the time what they look like, if they look like her, what they're doing, where they live,” says her mother, Lynn Corcoran, 52. “It's just that feeling of knowing that I have other grandchildren out there. I'll never see them. I'll never know them. I hope they went to good homes.”

For a long time the two women stopped talking about it altogether. But when Ms. Harter got married and had trouble conceiving herself, it was the elephant in the room. What if the only genetically related children she ever produced were born to other people?

In the end, after IVF, Ms. Harter gave birth to a little boy in January. Her own struggle with infertility made her even more understanding of couples who long to have children. “I have a new appreciation myself,” she says. “I'm very happy to know I helped make that happen for one or two other couples out there.” Ms. Corcoran admits it gave her some insight into the plight of childless couples too.

Kirk Maxey, 53, who donated sperm for almost 10 years, says he now sees that grandparents are an overlooked piece of the donor puzzle. “There's a set of fully legitimate grandparents out there, who've missed seeing grandchildren, usually all the way through teenage years,” he says.

His own parents were delighted when two teenage donor daughters surfaced a few years ago. “It impacts grandparents in ways that people didn't really imagine it would,” he says.

For some, the relationships are surprisingly warm. Florida resident Christine Striegl has discovered that she's closer to her donor granddaughter than to any of the grandkids born through her son's marriage. She met her son's teenage donor daughter, Virginia, about 18 months ago and they immediately hit it off. “She calls me her grandmother,” Ms. Striegl says.

For others, it stirs feelings of regret. Diane Wilkins, 53, of Ottawa, will probably never have the chance to meet any children born through her daughter's egg donation, though she'd love to.

“Even if I just got to see them, just to see what they look like,” she says. But shortly after the donation, the relationship with the recipient couple soured.

(Since 2004, it has been illegal to pay donors for eggs or sperm in Canada, and though women can still import commercial U.S. sperm, that's not true for eggs, so many women leave the country for such procedures.)

“Grandparents are vulnerable, on the sidelines, waiting to be invited in,” Dr. Guichon says. But she also turns the issue around: A recipient couple, she believes, has a moral obligation to consider whether a child would benefit from knowing their grandparents. It could be important to their identity, she says.

Perhaps no one feels the bond more intensely than grandparents whose own children have died unexpectedly.

Marjorie Smith's daughter died before she'd had kids of her own – but she had donated eggs three times, and Ms. Smith (not her real name) knew children had been born. She was ecstatic when a recipient family got in touch. “When I heard from that family, it was like a gift from heaven,” she says.

They are hoping to meet soon. “These kids are part of my daughter. They look like my daughter. I hope to become a real grandma to them.”

NYT Well: "Does cancer make you strong?"

The New York Times's Well blog had a great piece a few days ago about a new book called “Everything Changes: An Insider’s Guide to Cancer in Your 20s and 30s” by Kairol Rosenthal.

The blog entry focused on a particular aspect of the cancer experience explored in the book (and in a recent post on Rosenthal's own blog): what to say to someone who has cancer, & (especially) what not to say. In particular, the article focused on the tendency for well-meaning family & friends to tell the cancer patient about how "strong" & "brave" they are. Writes Rosenthal:

"I think it is great to honor cancer patients and recognize the challenges we face. But don’t call me strong when I have no other choice. It discounts the many nights that I sobbed alone into my pillow and felt cowardice in every inch of my body."

I don't want to discount the very real & awful & unique challenges faced by cancer patients. But I honestly think you could go through the article & substitute "infertility" or "pregnancy loss" for "cancer," and the words would be just as true -- so much of what I read sounded soooooo familiar...!!

I know that personally, whenever anyone told me how "strong" I was, I would find myself muttering, "I don't FEEL very strong." Or when people would say, "I just can't imagine..." I would think, "You don't WANT to imagine." I realize people mean well, but, uttering such trite cliches tends to discount & gloss over the way that those of us facing difficult situations REALLY feel.

Read the piece here -- and read the comments, too! -- and tell me what you think! (The first comment is a tad snarky, but the vast majority that I read agree with the author.)

Patrick Swayze

Patrick Swayze died yesterday at the far too young age of 57. :( Aside from being a charismatic onscreen presence & a wonderful dancer, I think what I admired most about Swayze was that he was very happily married -- for something like 34 years! -- to the same woman, Lisa Niemi, whom he met at his mother's dance studio when he was 18 & she was just 14.

They had no children, and not entirely by choice: Lisa had two miscarriages, including one on Valentine's Day, 1990.

"We just missed our window; we got so focused on our world and our careers that we missed the boat," he told People magazine in 2007.

My heart goes out to her. : (

Show & Tell: Back to school time

When you are childless-not-by-choice, there are certain times of the year that can be more painful than others. Holidays, certainly. Christmas. Easter. Halloween.

Labour Day is not a holiday that, at first glance, you'd associate with children. Until you remember that, in Ontario, at least, Labour Day marks the end of summer and the last day before the kids head back to school.

Since 2002, for us, Labour Day weekend has meant dh's cousins' annual barbecue. When dh was a kid, all his aunts, uncles & cousins lived within a quick walk or bike ride of each other, and we saw them often when we were first married & living in the city. Over the past 20+ years, of course, almost everyone has gotten married, bought houses, spread out across the metropolitan area, & gotten busy with their kids.

To ensure we all get to see each other at least once a year for a good visit, aside from the occasional wedding, funeral or first birthday party, the annual cousins' barbecue was instituted. Everyone takes turns hosting. This year, we all chipped in & had the food catered; in previous years, everyone was assigned to bring something (which usually wound up being way too much food, no matter how much we tried to pare the food list down) & the hosts provided the setup & drinks.

In general, it's a good time. Some years have been better or worse than others, depending on what's going on with me and with others (how many new babies make an appearance, etc.). Almost every year, we gather together the kids -- the next generation -- for a group photo. And of course, every year, as I look through my camera lens, I think about the little girl who's missing -- right between one cousin who is exactly six months older than she would have been, and another who is exactly six months younger. (Fortunately for me, both are boys.)

And of course, every year, "back to school" is a major subject of conversation. Not just because everyone's kids are going back to school, either: two of dh's cousins are teachers, one works at a school for the school board, and one works part-time at her daughters' old grade school. As I have joked in the past to my childless friends, not only do I get to hear about their kids, I get to hear about everyone else's too.

I had a hard time the year I realized Katie would have been starting junior kindergarten (they call it "nursery school" where I come from). Somehow, though, the hardest year was September 2004, when she would have been starting Grade 1. I was having a tough time facing all the back-to-school shopping flyers and signs at the mall. Six Months Older was also starting Grade 1, & at the family BBQ that year, everyone was fussing over him, asking him whether he was excited & saying what a big boy he was now, etc. (while I stared at my plate & wished for a hole to open up & drop me through). That was pretty brutal.

One day on my lunch hour, I was at a card shop at the Eaton Centre. I was looking at the Boyds Bears display, as I collect Boyds Bears figurines -- not obsessively, but dh & I have given figurines to each other as presents over the years on special occasions. He gave me a Boyds Bears statue of a pregnant Mama Bear for the Mother's Day when I was pregnant, which I used to illustrate a blog post about Mother's Day.

And there in the display case was the perfect way for me to mark this milestone occasion: "Bailey: Off to School." Fighting back tears, I hailed a sales clerk & asked her to unlock the case & box it up for me.

It now sits on top of my armoire in the bedroom, along with two Classic Pooh music boxes (one of which I posted about before), a framed photo of me, dh & my mother with Katie, and a couple of other Katie-related mementos.

Katie would be going into Grade 6 this year. Grade 6!!! She'd be 11 years old in November. She'd be starting junior high next year, for crying out loud. How could that be possible??

To see what others are showing & telling this week, visit the master list at Stirrup Queens.

Cousin Florence

Tash had a recent post in which she talked about her grandmother's funeral and her fascination with cemeteries, particularly, these days, the graves of children.

Which reminded me of a story.

When dh & I were first married, we lived in a lowrise, NYC-style brownstone apartment building in midtown Toronto that backed onto Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Mount Pleasant is one of the oldest, largest and most famous cemeteries in Toronto, if not all of Canada. It is huge, spanning both sides of a major thoroughfare (Mount Pleasant Road), full of big old trees, ornate monuments, and mausoleums for some of the city's most famous familes (the Masseys, the Eatons) that are as big as houses.

We lived very close to the monument to the Empress of Ireland, a ship which sank in the St. Lawrence River on May 29, 1914, two years after the Titanic sank off the coast of Newfoundland. 1,012 lives were lost, including 167 Canadian members of the Salvation Army who were travelling to London, England for a conference. A monument was erected in their memory, and every year on or around May 29, the Salvation Army holds a memorial service at the monument, which is not too far from the main gates on Yonge Street. We could hear the band playing "Abide With Me" through our open windows.

It is the perfect place to go for a long walk or bike ride, especially in the fall , when the leaves are turning colour, and dh & I loved to go walking there.

As an avid genealogist, I'm always keeping my eyes open for family names, and just off the side of the road one day, I spotted a tall white monument, inscribed with a name that's on my family tree -- the name of my great-grandmother's family, as well as the name of two men who married her husband's sisters (my grandfather's aunts). The story goes that the three were cousins, although we have yet to determine exactly how they're related. We do know that Hugh, the husband of my great-grandfather's oldest sister Elizabeth, was born & raised in Toronto, & from references in family letters we had copies of, we know that he had returned there to visit at least once if not more often.

There were about a dozen names inscribed on the monument -- including this one. The dates weren't very clear, but it seemed to be for a child:

FLORENCE MAUD (LASTNAME)
Daughter of
Hugh and Elizabeth
(LASTNAME)
Born Jan. (dates illegible)

Died Jan. (dates illegible)

(4 lines of poetry)

I pulled pen & paper out of my purse & copied down the inscriptions on the monument, thinking, "Well, you never know..."

Fast-forward to about two years ago when, thanks to the power of the Internet, I connected with a distant cousin, who is the great-granddaughter of my great-grandfather's sister Elizabeth & her husband Hugh (i.e., we share the same great-great grandparents). She had all kinds of information & photos we did not, including the first photos I had ever seen of my great-great grandparents. In fact, she had been in Toronto a few years earlier, researching Hugh's family. She told me that most of the members of his family were buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery --plot with a big tall white marker.

Yep -- the marker I had noticed & copied the information from, "just in case," turned out to be the family of my great-grandfather's sister's husband (my grandfather's uncle by marriage).

AND, she told me -- Hugh & Elizabeth's daughter, Florence, was buried there, too. She died when she was a toddler, during a family visit to Toronto. When I met my cousin last summer in Minnesota, she showed me a funeral photo of little Florence, laid out on a couch in a white dress. She looked as if she were sleeping.

I had never heard of a daughter named Florence. My grandfather (bless him) had started off my family tree research by giving me the names of all his aunts, uncles & cousins (including where they had lived as adults, who they had married & what they did for a living -- and just about everything he told me has turned out to be accurate) -- but he had never mentioned a Florence who had died. Perhaps he did not know -- she died at the turn of the last century, 10 years before he was born in 1912.

I couldn't believe it. Here I had been living for the first five years of my marriage only a few hundred yards from the resting place of my grandfather's first cousin. I wished he were still alive so that I could tell him that. He would have been tickled.

I need to go back there someday & take some photos.

(Mount Pleasant is also the site of our support group's annual Walk to Remember every October -- albeit in the section on the other side of Mount Pleasant Road from Florence's grave. I took the photo above of the historical plaque outside the administration building just prior to last year's walk. I remembered blogging about the walk & went to look for the post. I found it here and realized I wrote about this same story then too. Oh well... if you missed it the first time around, here it is again!)

News article: Placenta size linked to stillbirth

(This is post #100 so far this year! -- not bad...!)

A slightly belated news item that I wanted to share:

*** *** ***

Placenta size linked to stillbirth

Dave McGinn
From Thursday's Globe and Mail

Last updated on Friday, Aug. 28, 2009 03:39AM EDT

The size of a pregnant woman's placenta can determine whether a fetus is at a high risk of stillbirth, according to a new study conducted by a clinician-researcher at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

"A lot of problems are being solved in pregnancy relating to healthy babies, but the huge area that's unsolved and getting worse is placental problems," says John Kingdom, principal researcher of the study, published yesterday online in the journal Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology.

This research is "a big piece of the puzzle in the right direction," he adds.

The study looked at 90 women with both low levels of pregnancy-associated plasma protein-A, or PAPP-A (which is routinely tested to screen for Down syndrome) and elevated levels of alpha-fetoprotein, or AFP (which is tested to screen for Down Syndrome and spina bifida).

Researchers found that those with both conditions as well as a small placenta were at an increased risk of stillbirth and extreme pre-term delivery.

The results suggest that placenta screening, which determines size and shape through an ultrasound, should be done alongside tests for Down syndrome and spina bifida to guard against the possibility of stillbirth."Any one single test alone doesn't have enough positive predictive value," says Dr. Kingdom, a maternal fetal-medicine specialist.

Placenta screening is not as prominent as other prenatal tests despite the important role played by the placenta during pregnancy.

"Up until now, we've diagnosed placental insufficiency after the baby is born," Dr. Kingdom says. "We can diagnose placental insufficiency at week 18 to 20 when the baby is still healthy, then we can test interventions to keep the baby healthy."

Stillbirths are on the rise in Canada. In 2005, the number of stillbirths reached 2,209, an increase of 6.9 per cent from 2004, according to Statistics Canada. Such numbers show the importance of placenta screening, Dr. Kingdom says.

"The baby's growth and well-being are entirely dependant upon the placenta working normally," Dr. Kingdom says. "It's the placenta that actually transfer the nutrients and oxygen to the baby."

The study found that among women with low PAPP-A, elevated AFP and a small placenta, at least 25 per cent can expect to see their pregnancy end in stillbirth.

In greatest danger are women with additional risk factors, including those with a previous history of stillbirth, those more than 40 years of age, or those with chronic hypertension or Type 1 diabetes. Their pregnancies are practically guaranteed to end in stillbirth.

There are options available for pregnant women with small placentas, however, from dietary measures to ultrasound monitoring.

"There's a broad range of ways to help people," Dr. Kingdom says. "For example, a program of careful ultrasound surveillance will save the lives of babies that would otherwise die unnecessarily." Performing emergency cesarean sections in cases where fetuses have not reached full term, however, is an extreme treatment option, he adds.The Placenta Clinic at Mount Sinai now routinely screens all pregnant women with a low PAPP-A level and a high AFP level using a placental ultrasound as a result of Dr. Kingdom's research.

More hospitals need to follow suit, he says, but encouraging pregnant women to undergo placenta screening may require a change in the way prenatal test options are offered.

Women often decline to undergo tests for Down syndrome and spina bifida for fear of receiving false-positive results, he explains. "In Ontario, four women out of 10 decline these tests. My guess is, if you asked those four women, 'However, would you like to have the test done for a good reason, like to promote better placental health?' I bet you three out of four would say yes."

*** *** ***

Dr. K. was the doctor on call that my dh spoke with when I had a horrific migraine on our 13th (!) wedding anniversary during my pregnancy, and also the doctor who came by my hospital room the morning after I delivered Katie while making his rounds as the dr on call. He seemed very interested when I mentioned Katie's IUGR & my placenta, and said he'd like to examine it. Not sure whether he ever did, or what he could have done for me 11 years ago. I always intended to ask for a consultation with him during my next pregnancy (which, of course, never happened).

It's too late for me now -- but I'm so glad that progress is being made that may help other women & save them from the heartbreak that we & so many other families have been through.