How You Do It? I’ll Never Know… But You Must Be Awesome
January 27, 2009
I spent today at home with my darling daughter – just us girls.
GeekDaddy left sometime around 0-dark-thirty for a business trip to Philadelphia, so today was just me, Buttercup, and the cat & dog. Plus freezing temperatures and horridly grey weather colored with a bit of snow for variety.
Tonight found me trying to put her to bed alone and now that she’s 6, realizing that it’s actually much harder than it was when she was younger. When it was just us and she was younger, bedtime w/o Daddy just meant the same usual struggle as every night. Now she’s more aware of it when one of us is out of town. Makes for several more ‘I couldn’t sleep because…’ trips.
I have to say that while I love my daughter with every ounce of my being, it’s weeks like this that I wonder how single parents make it without totally losing their sanity. Especially those that work and are pretty much without any nearby family to support them. I think they are made of sterner – or perhaps less selfish – stuff than I.
I do suspect that far too many of them sacrifice sleep in favor of “just a little me time” at night after the child(ren) are asleep. It would certainly explain that glazed look so many single-parent friends of mine seem to have even after their past the early years of infant-originated sleep deprivation.
I just thought I’d take a second to recognize how amazing you single-parents are… because it’s nights like this one that make me think how awesome anyone is that can do this as such and somehow manage to raise happy, healthy children.
Meanwhile, I’m going to bed – I somehow have to be up at 5:30a tomorrow to get my daughter to school on time. It’s a good thing GeekDaddy comes home in a couple of days or I’d so be considering home schooling just so I wouldn’t have to drive before 9 a.m. on a regular basis!
Why don’t they have night school for kindergartners?
How I Learned to Stand Up for Myself and to Say No, Too.
January 23, 2009
The following post contains some details that may disturb some readers. Death, trauma, and pregnancy complications are discussed in some detail. If you are pregnant – stop reading this. Now. You can always read it later – but you don’t need this in your mind right now. Trust me. If you are sensitive to situations that involve medical complications or blood – stop reading this. Just figure that whatever happened from here? It taught me to stand up for myself.
Six years ago today, I was waiting around to check into Rose Medical Center in Denver for my inducement to have my baby girl. GeekDaddy and I kept calling the hospital to find out when I could come in, because seriously – 1/23… what a cool date for a birthday!
But apparently, there was some sort of “post-9-eleven” baby boom going on, so the Labor & Delivery floors of pretty much every hospital in town were overly full and there were women laboring in gurneys lining the hallway at the time. Something that just makes the whole experience joyous, I’m sure.
I was happy I had an induction scheduled, because otherwise they would’ve sent me home to “wait it out” despite the fact that I had been in non-productive labor for 72+ hours by the point I actually got checked into the hospital.
What’s “non-productive labor”? Oh, it means I was in full-on contraction mode… but my timing betweeen contractions was erratic. They tell you “come in when your contractions are 5 minutes apart.” Mine were along the mode of “5 mins, 5 mins, 20 mins, 5 mins, 5 mins, 16 mins, 5 mins, 4 mins, 18 mins…” For nearly 3 days.
This wasn’t exactly unexpected by me. My mother never went into labor “naturally” with either my brother or I either. I had told my OBs this and been reassured that they would “deal with that if it came to it.”
Their lax attitude should’ve been a huge red flag to me, but for some reason, wasn’t. I blame it on pregnancy hormones and an aversion to actual confrontation. You see, I should’ve been scheduled for a c-section, not an inducement. My due date had been pushed back from 1/6 to 1/11 and finally to 1/14. They finally scheduled me for the 23rd to be induced strictly because I had gotten so whiny. You know, given that I had such severe Hyperemesis Gravidarum that I had been on two different anti-emetics the whole way through my pregnancy and had been so sick for months that my students thought I must have cancer and be going through chemo… until I started showing.
Here’s the thing… my OB practice, which consisted of 5 doctors at the time, dropped the ball bigtime. Over the course of 8 months, I cycled through all 5 doctors – so I got to see everyone at least once. Since they rotated their on-call so they wanted to make sure you’d seen the person doing your delivery at least once. Every single one of them I went over my “history” with. I’m not going to burden you with details – let’s just suffice to say that at 36/37 I was extremely high risk for the complication that happened. I retold my concerns to every single one of those doctors and wasn’t listened to. I know, because they wrote it down several times in my chart – and it would’ve been a devestating blow if I had filed a malpractice suit.* (Reasons I didn’t are below.)
What complication? A condition called placenta accreta – which is the medical term for saying that the placenta attaches ‘abnormally’ or too firmly to the uterine wall. In my case, I had the rarest form of it, placenta percreta. Which means that my daughter’s placenta had actually grown through the uterine wall.
When I checked into the Emergency Room at 2 a.m. on the 24th (when they finally called us to come in) the guy doing the check in watched as I was rocked by a strong contraction more than once and said “I don’t understand, you are checking in for an induction, but you look like you’re already in labor…” Breathing shallowly, I said “I am.”
“Then why are you checking in for an induction?” he asked. “Because my contractions are not consistent and haven’t been for 3 days and you’d just send me home otherwise.” I replied trying not to bite my lip until it bled. “Oh… well, that makes sense – let’s get you up there then, how about we get you a wheelchair?” Fabulous!
I had to retell my story to the L&D folks upstairs, who gave me a room (with a pullout sofa for my husband) and said “well, your induction won’t start until the morning… your doctor should see you in about 5 hours… but you look like you’re in pain. When was the last time you slept? Would you like us to give you some Morphine so you can sleep for a bit?”
“Yes, please?” I said and then threw up on the floor… an action that I repeated but with “liter jars” repeatedly for the next 17 hours. Of course, past a certain point, they wouldn’t let me have water, so I just repeatedly vomited stomach acid. Because there’s some bizarre logic that says it’s better not to aspirate water into a breathing tube if you need surgery than it is stomach acid. Personally, I found the diluted stomach acid less painful.
So I slept for 5 hours and my poor husband didn’t – because some woman down the hall sounded as if they were torturing her repeatedly. In my morphine sleep, I kept thinking they should put that woman out of her misery and “put her down” gently. I guess I thought she was a wounded animal?
At 7:30 a.m. we wanted to know where the doc was. The nurse said she was just down the hall finishing another delivery, she’d go get her for us. The doctor who came in – whose name I will not reveal – had seen me only 1 time. Her first question was “who scheduled you for an induction?!” Um, the office?
It seems no one had told her. So instead of prepping by reading my file the night before, she just had to wing it. She wasn’t pleased. She had them ’start’ the induction with promises to be back “later that afternoon” after sleeping a bit. If you don’t know what an induction entails, you can Google it. I’ll spare you the details and the controversy. In fact, I’ll spare you most of the details until after the birth of my beautiful daughter at 6:50pm on January 24th… Six years ago tomorrow! The only thing I’ll say is “remember the liter jars I was using for the repetitive stomach acid upheavals – they will come in to play again.”
GeekDaddy accompanied Buttercup down to the nursery for the usual procedures while I stayed in the room with my epidural and my semi-delirium and my doula and the OB who had just delivered my daughter. We were chatting and I kept thinking “when will they bring the baby back? Why are these women looking so serious?“ What I didn’t know was that it had been 20 minutes and no placenta. I didn’t even know enough to know what they were waiting for. Finally, the doc said “I’m just going to reach in and get that placenta out manually…” and then all Hell broke loose.
Somewhere in the midst of the realization that the placenta was coming out in pieces and that I was now bleeding uncontrollably, the doc managed to get me to blurt out a simplified version of my medical history. She was rapidly being covered in blood and right after telling my doula to ‘push the button, scream if you have to, we need help!’ she started swearing. I can look up in my head right now and remember her saying “F**k! Why weren’t you scheduled for a c-section!?!” and then going on to describe in graphic terms the conditions of the placenta, my uterus, and the now gaping hole that was in the side of it. Trust me when I say you never want to hear an OB tell you that your uterine wall is “all ratty in there!” – but there’s some humor to it this many years later. I wonder if there’s a technical medical term for a ‘ratty uterine wall’?
Anyhow, I think I’ll kind of slide over the next bit. Because it’s getting more detailed than I usually feel comfortable with when I recount it to folks. Over the next several hours, I received super-human efforts and amazing care in the effort to save my life. 9 pints of blood transfusions – they based the amount needed by the volume of blood that nurses had “sponged and scooped up off of the floor” into the 2 different liter jars that I previously mentioned. They came to the conclusion that I was going to die without surgery.
My husband briefly held up my daughter once, so I could see her, just in case it was the only time I did. 16 nurses, doctors, and other hospital personnel were with me at one point… I had 6 IVs in, 3 in each arm. Then the OB, whom I blame for none of this, did something astounding for a doctor in my experience. She asked if “anyone in the room” had any ideas on how to save me other than getting me into an OR for an emergency 
hysterectomy? The Deck Doc (a young woman going through her OB rotation) piped up that she had seen a (then) experimental surgery a couple of weeks before that was a radiological procedure called Uterine Artery Embolization – usually used for Fibroid treatment, it entails threading a tube up the femoral artery and injecting polyvinyl microbeads into the artery that supplies the blood to the uterus, blocking off the blood flow. In this case, I was the 5th person ever at Rose to undergo the surgery rather than emergency hysterectomy. I know because I was awake throughout the procedure… and half of the hospital apparently came in & out of the observation room to see. There were so many who wanted to, they took turns. I was really well known for the next 5 days that I was there.
I keep vacillating on sharing more details here. This is already long enough to be a short-story and yet too short to even begin to encompass what I and my family went through over the course of my time in that hospital following my daughter’s birth… But there’s a title above that says “how I learned to stand up for myself and to say no, too” and so far, all you’ve heard are horrific details about my daughter’s birth and my near-death.
So let me skip the minute gory details and get to the end of the story.
Those doctors and physicians assistants and personnel at my OB’s office? They didn’t listen to me. As a result, I almost died and I suffered irreparable damage to my reproductive system that required a tubal ligation. Since getting pregnant again would be a death sentence for both me and the baby.
Death is always a risk in childbirth – even in 1st world countries. But if even ONE person at my OB’s office had listened to my concerns? I would’ve been scheduled for a c-section, given late-term ultrasounds to see if the placenta was an issue, and treated as the high-risk patient I was.
Why didn’t they listen?
Because I didn’t demand it. I should’ve walked out of that practice the first time someone dismissed my concerns and found doctors who would listen. I should’ve stood up for myself repeatedly and didn’t. I should’ve been my own best advocate and if not listened to refused to put up with it until heard. Instead, I nearly lost my life because I entrusted it to people who weren’t paying attention.
I didn’t file a malpractice suit because I talked to the top malpractice attorney in the state and he said “Look, let’s be frank here… you could file a suit. There were so many instances of malpractice here that it’s amazing. Clear cut. Undeniable. Even in writing. But… you’ll waste your time and you’ll lose. Because you are alive, you have a beautiful, healthy baby girl, and you are 37 years old. I’m not going to smoke-screen you… no jury will award you damages because the defensive attorneys will argue that they saved your life, you have a child already, and your eggs are old.”
It was an awful thing to hear. Your eggs are old. Your uterine lining is ratty. They messed up, nearly killed you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
But it was the truth and I knew it when I heard it. He could’ve filed a suit, charged me tons of money, and had the same result – but he was far more helpful… he was truthful.
So here’s another truth: that OB did save my life. I’m here. Every day I get to spend with my daughter is a blessing. A gift that I almost didn’t get. Six years tomorrow of days I almost didn’t have with her or my husband.
And the hardest truth? If I had believed in myself enough, had believed in my right to say “No, stop. Now listen… I have valid concerns and you are dismissing them without even thinking about it. Stop and listen or I’ll go find someone who will” she wouldn’t have had to save my life. I wouldn’t have had to see her covered from the neck down in my own blood. I wouldn’t have had to see my husband holding up my daughter ‘just in case it was the only time I ever saw her.’
Because as much as those doctors failed me – I failed me.
So for 6 years now, I’ve said what I need to say, done what I need to do, and had absolutely no fear of saying “no” because I never want to go through anything like that again.
Sometimes, I have to remind myself. Because old habits die hard. But that’s why I wrote this post. Because maybe it will help me remember. And maybe it will help you too.
Tomorrow I’m celebrating my daughter’s sixth birthday… But I’m also celebrating the beginning of the point where I became the best advocate for me that I can be. How about you? What’s it going to take for you? I hope it’s not as extreme as what it took for me.
History is Always Happening Around Us
January 19, 2009
Today is officially Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the United States.
When I was a kid my daughter’s age, it wasn’t a holiday. We had President’s Day - always the 3rd Monday in February, it took the place of the former federal holiday of George Washington’s birthday (February 22nd) and while there were attempts to get it to also celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday (February 12th) the federal holiday apparently still just commemorates Washington. Different states “do” it differently – but that’s kind of how states are.
Whatever the case, since it’s a Federal holiday, it meant that the post office didn’t deliver mail, the banks were all closed, the stores all ran sales, and school kids got an extra day off in the middle of the year.
Somewhere in the middle of the Reagan years (1983) the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day bill got signed into law by the president – setting aside the 3rd Monday in January as a Federal holiday (Dr. King’s actual birthday was January 15th.) First celebrated officially in 1986, I was long out of public school and when it became a reality, all I was thinking about was that “there was no way that businesses, schools, and other organizations were going to go for one 3 day weekend in January and another one a month later in February after they’d already lost January 1st to the post-Amateur-Night-Out hangover holiday.”
I was right and here we are 23 years later with no consistent practice. Some places give their employees MLK day off. Some give them Presidents Day. Some give them neither. A small percentage give them both, but mostly only banks and private schools. There is still no mail delivery – unless you count Fed-Ex and UPS.
The thing is, I was so clueless back then. This holiday? It’s more than a 3-day weekend-no-work-or-school-opportunity. Not unlike every other Federal holiday that has been turned into an excuse to skip Monday at work, it was enacted for a reason. The point is to take a day to think about why we honor the day… whether it’s because of our Presidents, or our War dead (Memorial Day) or any other reason – we’re supposed to think about it.
That MLK Day occurs the day before Inauguration Day this year (January 20th since 1933 and the passing of the XXth Amendment) seems a fortuitous happenstance. Tomorrow, we in the U.S. are witnessing the swearing in of the first non-Caucasian President of the United States of America. I’d like to think Dr. King would be smiling if he knew that.
I know. You noticed that I used the phrase “non-Caucasian” above… Not because I’m trying to downplay the fact that he’s our ‘First African-American President’ but because our soon-to-be President Obama represents more than just the African-American citizens – he represents our European-American citizens (his mother was a Caucasian woman of Irish & English descent) – he represents ALL of our minorities, and our young, our old, our rich, our poor, our educated and our disadvantaged. Even those who can’t stand the fact that he’s becoming our President? He represents you too. Because he’s becoming the President of the United States of America.
I know that most of the world will spend the next 4 to 8 years and beyond calling him “our first black President” – but I also hope that someday, that adjective becomes less impressive than his other achievements. I hope that he just becomes “one of our best Presidents ever” instead of people focusing so much on the color of his skin or his gender or something else that he never had any control over.
As Dr. King said so very many years ago “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” I think he would’ve been impressed by the content Obama’s character – I hope I’m right.
Tomorrow, you can find me hanging out at TotallyHer.com – where I’ll be participating in a Community Service Project to in honor of President Obama’s inauguration. I’ll be spending my time learning from these amazing women:
Liz Strauss, Anita Campbell, Kelly Phillips Erb, Jessica Smith, Kelby Carr, Susan Payton, Miranda Marquit, Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, Kelly McCausey, Char Polanosky, Barbara Jones & Wendy Piersall at:
That is when I’m not trying to help out a bit myself (3:30pm EST / 12:30pm PST) or watching the Inauguration ceremonies with my daughter (12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST).
Because I may not have grown up with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – but she will… and she’ll have grown up never knowing what it was like wondering when and if we would reach a day where Dr. King’s dream looked like it might come true.
See you tomorrow. When we watch history being written once again… and if you happen to join me here too.
Hangin’ With the Cool Chicks
January 13, 2009
This past weekend, I was fortunate enough to participate in Chicks Who Click – a Social Media conference focusing on women – up in Boulder, Colorado.
Barbara Jones, Zena Weist, Kit Seeborg
Thanks to the amazing Denise Smith [@deetells] and Gwen Bell [@gwenbell] and the folks at Metzger Associates, I was allowed not only to speak on a panel with some incredible Social Media folks (@tarable & @waynesutton as well as Gwen) but to spend the day hanging out with, collaborating with, and learning from some other amazing women.
I could start listing them all, but then we’d be here all day! Seriously it was this incredible experience. If I start naming any more names – I pretty much have to list them all, because every person who attended (there were 5 guys in that room of nearly 50 women!) added to the experience. The only other name I will call out is Barbara Jones [@BarbaraJones] because she wins my award for “awesomest take-home schwag from any conference ever” for the medals and trophies. I mean seriously – even though I only qualified for a medal as a judge – I totally love it!
As usual, the folks in Boulder who made it out to hang out at the pre-party and post-party were phenomenal and did Colorado proud in showing what an awesome place it is to be in Tech &/or Social Media – even if we had lost more than one important & familiar face to Las Vegas (yeah, so CES, WordCamp LV, and AS West were all kind of overlapping date-wise) we still had a fabulous contingent of the local community come out and hang with us!
What I learned was something I have been hearing for awhile from my friend Liz Strauss [@lizstrauss]- a small conference of really amazing people can do incredible work together and bond really well. It’s made me even more determined to get to SOBCon 2009 this year. Because I really loved that feeling of working in small groups with smart people to make our community a better place.
I hope to see you there – or next year at Chicks Who Click 2010 – or someplace down the road. Because while blogging and twittering and hanging with all of you online is good? Hanging out with you all in person would be even more fun!
I know – because I just spent my whole weekend with some really awesome folks – just go check the Flickr photos if you don’t believe me. (But don’t be surprised if I often look like I’m spitting out marbles – I’m not terribly photogenic – really, just ask anyone who tried to take my picture this weekend!)
Go Big or Get Bigger…
January 7, 2009
Yesterday I mentioned on Twitter that I hadn’t had coffee, soda or red meat since 2008… yeah, it’s a little more impressive to use the year than to say “in 7 days” but I was feeling all impressed with myself. A little sass never hurt anyone.
But that brought up a lot of questions like “is that a New Year’s Resolution?” and “why those things?” and “how can you live without coffee??” (and bacon.)
It was part of my New Year’s Resolutions in a tangential sort of way. It’s that number 2 one: “Lose weight, get healthy, get fit.” A key element of all 3 of those is diet. What goes in your mouth is crucial to all of them. I didn’t set out thinking “no coffee, no soda, no red meat” – I set out thinking “okay, now how the heck do I get my pH balance back in control?”
I know, I know – ‘huh? Your pH balance GeekMommy? What the heck are you talking about??’
I don’t bring it up a lot but I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia in November of 2007. That was official confirmation of something that had been getting progressively worse for me over the course of about 12 years. At that time, the pain was so bad, I’d lie in bed trying to sleep cataloging the parts of me that didn’t hurt, because there were fewer of them most days. So my doctor started putting me on things to treat the Fibro and I’ve been mostly pain-free for about 4 months – since she added Lyrica to everything else.
Here’s the catch though – one of the side-effects for the drugs I’m on? Insomnia. As if I didn’t already have enough problems with that. One of the worst things for Fibro? Lack of sleep. See where the cycle starts getting vicious pretty quickly? So I start having to take Ambien just to sleep. Now we’ve added in yet another pill. Another side effect of sleep issues and the drugs? Weight gain. Seriously now… I’m trying to lose weight not add more. Did I mention that weight-gain is bad for my back, my arthritis, and you guessed it, my Fibro?
Okay, to top it all off – I start having serious problems with finding words. Not difficult words – every day normal words. Like ‘honey can you hand me that… um, round thingy with the drink in it, you know…’ I’d say ‘Coffee cup?’ my poor husband would reply. Short-term memory? I haz none. Alright then… I write it off to “fibro fog” that everyone talks about. Then Lyrica puts an additional 15 lbs on top of my already totally unhappy weight and shows no signs of stopping.
I go to look up the side-effects… I’m about to list the “more common” side-effects here (hold on to your hat)
Accidental injury; bloating or swelling of face, arms, hands, lower legs, or feet; blurry vision; burning, tingling, numbness or pain in the hands, arms, feet, or legs; change in walking and balance; clumsiness; confusion; delusions; dementia; difficulty having a bowel movement (stool); difficulty in speaking; double vision; dry mouth; fever; headache; hoarseness; increased appetite; lack of coordination; loss of memory; lower back or side pain; mood or mental changes; painful or difficult urination; problems with memory; rapid weight gain; seeing double; shakiness and unsteady walk; sensation of pins and needles; sleepiness or unusual drowsiness; stabbing pain; swelling; tingling of hands or feet; trembling, or other problems with muscle control or coordination; trembling or shaking of hands or feet; shakiness in legs, arms, hands, feet; unusual weight gain or loss.
Hold up there… did that just say clumsiness; confusion; delusions; dementia?? You don’t even want to see the list for “less common” – but yeah I have some of those too (okay, if you do want to see it, click here.)
So I started researching. Something I should’ve done before I started putting things in my body, but hey, when you’ve got chronic pain and your doctor says this will fix it and is safe? Sometimes you’re less cautious than you should be.
Well let’s just go with ‘better late than never.’ Sometimes that’s as good as it gets.
I’m not going to drag you through all of my research – it took me a couple of weeks and this is already getting longer than I planned. I’m just going to skip forward to the good part. The part where the people in the tin-foil hats start making sense.
Somewhere in the midst of all of my research the whole idea that I really ought to check my body’s pH-balance comes in to play. It seems that a lot of people with chronic pain ailments are ‘very acidic’ due to the ‘Standart American Diet’ (SAD) and that the body really should be closer to neutral or even slightly alkaline in nature to be healthy. Trust me on this – the science is solid, but it’s hard to find it behind the deluge of people trying to make money with “pH-balancing solutions” – from additives to diets to drops to ‘whole body wellness’ programs that you can access via eBook for just the low, low price of…
So I go to Amazon.com and buy these pH test strips. It’s $10 and what the heck, it reminds me of tests we did back in high school science lab. They’re supposedly good for urine & saliva and they do have the nifty little color-chart right there for you to compare too. Home science fun!!
They show up a couple of days later and I start doing the testing… according to directions and all. Testing for 2 days twice a day to get a ‘range’ so I can see where I really am. The little chart goes between 4.5 and 9.0 by halves and quarters. I learn that the 1.0 is a power of 10 – so while totally “neutral” water is a 7.0, 5.0 is not 10 times more acidic than 6.0, but rather 100! Scary.
Except for the part where the strips must be bogus. I mean, I’ve tested for 2 days in a row… and I’m down at 5.0 which is about the color it looks like the little test pads would turn if they were nothing except damp. Oh yay. So I drag out GeekDaddy as my control subject. We test at the same time. I mean, we have the same diet mostly, we live the same lifestyle… in theory, his should turn out the same way mine does, right? Especially if they’re just lame, or stale, or non-functional strips. We both stick the little strips on our tongues… wait 15 seconds – hold them up to the magic chart.
Mine still says 5.0 – or very acidic – his? 7.25 – normal, healthy, right in the zone. Crap. A few days later, my friend is visiting, so I have him do it with me. Mine? 5.0 again. His? 6.5 or right below the ‘optimal’ zone. Then again, he drinks a lot of coffee.
So then. What do you do? You change it. How do you change it? By getting rid of the foods that mess you up. Bye-bye coffee. Bye-bye red meat. Bye-bye Coca-cola my one ‘unbreakable’ habit!
Of course, everyone tells me “GeekMommy, you should make changes a little at a time, that way you will succeed.” Let’s revisit yesterday’s post for a minute, shall we? I don’t function like that. I’m a “do it, do it now, or spend the next several years talking about how you’re going to do it any day.”
Why do I say that? 7 and a half years ago, GeekDaddy and I quit smoking. I smoked for 20 years (from age 15 to age 35) and was at 2 1/2 packs a day when we quit. Cold Turkey. No ‘gradual ease down’ for me. No nicotine gum, patch, pill, treatment plan. I’d tried all those – if you throw in hypnotherapy and aversion therapy, you’ll get a complete view of what didn’t work. What worked? I stopped smoking.
Moreso, I just didn’t start again. Throughout many temptations (and there have been some big ones!) the trick has been just don’t ever do that again. No excuses, no plan for failure, no loopholes. Just. Don’t. Do. It.
Losing weight has been harder for me the past 10 years. Because while I could just never smoke another cigarette, I couldn’t not eat food. It’s kind of the equivalent of telling an alcoholic “you can’t get drunk, but you MUST drink 1 shot of alcohol 3 times a day to survive.” Yeah, that will happen.
But you know what is working so far? I just can’t eat those foods. I can eat – even sensible portions of ’semi-bad’ foods. Fish and chicken and pork are ‘moderately’ acidic in the body – but those red meats? The worst. So I’ve put certain things off limits. I’m living with The Acid-Alkaline Food Guide at my fingertips. Until I’m back “in the pH zone” everything in the far-right column (highly acidic) is right out. Anything on the acidic side at all is best avoided, except the protein thing for me once a day (I like it.)
So far? I’m one week in. I’m 6 lbs down from my weight before I started. (Yes, I know it’s mostly water-weight.) I’m feeling better than I did before. I’m working hard on getting enough sleep a night. I’ll be eliminating the drugs as I go. Did I mention that I just tested my pH balance as I was typing this? Yeah, it’s at a 6.0 today. Just like it was yesterday.
I’m going to get healthy. Losing weight will be a part of that, but not the only part of that. I don’t want to be here any more – the “cure” is just as bad if not worse than the “illness” it’s supposed to fix. And I’m doing it my way – the big way. The all-at-once way. The trick is? I’m not going to let myself off the hook this time. I can’t afford to.
Because that’s how I roll.
SSDD? No, Different Day, Different Stuff.
January 6, 2009
Yesterday I got up and hit the ground running. Today I got up and hit the ground. Face first. Metaphorically, of course. It’s just been one of those days so far, ya know?
I envy consistent people. They move along at a fairly even pace – awakening each day to the same process, facing the morning with some sort of well-practiced routine that gets them up, showered, dressed, and even exercised in some cases, long before they have to engage their brains and settle in for a day’s work.
Even in my days as a corporate denizen I was never any good at that. Some days I’d get up and through the necessary ablutions, have time for breakfast, coffee, and a perusal of the day’s news before heading out the door. Other days I’d be hard pressed to get out of bed without first making best friends with the snooze button too many times and then experiencing a harried flight outward just making it to work on time. Which pretty much describes every day of my education from kindergarten to college as well. Consistency has been a battle for me all of my life.
I’ve pondered at times why some of us are capable of incorporating such routines into our lives and why some of us are not. It’s one of those “2 types of people” dilemmas. I’ve noticed that those capable of doing it are almost always trying to convince those of us who aren’t that we could do it if only we “tried harder” or “got in the habit.” In fact, I think they suspect that we’re just not trying or it would come as easily to us as it does to them.
And yet, still I have no “consistent bedtime” nor “consistent morning routine” nor, for that matter, a consistent anything. We say humans are “creatures of habit” but I begin to wonder if it’s true for all of us. I don’t drive the same way to places I go routinely. I don’t break down my work day into smaller processes like so many ‘getting things done’ books say I should.
Not for lack of trying, mind you. I’m 42 years old… believe me, I’ve tried. It’s just that something in me just refuses to ‘buckle down and fly right.’
This often makes it difficult for me to interact with the “if it’s Tuesday, this must be casserole night” crowd. My lack of consistent routine or ability to implement one comes across to them as flakiness. In fact, I’ve used that term to describe myself many times because it’s just easier than saying “I’m not like you.”
If you label someone as “inconsistent” it’s seldom a compliment. We try hard ourselves to come up with more flattering terms – ecclectic, eccentric, artistic, marching to the beat of a different drummer – but really? We’re just as baffled as to why we can’t do it as those who can are as to why we can’t.
I’ve been battling this for a long time now (based on starting kindergarten at age 5, I’ll go with around 37 years or so) and I think I’ve just had an epiphany of sorts for me. I need to quit trying to fit my little square self into that tempting round hole and try to figure out instead how to thrive as someone who will never have 2 days in a row that are the same (unless, of course, having 2 days in a row that are the same breaks the pattern, then it’s a given, right?)
So how does someone who is ‘consistently inconsistent’ turn that into an asset rather than a handicap? Well, I’m not sure yet. But I’m going to find out sometime this year and I’ll let you know. I’m done being down on myself for not being a ‘creature of habit’ – I’m ready to be a ‘creature of unpredictability’ with fabulous flair. Success doesn’t depend on fitting in, after all – it depends on rising above the crowd.
Please Leave a Message At the Sound of the Tone…
January 5, 2009
“Domo Origato, Mister Roboto…” – Styx
There’s been a bit of hubbub lately about automation on social networks like Twitter. Prominent folks have come out saying how anti-social it is to automate certain functions because it simulates engagement without actually being genuine.
I get dozens of automated Direct Messages (DMs) in my Twitter inbox daily that say something along the lines of “Thanks for following me! yadda-yadda-yadda…” After awhile I was on the band-wagon. “Don’t send me your auto-DMs! I don’t want your free e-book, or a link to your website! Be real!!!”
But I kept seeing these DMs despite the seemingly general sentiment against them. Then I realized something – those calling for the ‘end to the robots’ are also power-users. By power-users, I mean they’re folks who a) are followed by thousands of people and b) follow most of them back.
It’s that following back part that triggers these automated messages. Sent out from a variety of different services, the average user signs in once, sets up a generic “Thanks for following me! yadda-yadda-yadda…” message and doesn’t think twice about it afterwards.
So clearly, there’s a discrepency here: the usage/impression varies depending on how the user interacts on Twitter. If you follow less than one person a day, say maybe 5 a week, and only a couple of them send those messages – the annoyance factor is going to be far less.
That got me started thinking about automation in general. Since I had gotten behind on my own ‘followbacks’ in the month of December (to the tune of about 1500 people!) I turned to a friend of mine who really ‘gets’ thewhole automation thing – Jesse Stay [@jessestay] the creator of SocialToo.com.
The reason I contacted him was that I knew his service offered an option to “automatically follow back” those who followed me. I asked Jesse if that was “from the time I registered” or if there was a way I could retroactively follow all of those people whose notifications were sitting in my inbox, pushing it over 2,000 unread emails.
Jesse told me that he had been working on a premium option (now live) that allowed the user to run a ‘one time’ catch-up script. Was I game? Sure. Because at that kind of number, it would be easier for me to go back through them and unfollow people that I didn’t want to interact with than it would to a) open each email, b) click on the link to their twitter, c) click on the follow button (or not), d) go back to the email, close it and go on to the next. For fifteen-hundred-plus people. So Jesse ran the script for me. About 10 minutes later, what would’ve taken me hours was done.
Do other ‘power-users’ use this automated follow-back? I suspect so. There are some who probably do what I do and try to manually do it every day – but you know what? That’s a lot of time spent just going thru the notifications.
So is some automation good but other automation bad? My analysis? No. It’s how you use it that makes it effective or ineffective. To that end, I wanted to ask Jesse some questions about SocialToo.com and find out a bit more about what he’s done and why.
Here’s that Interview
GeekMommy: Jesse, I hope you don’t mind if I write about the fact that I turned to you for help with the automated following.
Jesse: That’s no problem – I’m probably going to turn that into a one-time payment, or possibly donation tonight or tomorrow as a new feature on the site if others would like that. I’m thinking maybe $15-$20 to turn that on once, but I may just make it a donation. (Note: the service is presently live at a one time fee of $5 on the SocialToo site ~GM)
GM: Your script took literally *days* off of my timeline for that. After the script ran, I went back through my following list and pared it down a bit based on whether or not people were following/engaging with me and also if they were spammy or scary – and I still had to go thru 348 pages of following folks on Twitter for that!
Jesse: I’m glad it could help. That’s why we started this – there were too many time-consuming tasks like that, and as Twitter grows that will only get worse.
GM: I really think that people are mistaking the tools for the issue. Anyone can use automation – but how they use it may or may not ‘work’ for someone else.
Jesse: Exactly. My goal is to try and satisfy those for automation, and those against automation, too. If you don’t like the auto-dms people send you, we’ll provide an option for that as well (I should note that I currently have a beta feature turned on for just my account that disables socialtoo-generated DMs from being sent to me.) Many, if not most people I hear from don’t mind them. Most of those people also aren’t following 4,000 people. We all have different circumstances, and should be able to control the way we use the service, and enhance the relationships we have as we use it.
GM: To me, the real issue with DMs is that they shouldn’t be tied to following. Just because I read your blog doesn’t mean I want to give you my home phone number too…. Likewise, just because I’d like you to have my home phone doesn’t mean I’m interested in reading your blog… The issue lies with Twitter, not with automation.
Jesse: Very true – I’ve got a post I’ve been meaning to write about this as well. Twitter relationships are broken. On Facebook, if I want to be your friend and follow your updates, you have to approve me doing so, and vice-versa. Once you approve me, there is a mutual relationship there, and both can know that they can see and follow each others updates if they choose. It’s built into the system. Then, Facebook has built in Friend lists and privacy filters to control what you want to see amongst those you have agreed to be friends with. Twitter gives no protection to users – relationships can be one-way, which IMO hurts the network. People can follow me but there’s no guarantee I’m listening, or even have the chance of listening down the road.
Then again, some people like that, and that’s how they use the service. There’s no wrong or right way to use the service – this is just my perception.
GM: That said, automation is a good tool used effectively. Ask anyone complaining about it if they have voicemail or not?
Jesse: Twitter itself is an automated tool – I don’t see people criticizing Twitter. These are all tools, and they’re built to give you flexibility to build the strongest relationships you can, and retain those relationships. I call it Relationship Metrics – the tracking of those you follow, and those that follow you, and finding ways to retain those followers and build strong relationships with them. The more people you can build a strong relationship with, the more “authoritative” (for lack of a better term) you can become.
GM: What made you decided to start SocialToo.com? Was it more a matter of wanting certain functions yourself and making them available for others, or of seeing people ask for something and fulfulling that niche? (or something else entirely!)
Jesse: It was a combination of the two. I don’t ever like to do things manually that could be automated. I was already manually following everyone who followed me on Twitter – I like to solidify the relationships of people that are interested in me. It’s just my policy, and it’s important to me. At the same time I wanted a way I could choose not to follow certain people. I believe it was Chris Pirillo [@chrispirillo] that mentioned he wanted a way to follow those that were following him on Twitter automatically, so I wrote a script for him to run on his servers (or Mac – not sure which). I ran the script for myself as well, and I built blacklisting functionality into it so I could exclude spammers and the like from being followed if I didn’t want to follow certain accounts.
Then, after following Guy Kawasaki [@guykawasaki], I noticed when he asked for the same functionality. I offered him my script, but quickly realized not everyone was going to be able to set up my script, and setting it up for them would require me asking for their Twitter credentials in person, which I really didn’t want to do. So I wrote a UI (user interface) around the script, put a database on the backend, and enabled it to support multiple users, allowing them to enter their own Twitter credentials in so I didn’t have to see them. And that was the beginning of SocialToo.com – I believe this was around April or May of this year.
Chris Pirillo also gave me some great advice as we were building it (along with Ponzi [@ponzarelli]) contributing to the auto-unfollow capability. Guy then later approached me with an idea about creating surveys you could Tweet to your friends, in similar manner to TwitPic, but for surveys and polls. I gave him some ownership of SocialToo, we built it out, and launched all features of SocialToo, officially to the public in November.
TechCrunch featured a survey Guy posted on our first day of launch, and we knew it was an instant hit. In just a month we have garnered near 5,000 subscribers on the service, and I expect that to at least triple in the next month.
GM: Do you foresee premium services down the line?
Jesse: Yes, we will be building on a Freemium model. The base features that are currently there should remain free. Our target market is small to even large businesses that want to better track the relationships of people that follow them on the social networks they belong to. We’re establishing a new concept I call “relationship metrics”, which tracks statistics around the relationships you create, along with another concept I call “relationship retainment”, helping you to retain the relationships you build. We’ll provide premium features on top of an already rich feature-set that will support these concepts.
GM: You managed a function for me by running a script that followed back for me over 1500 people in a matter of minutes – do you plan on offering something similar to users down the line? What about a script that does the opposite – unfollowing everyone for someone so that they could ’start over’ on their follow lists?
Jesse: Unfollowing *everyone* is a novel idea – I’ll think about that one, but I could certainly imagine that being a feature. To answer to the function we ran for you, the answer is yes, and hopefully in the next couple days. There is a chance that will be a one-time pay feature*, or perhaps at least a donation of some sort. We’re a completely bootstrapped company, so I’m very eager to start monetizing some of this! A family of 6 is not easy to support as an entrepreneur! (*again, this feature has been implemented since our interview, for a small one time fee of $5 ~GM)
GM: What are your plans for SocialToo.com in 2009?
Jesse: Expect some interesting partnerships with other products and services. I’m not going to say what right now, but we’re going to be launching some unique services that will make these partnerships much easier, and will provide a wealth of information for other products and services. Expect some interesting monetization strategies – in particular around the SocialSurveys themselves. There will always be a free option, very similar to what we provide now, but I have some ideas that could be win-win for our users and us as a company.
My hope is, as we become profitable, to hire several more people and build out the statistics much more than they are currently. I’d also like a much more solid and feature-rich Survey product. There will also be several new products released – remember, our goal is to be your “companion to the social web”. Whatever we can do to further complement your experience on the social networks you belong to, we’ll be working to do so.
Oh, and Twitter will not be our only focus. Very shortly, as soon as we solidify our focus around Twitter, we’ll be expanding features around the other networks we support (Facebook and Identi.ca), along with some new networks we haven’t yet announced. Keep an eye out for that, as I think that is what will make this service very powerful.
GM: How do you deal with people who are saying that “automation” or “robots” don’t have a place on Twitter?
Jesse: Those people are right, based on the way they use the service. People that don’t mind “automation” or “robots” are also right. Personally, I don’t enable auto-dm (except when I’m testing new features, which is happening currently) for my personal account [@JesseStay]. At the same time, I think it’s appropriate to auto-dm for our company’s @socialtoo account. We thank them for joining SocialToo and tell them how to contact us. I don’t think that’s any different than an auto-responder for new subscriptions to any new service. We’re just doing it through Twitter.
Some people have thousands of followers however. Getting a new auto-dm every minute gets annoying, especially when many of them are generic and meaningless. It’s my intention to provide solutions around this as well – our goal is to stay flexible enough to where we can satisfy the way multiple types of users use these Social Networks. For instance, I’m testing a feature right now which we may or may not release, in which you can opt to not receive SocialToo-generated auto-dms. That may or may not be released, but it shows that I am aware of the other opinion. We’re also working on better ways to make the auto-dms much more personal, and more real. For instance, I’ve found when you mention a person’s real name in the dm they are many times more likely to start conversation with you, and appreciate the message. People should have choices, depending on the way they use Twitter. At the same time we all have a responsibility to be responsible, and considerate of different types of users that may be overwhelmed by such features. There’s no wrong or right way to use these services.
There’s no wrong or right way to use these services… How many times have I said that? Yes, I have my preferences too – but in the end, telling someone else that how they use a service is “wrong” because it’s not how you do it? Is like telling them that they should like spinach because you do and they shouldn’t like kumquats because you don’t. Automation isn’t the end of the social aspect of networks like Twitter – used correctly, it’s something that just gets us to the socializing faster.
After talking to Jesse, I changed my policy. I now have an auto-DM set up – it says “Nice to meet you <<firstname>>. This *is* an automated message, but only to say I will check out your Twitter shortly” because I’m all about transparency. I’m not going to pretend it’s not an automated message – any more than I pretend that you’re talking to me when you reach my voicemail. But I do think it’s nice to acknowledge to someone that I’m not just going to ignore them just because I’m not online 24 hours a day.
Am I using the auto-follow feature of SocialToo right now? No, I’m back to my old methods of adding manually. Which means I need to quit writing this and get to back to my inbox. Thanks for reading (if you did) this lengthy post. I really think we’ll see people adapt to the automation tools the same way we have to voicemail and call-waiting… but until then, we may have to slog through a few unwanted DMs.
I Resolve…
January 1, 2009
It’s 2009. I meant to write this post in 2008.
I guess that’s got to go on the list of Resolutions for this year:
1. Get things done in a more timely manner…
Last year was amazing on a lot of levels for me. So many amazing people I’ve had the privilege to meet. So many amazing experiences I’ve had the good fortune to be a part of. I couldn’t have foreseen some of the events of 2008 in a million years before they happened and I’m still not quite sure I believe all of them have!
But this isn’t a ‘year in review post’ although perhaps it ought to be… It’s just that I had the chance to write about that stuff over the past twelve months. If I didn’t do it? It’s time to move on and get up to speed with 2009 instead of putting it off until I get the other done.
One of the things that made this blog so sparse last year was that I kept saying “oh I’ll post about such-and-such just as soon as I get X, Y, and Z done first.” Here’s one of those self-realizations: that just means that X, Y, Z and now A thru G aren’t getting posted in a timely manner either.
So while I’ve got a doozy of a post in the works for tomorrow and another one I want up right after that? I’m going to do this right this very moment.
I’m going to sit here and write out a preliminary list of my New Year’s Resolutions. Will it be comprehensive? No. Will it be well-fleshed out? No. Will it be here in case I do get around to adding to it or adding to the detail? You betcher boots.
In 2009 I Resolve to:
- Get things done in a more timely manner. I told you this would be on here! I’ve had a horrid time the past six months or so with this. I just deleted a huge, long “too much information” paragraph with details about it. The short story? Moving from ‘procrastinates at times but gets things done’ to ‘can barely get through a day and get 1 out of 20 things on the to-do list done’ was the apparently-common side-effect of medication I have been on for health/pain issues over the past year. The worsening of which coincides directly with dosage changes. That will be changing. Pain + productivity and a sense of accomplishment is better to me than less pain + non-productivity and resulting depression.
- Lose weight, get healthy, get fit – yeah, I know… way to lump huge goals into 6 words! But you really can’t separate them out. I can’t get fit & healthy without losing weight, I can’t lose weight without doing the other two. The three are mutually dependent in my book. Yes, I actually do have plans on how to achieve this. I’m just not going to detail them here. Changing my diet, exercising regularly, dealing with the side-effects and changing my medical approach? All parts of that. Which should help me more with the first goal too!
- Set & achieve new career goals – can I be more vague? Yeah, I could. I could’ve left out “career.” I know what it means – I’m hoping I can post about some new developments very soon. I’m working on a few possible projects for this year that I think will enable me to both do what I love to do and benefit my clients and colleagues more regularly too. But some things need to come out in their own times.
- Strike a better balance between branches of my life time & energywise. The social, work, and family aspects, specifically. Less Twitter, more blogging. Less internet for play, more family time. More internet for work, less play time. You know the routine!
- Travel more. There are some places and events I will find ways to be at this year… they will enable me to learn, teach, share, grow, and spend time with others who have similar passions. But as much as I plan to ‘go more places’ I will remember that there’s no place like home.
- Put my houses in order – all of them. The place I spend each day, my online homes, my spiritual homes, and my places in the hearts of those who love me and whom I love? I will nurture them and care for them this year – so that next year, this list is shorter in “big” things and longer in detail.
That said? Specific enough or not, it’s time to quit making lists and get cracking on crossing items off of them! Wish me luck – I’ll wish it back to you. Hopefully, what we both lack in luck, we can make up for in determination.
2009!!
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