Well, I've had an exciting week. Let's just run through the highlights, shall we?

Last Thursday, what started out as a bad period got a whole lot worse. I passed some chunks of SOMETHING, and totally freaked out. Obviously I thought that I was having another miscarriage. I'm sitting there on the bathroom floor thinking, "haha, God, good joke. Wait 'till I get over the first miscarriage, and then give me another one." Christian came home to save the day. (Boy am I sure glad that sometimes I can just freak out and let someone else deal with the details.) We went to the doctor, gave him the stuff, and got a blood test. Turns out I hadn't been pregnant, the something was probably just endometrial tissue but they were going to get it tested, and we probably shouldn't worry. I, of course, was still worried anyway. I don't think my husband quite understood, but it was like getting a big huge punch in the gut and getting the wind knocked out of you. You can't just jump up and get going again. Just because it wasn't a miscarriage doesn't mean it couldn't have been something else bad, like cancer or endometriosis.

The next day I called up my mom and she said that started happening to her all the time when she was in her early 30's, and it had happened to her mom too. She felt bad that it had started happening to me so early, but she didn't seem too worried, so I relaxed too. Now we're still waiting for the tests on the tissue, but I'm no longer very concerned about it.

On Saturday I went to the mall. I had a gift certificate from Target that I thought I ought to get used and I wanted to buy a dress. I have some skirts, but besides my wedding dress I don't have any other dresses. I've been exploring my feminine side lately, and I thought it would be fun to see if I could find a dress. Now normally shopping is a terrible experience for me. I often end up close to tears at the end. I'm small chested and small hipped at any size, so women's clothing never fits me perfectly, but at the size I am at, it is even more pronounced. All of the normal sized womens' clothing is just a tad bit too small in certain places and doesn't look very good. The plus sized women's clothing fits in those certain places, but just hangs off me like a bag in the other spots. I swear, I could rent myself out as a sail. Almost nothing, no matter how good it looks on the rack, looks good on me. I usually wear men's pants, but since I'm starting to care about my appearance and myself as a woman more, I'd like to be able to get some things that look more feminine and stylish.

Luckily I had some success on this trip with very little trouble. I ended up finding a nice dress in the maternity section, of all places. It was perfect. It was pretty simple, with nice straight lines. It didn't fit too close in some spots and hang out like a bag in others. Of course I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that the best one was in the maternity section, but oh well.

Afterwards I walked around the mall a bit and stopped in Barnes & Nobel to look at a few books on infertility as I had some things I wanted to look up without having to buy anything. (Barnes & Nobel is great like that.) I picked out a few books and sat down in a chair to look through them. This guy sitting next to me looked at the books, looked at me, and then asked, "so are you infertile." Not knowing what else to say, I said, "uhhh….yeah." He then proceeded to tell me all about his sister and wife's troubles with various types of infertility. Somewhere along the line I decided he was probably harmless, if a bit insensitive, and refrained from trying to escape too quickly. At some point he was telling me about his wife and her trouble with endometriosis, which is a disease where the some of the cells from the lining in the uterus that grows each month get out of the uterus and attach to other places, usually the outside of the uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, intestines, etc. Each month when the lining in the uterus grows in response to hormonal changes, these new spots respond in the same way and cause pain and scar tissue. Doctors don't know quite what causes this, but they have a few theories. This guy that was talking to me had an interesting theory all his own, though. The culprit in his world? Masturbation. Except he called it something like, "enjoying yourself." The reasoning behind this seemed to be that when a woman has an orgasm, her cervix draws up stuff from her vagina. (Which is true.) However, when a woman is masturbating, there is no semen in the vagina, so it just pulls up whatever is there instead. Since a woman's vagina normally has a slightly acidic ph, especially at certain times of the month (also true), then it's drawing up acid into the uterus. This eats away at the uterus, creates scar tissue in there, and allows the lining to escape. The worst time to masturbate, according to him, is right before your period. A few times was ok, but do it too much and you'll get endometriosis. (Not to mention hairy palms, I'm sure.) It was hilarious. It kind of reminds me of the trouble my brother used to get into when he tried to do fancy stuff on the computer when we were younger. He knew just enough to really mess stuff up and get himself super confused, and not enough to actually fix the problem. That's got to be the oddest person I've ever met (the Barnes & Nobel guy, not my brother, although he's pretty odd himself).

Then on Sunday Bracken, the dog that loves to chew up everything and anything, chewed up Christian's bottle of antidepressants. The vet calculated that he could have gotten as high as 33 times the normal dose based on his body weight and how many we think we were left. (The bottle, of course, was too chewed up for us to figure out how many had been in there before.) There were pellets all over the floor where he had chewed it up, so we stupidly assumed that he probably hadn't gotten enough into his gullet to do much harm, but a few hours later he was having a lot of trouble walking so we took him in to the emergency vet place. By then his pupils were dilated, his pulse and blood pressure were way up, he was nauseous, and his limbs were too rigid for him to walk. Luckily, though, he never became unconscious and even though he was pretty out of it, he was aware enough to wag his tail when we petted him. He's been in the vet place since then with an IV and something to monitor his heart rate. Right now his heart rate is still high and his pupils are still dilated, but he's getting better and should be coming home tonight or tomorrow. It's a good thing, too, because if anything happened to him, poor Christian never would have forgiven himself for not putting his pills up high enough and for not taking him into the vet soon enough.

It's always kind of strange when one of the pets has to spend the night away from home. We're sometimes away from some or all of them when we go on trips, but home doesn't seem like home without a bunch of friendly happy dogs around. When one of them is missing, it changes the whole dynamic. I'll be glad to have him back home, even if he does chew everything up.

So that was the exciting week. I sure hope this week doesn't get any more exciting!