The Glass Pelvis (by sarah)

Through my tears and the creation of a dark transient poem I have hit upon the concept of writing a self-help/how to survive book on chronic pain and truma during and pregnancy, child birth and the after math. It would be called the Glass Pelvis. Arrogant? Probably - something that's needed definatly.

I slipped over yesterday which would have been pain full for anyone as pregnant as me but with the seperated pelvis - I could not speak for the tears of pain. This have been quiet bad pain wise as I have had a mini pain flare up with my left arm anyway which sucks as it has ment no proper writing and no guitar practice for about a week now.

Chronic pain has many books on it - but seperated pelvises are relatively new thing in medicine. A great increase has been seen in the last ten years - I have my theories on this involving modern live style and gyms not getting to the right areas that women need strengthened and modern diet with it's additives and loss of various things like sea food.

You see I am on the crutches and it is an issue but I am not anywhere near the state I was in with Jeany and looking at how things like gestational diebetes come about I feel that management of such conditions as the 'broken pelvis' are important. Especially as it can lead to complications and more truma for both mother and child.

Now there was nothing avalible for me when I had Jean and everybody seemed quiet confused over the whole thing. I have been told this time round that even the physios are now giving up with the condition.

So I want to share what I went through, to aliviate some of the isolation that mothers in this sort of position suffer. Of course I also had lots of other things from the miscarriage stuff, to the blood clots to the pre-clampsia and pregnancy induced hyper tension. Even being in the hospital when the bombs went off in London. I think with research and checking with medical people I could produce a good guide to mother who don't have it easy.

Separeted Pelvis is termed symphysis pubis dysfunction or SPD and having seen the result of being not allowed out of bed with Jean's pregnancy (due to blood clots and what not!) I have been desperate to keep my mobility up what ever the pain levels (once I'd checked that there was no danger of baby popping out!). I have interesting comparisions but then this pregnancy has been managed much better - the only issue is that a) the pelvic pain never completely went away from Jeany and b) due to issues I've had I've had a body pumped full of pregnancy hormones on some level for well over a year now meaning that the pelvis has been far more mobile than expected.

The truth is that I didn't now that I would end up on crutches again before the baby was born - becuase I was bed and wheel chair for the last half of Jean's pregnancy the pelvic issues were only found after the birth and was told that it was from the childbirth because of an old back injury and a large baby but they have said this is wrong and it is the hormone levels and stuff. This was a bit of a blow for us but hey I can still walk (with crutches) in the week when my baby is due!

I think the main issue with producing such a book will be that I don't know what a 'normal' pregnancy and labour is like. And even the c-section is going to be interesting on the recovery side of things due to walking with crutches etc...

My mood is fragile at the moment due to the pain I'm in but what is actually concerning me is that after Jean was born I was bunged in a side room at Harold Wood with no one to talk too and depending on shifts was not even given water to drink! (resulting in dehydration and my milk drying up and me then having to suppliment and work hard at getting the milk back again!). People have said it's not like that here but the fear of hospitals is still nagging at me - I am concerned as to what is going to happen to my mood when I get the post birth hormone crash and a hospital stay. I'm hoping that I will just know how to cope with it better this time.

So in some ways I think this is going to be a self help project as well.

A Recipe for Riot (by sarah)

1. Take one apathetic, peaceful, book-loving student body intent on learning

2. Tenderise with cuts and broken promises

3. Optionally add agent provocateur/thug type - this speeds the reaction but is not necessary due to using the kettling technique - guaranteed to bring anyone to a slow violent boil

4. Sprinkle in a portion of police - ill-equipped and vulnerable causing the trigger happy reactions that seem justified - adds flavour

5. Leave to simmer with the odd bit of bait/sacrificial target to get the crowd proving

6. Knead in naive youth quick to follow the flow - after it swells to double the size - bash it down

7. Season with paparazzi to bring out the 'incite to violence for the perfect photo' flavour

8. Add a match and Voila! The Social Flambe - Riot

9. Garnish by only reporting the juciest politically-approved bits to the general public

10. Serve piping hot and full of bias and lies

I had a Dream (by sarah)

Actually I've been having lots of very vivid dreams which doesn't bode well for sugar levels but I haven't got the results of the Glucose Tests back yet - by this time with Jean's pregnancy I had gestational diabetes. But then I often have vivid dreams - many of them are what is termed lucid and I have some sort of control on them. Part of this is the fact that when pain levels are high I don't actually go to sleep properly so I am in a sort of resting trance. They have benifits but it makes it harder for you body to repair itself from injuries - this isn't mumbo jumbo this was out of the Drs mouth at the pain clinic when they attempted to medicate my sleep when we lived back in Essex.

Anyway I thought I really needed to share lasts nights dream. It starts with me trying to get to a PhD interview at Reading University - the PhD is about modeling other solar systems and exo planets etc... I have no idea if Reading does this sort of thing but it was Reading in the dream - the only issue was Alaric was running late so instead of having a nice sedate drive to the interview we had to high jack a state of the art plane from the local army base type place.

As we took off I noticed the tail wasn't actually attached to the plane but the whole thing was segments held together a bit like a kite - the tail itself looked remarkably like a cray fishes or something lobstery only in shiny metal.

We get to the university and I am late - I haven't read the notes on what the things is actually about but they agree to see me anyway as there is only one other candidate - a UG astrophysics girl. I then proceed to think on the spot and tell them that they need to reassess everything. I tell them that what they need in a lovely large database with a nice archive mode - this is sort of a giant wiki with the ability to pull meta structures from the data such as phase diagrams. You see I don't just want to make a database of the planets and the physics but why not add all of mineralogy and astronomy?

Why not had layers where people can choose the data to run their simulations and the like? In the dream I'm in a pale yellow room with aging equipment and they are like - we don't have the money to pay the programmers and our stuff never quiet works.

Of course it doesn't I crow - your not programmers and you just use which ever language you happen to have picked up. Then I tell them not to worry - I'll make the database - I'll make the initial system and we can have people adding their own stuff!

It would be massive and everyone would argue about things added which is were the archive system would come in - they could just take an previous theory ect... With this we could easily extrapolate the composition of planets around other stars. It could have the ability to swap between notations so no more issues over what a Chemist calls a metal compared to a Geologist compared to a Astrophysist etc...

I have to say at this point there was decent in the interviewers - there is of course a problem of who the data belongs too and would we have to pay and keep it secret - that would hamstring the project - it would kill alot of their grants dead etc... alter the peer review system. Subjects that I have touched on before whilst awake!

But then I point out that it would have commercial applications and launched into a whole thing about the gaming industry being a growth sector and how you could build games engines on this thing! (again this is something we are sort of doing anyway in the real world but not with real physics).

I point out that scifi authors and the like would love to get their mitts on such a database too - for it would make world building a lot simpler and you could make smaller custom ones.

They were still like but we need someone to make all this and we just wanted a data monkey to enter numbers into spreed sheets. I laugh and say I can build it for them (I can't but I'm planning on using an advance version of Alaric's Ugarit.).

Anyway it ended with me negotiating to mainly work from home and stuff.

Part of me is now going - this needs to become real! We need to have this database - an extention on an idea I had a few years ago! And Alaric was like that is exactly the sort of thing the archive mode of Ugarit would be good for. The arogance of me in the dream was a suprise though. Besides last time I had a PhD interview I told the person their project was recording the wrong things - which didn't go down too well :/ And this dream is just that rite large - plus there is no way I am going to be doing anything academic for a while either - but it was a cool dream non the less!

Equal Writes (by sarah)

One of my fellow NaNoWriMers is collecting sponsers for his writing this November - he did this last year too - he is raising money for Equal Love, the campaign group from same-sex marriage rights in Melbourn 🙂 There is a FaceBook Group here.

As those who have been reading for a while will know I hate intolerance and this the same-sex marraige being denied is to me a gross example of intolerance.

Marrage is about love, about declaring that to the rest of the world - hey guys we're together! I know some people say marrage is about children but many hetrosexual couples never have children and when they do they are not necasserily inside of marrage.

Also to say it is about children is to diminish what it is worth - if it is about children then it nothing more than a snare and a trap to enforce family structure and that leads to unhealthy mental baggage for the kids in the first place :/

Marrage should not be a trap, it should be a union and as such there should be no gender/sexual orientation constraints placed upon it - people can not choose who they fall in love with - such has been known for a millenia or two.

Plus with IVF and adoption the child argument really can not stand even on it's own merits - I feel sad that society is still so bound up in hate that two caring individuals can not easily adopt just because they are the same sex. I have heard people fearful that it means two men can adopt a little girl and do dreadful things and then I think of the Wests and I think that was a hetrosexual couple and what they did was beyond words. Yes there is a risk of abuse but no more so than with adoption in general or even just who your perants happen to be 🙁

So why? Why? Can't gay marrage be allowed? We have Civil Partnership here in the UK which people tell me off for telling Jean is marrage. But I will not tell her that people of the same sex can not marry as to her any couple who are together are marrade. Obviously she is very young and kissing apparently counts as marrage but she came home very upset from pre-school last year, as the other kids had told her she couldn't marry one of her best friends. The topic came up sooner than I was expecting but we told her it was fine if she wanted to marry a girl (she will probably kill me for this post when she's about 13!).

I know people thought that we shouldn't have told her this but we have gay couples as friends! And I'm sorry but Jean is not silly and is very good at noticing human interactions :/ Plus why should we lie to her? Also we have been to a gay wedding with her so I think it would be a bit stupid to tell her they can't happen :/

Homosexuality has had to lay hidden for far too long, to the extent that friends asked if they could kiss their partners or even bring them to things like our wedding - they shouldn't have to feel like that.

Anyway - that is how I feel and why even though he is not based in the UK I felt this was something I would tell you all about 🙂

Food and Dyslexia et al (by sarah)

Food would appear to play a large part in how bad things like Dyslexia, Dyspraxia and ADHA get, or how the symptoms show. It has been suggested that diary plays a large part in this and I have to say that I have personally noticed a coralation with this but I due have food intollerances. These may or may not be connected to the problems however excessive diary does seem to act things up as does general none home cooked food to be honest. Obviously there is the issue I have with food colourings, caffine and sugar combinations - I assume these are part of the ADHD but apart from caffine can find no mention of them.

The other one is that Omega-3 (I think) oil seems to play a huge part too - or at least it's absence. This is interesting as it plays straight into the joint issues and for me at least the pain management stuff. Add in collagen difficiences and the like and I came to a conclusion (this is mine there is no research on this - it's just something I have observed with me!). We basically need fish and shelf-fish type nutrition in our diet to remain healthy - this appears to be true of many people anyway but more so with those with Dyspraxia and stuff.

Of course this would be a situation that is getting worse as modern diets are down to a fraction of the amount of sea food it once had in it - on top of that we are killing the seas and they may not be able to provide for us 🙁 I think you can get the oils from things like flax seeds so there are veggi options though they may take more digesting.

I have noticed it is not just me with these conditions and either the chronic pain nor the food intollerences - they crop up in combinations startingly frequently on the forums and help sites I've seen - people asking are their intollerences/allergies part of the condition etc...

This is something I really feel would benieft from some more research done on it 🙂