Ripple Effect

This post may be a little disturbing, and will certainly not be a happy one, because it’s about rape.  If you want to skip it, please do.  I won’t be bothered.

I mentioned last month, that someone close to us had been violently raped.  I still don’t intend to tell her story; it’s hers, and not mine to tell.  At the same time, I feel like I have to tell our part of the story because her assault has had a ripple effect on my (and our) life.  In order to help you understand this effect, I’m going to share a few details.  Her attacker was not a stranger, to her, or to us.  He was someone that we had shared meals with – sometimes on holidays, someone who was friends with several other people we know.  Someone that none of us would have ever expected to do something like that.  He was someone who had apparently been watching this woman with inappropriate thoughts for years, since her early teens, and he is in his mid-forties.  While he wasn't a friend of ours, I have been in his home, and have dropped children off there so that his sister could watch them.  How could I have been so blind?

After it happened, she came to stay with us for a few days, and one of the things that she needed to do was to talk about what happened, in detail.  It hurt to hear it.  It hurt to know that it was something that I couldn't undo, or fix.

Since then, I have been having nightmares.  Dreams where people I know and trust do terrible things, and I have to smile and put on a nice face and just go about my day.  I have dreamed that he invaded my home, and that no one would let me force him out, that I just had to put up with it.  In one dream, I wanted nothing more than to kill him, but I knew that I had already sent all of my guns away.  He was in my home, and eventually I broke my way through all of the people who were in my way, knocked him down and tried to strangle him… only to discover that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Part of me feels like I shouldn’t be feeling this way.  This wasn’t something that happened to me.  But it did happen to someone I care about, and feel some level of protectiveness toward.  And, right now, it’s got me a little screwed up.

Then there’s another ripple effect.  It comes in two parts.  Jakobe and I have always struggled with a difference in our libidos.   And this has had an effect on both of us.  For weeks, the idea of having sex was something I couldn’t wrap my head around.  In addition, Jakobe has always been a little bit paranoid about rape.  Even after we were married, he wouldn’t have sex with me if I had been drinking, because I might change my mind.  We were slowly working through that (because a little bit of alcohol makes me frisky!) but this situation has brought a lot of that back to the forefront.  So, once I was ready again, he really wasn’t.  As a result – we have had very little sex, and that’s not good for us either.

I find myself wondering if this man has any idea the amount of damage that he has caused.  Not only to the woman that he raped, but also to her friends and family; the damage that he caused to the couple that were his first friends in our social circle, who introduced him to the rest of us.  Every one of these people trusted him to some extent, even if it was just the trust that someone you know could never do anything like that.  Every one of us has been betrayed.

There are things about this that aren’t quite as bad.  The criminal justice system seems to be working.  He was arrested less than two weeks after it happened, and has been in jail ever since.  He can’t make bond, and the courts won’t reduce it.  He has confessed to two of the three ways that he can be found guilty of rape, he just claims that he didn’t use violence, so I expect that there will be either a plea deal that will have him serving prison time, or that it could go to trial – at which point he would most likely be convicted.  She seems to be holding up well – she’s strong, and she’s dealing.

Photo Friday: Peanut Butter

Just had to share, because this was fun and adorable.

Getting started: Baby steps

Today was the first day where I could feel how close we are getting to actually doing this.  I've been diligently working toward it for months, and making money choices didn't really make it real.  Today though...  I started of my day at the RE, where it was morning monitoring.  I was about the 4th woman there.  And I feel so bad for everyone who arrived after I did, because it was a really bad day to follow me.  It took 5 different needle sticks to be able to draw blood for my CD3 labs - we were going to try and do the rest of my labs at the same time, but no such luck... And it too easily 20 minutes to do the one blood draw...  Meaning that by the time I got out of the phlebotomist's area....  there was standing room only in the waiting room.  Everyone was waiting for me to finish.  I'm So Sorry.

Before the start of a triathlon - Kind of how I feel today.

Then at work today, I had a meeting with HR to explain what was going on and to find out what my options were.  Unfortunately, they really wanted me to work things out with my boss' supervisor.  She Really, really doesn't like me.  I've yet to figure out why, but she feels like she has to watch my every move, and she has to pay extra special attention to me, and it's all negative.  No one but her has a problem with how I do my job, but she seems to have it out for me.  Plus - she's given my boss a very hard time for having been very ill this fall.  I didn't want to talk to her about it.  I couldn't see how it was going to end well.

I was VERY pleasantly surprised.

She seemed very supportive, and even came up with the idea of changing my scheduled shift while I'm doing IVF so that morning monitoring will hopefully not interfere.  No decisions were made today, but I feel much better about it now.  Maybe this will all work out.

Here's the current plan:

•  Jakobe and I still have some blood tests to do.  We'll just go to the lab and have them done - Maybe Saturday morning.  
• We have to pay them for the cycle and ICSI by February 28th.  I didn't quite make my goal of being able to pay for everything with cash, but we're not to far off.  We've got just shy of $12,500 in savings, and just over $3000 coming in a couple of weeks with our tax return.  That's all but $800 of the up-front cash for the clinic, and  then it's mostly Meds and incidentals...  and some of it will be reimbursed.    We'll be picking up a bit of debt, but not more than we can handle.    
• I start BCPs with my next cycle.
• IVF in April!

Finally - to finish off today's post, here are the lab results from today, not to shabby, I don't think.

• FSH: 3.3
• LH: 8.2
• Estradiol: 36.3

unexpected bumps in the road

This morning, after I dropped Jakobe off at work because his car was in the shop, I went on my merry way to work myself. Except, halfway there, my car overheated again and ran itself out of coolant.

There I was, mostly in the middle of nowhere, so I decided to drive just far enough to stop at a coffee shop. (I've already spent 5 hours once this year waiting for a tow in a car with no heat while the temperatue is in the teens or below.) I was a good thing, because it was 2 hours before my tow got there. A coworker came and picked me up, so that I could make it to the rest of my work day, and I waited to hear how expensive it was going to be to fix *this time*.

Apparently, not expensive. They didn't find anything mechanically wrong. So, just more of my bad car luck.

Tonight, I'm riding the bus home from work... a two hour trek filled with people who won't stop talking to me even though my body language clearly says "Leave me alone, I'm busy reading on my phone."

Admittedly, I used to ride the bus quited a bit, it used to be a cheap and fairly convenient way to get from place to place. Now, the routes have been cut so far back that only people who absolutely have to are riding the bus. And even for me it would only work to get me home, as it doesn't run early enough to get me to work on time.

I'm glad that my car will be available tomorrow, especially since I have to stop by Dr. R's office for CD3 bloodwork so that we can proceed with IVF in March/April. Tomorrow will be my first experience with the craziness that is morning clinic hours at the RE. Only 28 days until we give them all our money. Less than one month (or thereabouts) befored I start BCPs. It's sneaking up on me fast.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Photo Friday - a little Belated: Fun With Flowers

I told this to publish Friday morning... but apparently, it didn't!

These are some old but good ones that I got to look at after I finally got my new workstation/desk all set up upstairs this week.  I'm actually using the computer a lot more with a place that's all my own and not down in the "man cave" where I felt like I was intruding.