PT-LawMom

The Weekly MILS (Moms In Law School) Roundup** is the brainchild of Saramel (retired). It is hosted on a rotating basis at the PT-LawMom and A Little Fish in Law School blogs and is usually posted no later than Monday morning. Next week’s MILS Roundup will be hosted by Butterflyfish.

Please forgive the editorial comments weaved into today’s roundup. I’m chatty today.

2L Wannabe must be running a fever (never gonna happen! If it does, I’ll owe you some great act of public humiliation, like racing through my school’s courtyard in a ball gown and boa sporting a PT-LawMom tiara or some such nonsense, but since it’s never going to happen there’s no need to worry about the particulars…)

Butterflyfish should stick with the ladies.

New Duck is finding out that sometimes the best answers are the most obvious ones.

Dakota and I are having the same mental debate. D, for me it’s all about healthcare. Did you read this NY Times piece? Totally swung me towards Hillary, even though I really WANT to vote for Obama. Fortunately I have some time yet before my state’s primary to think a bit more.

Over at Diary of a Law School Mom, Bubba is plotting and planning (maybe he’ll put it to use as a famous movie director?)

Citations is still overwhelmed, but looking on the bright side.

ProtoAttorney is starting to realize the full extent of parental worry (just wait!)

LagLiv could really use a break.

You, too, will want to dive right into Law School Sucks — and So Do Lawyers to nibble on these cute little toes and cheeks.

I love this post from Magic Cookie on the correct grammatical usage of the term “as such.” Check it out, if for no other reason than to see her cool illustration of a pet peeve.

Kim at Merits of the Case just wants you to get out and vote (she’ll even help you register!).

Googie Baba’s got her priorities straight (and an awesome summer job!)

Andrea and her champ are getting out and getting recognized!

Cee’s learning all about the tiniest measurements and riding the hormonal rollercoaster.

If you’d like to have your blog added to the MILS blogroll for weekly review or would like us to consider a specific post, drop the hostess(es) an email or leave a comment at their respective sites.

**Hat tip to the “original” Roundup — Evan Schaeffer’s Legal Underground and Divine Angst

I was tagged by Law Student Hot Mama for this post meme. Thanks lady! Sorry it’s taken me a few days to get to it.

THE RULES:
** Post about the meme and link back to the person that tagged you.
** Go back to your archives and link to your five favorite posts.

Link One: must be about family
Link Two: must be about friends
Link Three: must be about yourself
Link Four: must be about something you love
Link Five: can be anything you choose

** Tag five other people (at least two must be new acquaintances so that you can get to know them better).

Link one: Family — “Ain’t nothing in the world like youngins. Getcha Some!”

Link two: Friends — this was one of my early posts about two of my good friends, Christa and Ashante. They are both women I deeply admire, each of whom have qualities I hope to emulate.

Link three: Yourself — Using another meme to respond to this one since all the other posts about me are too whiny or generic. This was a good chance to review my tone and realize how much the past 8 months or so have sucked. Time to cheer up and blog sweetly!

Link four: Some[one] you love — this is a post all about Chapin. I don’t write in detail about him often, but he’s my love, my rock and a great support in this journey. Right now I can hear him downstairs reading books to Pumpkinhead using all sorts of funny voices to make the different characters come alive. Pumpkinhead keeps falling off the couch he’s laughing so hard!

Link five: my choice — when I need a fall down, roll around, pee in my pants laugh, it’s all about the joys. And looking at my Bloglines, I can tell you I am 60 entries behind on my Oh the Joys reading. No wonder my blogging style has been so damn uptight and obnoxious lately!!!

Now to tag five other people. I hope I’m tagging people who haven’t already been tagged. Here goes: Christa (because she’s moving to a new platform!), Aspiring Solo (because I love to read blogs about people who are trying to go that route!), Kristina (because she hasn’t posted in a week and I want to know what’s happening!), MeltingMama (because she’s bored, broke, covered with EEG glue and toddler puke, drowning in hate mail and ready to seize at any moment) and Ana (because I need to remind myself to e-mail her or remind her to e-mail me because I need some data from her!)

This has been a week of revelations about the true nature of many people. Maybe it’s part of growing older and getting wiser. Maybe it’s part of getting hurt one too many times. But I’m starting to realize that oftentimes people truly are just out there for their own benefit and will do whatever it takes to get to the top or make themselves feel superior, even if it means stepping on your face on the way.

My husband, who grew up in a country divided for many years by a brutal civil war, has often tried to convince me of this harsh reality but I, the daughter of Christian missionaries who always had a room and a warm meal for a stranger, refused to believe it. I still find it hard to believe. That said, at least when it comes to work and school, I think I need to put up a bit of a stronger shield.

Early this week, a good friend of mine at work lost her job under circumstances that were very unfair. Then I had a run-in with someone at work that was really humiliating and uncalled for and the two work issues combined made me wonder about my future there. In addition, while school has been going well in terms of professors and the subject matter itself, some of my classmates have been acting like real asshats all of a sudden! I’m not sure what changed, but I know that several others feel the same way I do — please let this 1L year end so that we can pick our classes and hopefully get away from the few that are being particularly obnoxious.

Anyway, while many things are going much better than they were just a few weeks ago, this week really made my heart hurt and made me think about long-term priorities. Who knows? If it’s meant to work out, there may be some changes in the works and a steelier, less tenderhearted lady ready to face the world when the bell rings for the next go-round.

Perhaps I should switch my focus to environmental law to combat the strange forces that are making their presence known in my house these days.

HippoGator, Pumpkinhead’s constant companion:

Mutant PlayDoh Creatures:

Next thing you know, Pumpkinhead will have to be renamed BroccoliEar or CheeseFoot (especially if he keeps resisting bathtime!). Sinister stuff, I tell you! I may just have to get Chapin to tie him down in the bed of the truck for a trip around the neighborhood in the rain.

As a follow-up to the Ms. JD post on whether BigLaw salaries negate incoming associates’ choices/voices on work/life balance, there is another post about to whom partners should be listening when determining the priorities for changes to work/life balance programs and polices. Again, it appears that the focus is more on the bottom line and Per Partner Profits and that young associates are written off as flighty, inexperienced and irrelevant in the debate.

If you can believe it, the partners that I talked to recently claimed that young associates and law students lack the credibility to talk to partners about our generation’s balance concerns and priorities.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this Ms. JD piece and how you think the legal field will change (or not) in the years to come as we push for rebalancing and time with both our children and parents (and, God forbid, other outside activities).

This week’s roundup is up at A Little Fish in Law School.

The Weekly MILS (Moms In Law School) Roundup is the brainchild of Saramel (retired). It is hosted on a rotating basis at the PT-LawMom and A Little Fish in Law School blogs and is usually posted no later than Monday morning. Next week’s MILS Roundup will be back here.

The New York Times has a recent piece focusing on the huge hole in the Republican position on immigration — namely what happens to the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants currently in this country under their plan.

Except for Mr. McCain, the Republican candidates have skirted the issue or, worse, embraced the restrictionist approach known as “attrition.” That amounts to relentlessly tightening the screws in workplaces and homes until illegal immigrants magically, voluntarily disappear.

Making it work would require far more government intrusion into daily lives, with exponential increases in workplace raids and deportations. It would mean constant ID checks for everyone — citizens, too — with immigration police at the federal, state and local levels. It would mean enlisting bureaucrats and snoops to keep an eye on landlords, renters, laborers, loiterers and everyone who uses government services or gets sick.

Worst of all, it’s weak on law and order. It is a free pass to the violent criminals we urgently need to hunt down and deport. Attrition means waiting until we stumble across bad people hiding in the vast illegal immigrant haystack. Comprehensive reform, by bringing the undocumented out of the shadows, shrinks the haystack.

Do you know what I think? I don’t think they’re going to do anything except pass weak, token, piecemeal measures and then pick up the pieces when they have disastrous consequences. DHS is already facing the fallout from this past summer’s doubling of application fees, which resulted in 1.5 million additional citizenship applications filed in a one-year period without the necessary infrastructure in place to process those applications!

The immigration agency’s workload has nearly doubled, Aytes said, with 1.4 million naturalization applications arriving from October 2006 to September 2007, compared with 731,000 applications the year before. Between July and September of this year alone, USCIS received 560,000 applications, he said.

The number of green-card-related applications surged to 876,000 in fiscal 2007, from 497,000 in fiscal 2006, he said. At one point this summer, USCIS had 1 million applications and checks waiting to be opened and acknowledged, Aytes said, a backlog that now stands at 235,000. Overall, USCIS received 7.7 million applications for all types of immigration benefits, up from 6.3 million.

Of course they managed to deny Chapin’s citizenship two months after the new fees took effect. One more off the desk…

Maybe it’s because for the first time in a month, I’m not sick or in pain or in crisis, but things are looking up.

I was really concerned that this semester was going to be terribly difficult for a variety of reasons, but it’s actually going better than I could ever have imagined. It was early enough in the year that I was able to rearrange my schedule and limit the number of nights I’m in class (as part of the recent family crisis, I had to give up one of my two babysitters so I needed to be home more for a while). In addition, the flow of one class has been much easier than expected and the content of the other has been more straightforward and enjoyable. I was worried that I would fall way behind being so sick the past few weeks but my study partner has been great about sending me her class notes and I’ve tried hard to keep up with the reading. Fortunately one of my two classes is a legal writing class so the first week was mostly introductory. Finally, the dean’s office and the accommodations team have been extraordinarily helpful in getting the necessary info from my doctors and helping work out a plan that takes into account both the pain and the confusion/dizziness/fatigue caused by the medication. My teachers have been really accommodating and pleasant to deal with and that has made my life so much easier.

I also met with the neurologist today. The great news is that the nerve pain is real but that the nerves are inflamed, not permanently damaged AND he thinks he knows why. It’s from the micronutrient deficiencies I’ve been struggling with for several years (iron, B12, calcium and, most recently, Vitamin D) since my gastric bypass surgery in 2001 despite taking daily vitamins faithfully since 1997. I didn’t realize that what they term “malnutrition” could cause this type of pain but he said it’s called osteomalacia. This online piece explains it the best.

The pain of osteomalacia is typically difficult to localize. All the bones are tender—especially the long ones in the legs and arms—because of inflammation of the nerve fibers imbedded in the lining of the bone (called the periosteum). When Vitamin D is deficient, the lining of the bone becomes activated, causing more bone to be absorbed and replaced at an accelerated rate. This is similar to the “growing pains” experienced by adolescents who are going through the growth spurt.

He also said that the numbness and tingling is probably peripheral neuropathy from my long-term struggle with low B12. He’s recommended more frequent injections.

Vitamin B12 deficiency can also cause nerve problems, often causing numbness and tingling that start first in the hands and feet. Hemoglobin is low, but red blood cells are abnormally large.

The good news is that the new drug, Topamax, seems to be working to control the pain. The bad news is that I’ve been struggling with these deficiencies for several years (starting with B12 in 2003, followed by severe anemia in 2006 requiring IV iron infusions) and injection or IV forms seem to be the only way they stay in my body. I’ve been on oral Vitamin D (prescription) since August and my levels are still low and, as I can tell you from the bout of torture a few weeks back, the pain is still really bad. So he’s raising the Topamax to a higher level and I’m going to switch to the expensive-ass specialized vitamins made for people with re-routed intestines for several months to see if they really make that much of a difference (we can’t absorb anything oil-based and we have to take a lot of vitamins separately throughout the day so it’s a big ‘ol pain in the ass, but I guess that’s better than a lifetime of pain, anti-convulsants and broken bones!) If my levels don’t come up by the end of the summer, we’ll look into going back to the hematologist or moving on to a gastroenterologist to see about more invasive gut-specific checks to find out what is wrong with my intestines specifically because only a small percentage of gastric bypass patients seem to have these problems.

Ahh, the foolish things we do to ourselves when we’re young (I was 21). I was telling my coworker today how painful it was growing up because my friends used to make fun of my mother (she was morbidly obese) and we were always sad that she didn’t want to go outside and play with us. But here I am and I may not be morbidly obese anymore but when I’m in pain I sure don’t want to get down on the floor and roll around with Pumpkinhead or go outside and chase him on his bike. So if I can’t do that, what’s the point? Guess I’d better get with the program and get well, huh?!? On the plus side, I have lost about 10lbs in the past three weeks (hooray for the new meds that make you lose weight instead of gaining it — that and the stress/bronchitis diet!) Now to get outside and actually move my fat butt and sore legs down the sidewalk without hurting myself (Klutz Central here).

Finally, on the work side, things appear to be going fairly well. My boss has eased up since my supervisor talked to him. I’m not sure what will happen there but I’m glad the tension seems to be broken.

If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading my book. I have a very busy weekend ahead and am just glad to have a clear mind and a fairly clear head/nose to get it done! Lots of reading and research for a paper and I definitely want to have some one-on-one Pumpkinhead time. Poor little guy hasn’t had much Mommy time in the past few weeks.

P.S. I share all this personal medical information a) to keep a little log of it for myself because, after all, isn’t a blog just really an Internet diary of sorts and b) so that others out there who might be struggling with weird symptoms might read it and know they aren’t alone. There is way too little info out there on the long-term effects of gastric bypass surgery so, even if it’s rather embarrassing to know that all of this pain was brought on by something I chose to do eight years ago, I think it’s important to be honest about it so that others can make informed decisions or know what’s going on with themselves when doctor’s poo-poo their pain as “chronic fatigue” or “fibroymyalgia”.