If you're not renting a car, I would just put out for the uber.

Steroids can be vital, if you need them you need them. But yes, for sure with high dose steroids, they should be following your glucose levels closely because steroid-induced diabetes is a real risk. Melissa, I hope you are able to get a firm diagnosis soon. This whole process has been torturously slow. I can only imagine how weary you're feeling.

I love this. Good choice!

Beauty and ashes. Thank you for sharing. It does my heart good to know that you are so loved and supported. Much love from your WTM sisters, too.

Here's one I just saw and totally got wrong- Does Richard Simmons wear a headband?

Ed McMahon?

Watching the video, I'm 100% team Miranda. Sure, it would have been better for her to communicate to her team that this needs to be better handled on an usher level. But Miranda was right, that was super rude, disruptive, and disrespectful to the other concert goers. I looked at the venue map and those VIP seats are in front of everyone. Good for Miranda.

Peds nurse here. The medication has to get in. I would try to sneak it into her food. Ask for an rx for tablets and then crush and mix it into something. I love Dawn's pop tart approach. If that's not successful, a hospitalization would mean someone else will force the medication down, get her to a more stable place and then try to transition to unforced administration. I work in oncology and the absolute hardest is when we have a kid refusing and a parent who wants to negotiate. It's more trauma for everyone. The kid ends up crying and resisting for an hour while the parent tries to talk them into it. Let us hold the kid and pop it into their mouth and this whole thing is over in less than 5 minutes. Eventually those kids either get better about taking it or end up with nasogastric tubes because the medication is not optional. Of course, it's way different in your situation because the resistance is part of the disease and I know you're trying your best to not add more trauma/mental blocks to the problem. Bottom line is that this is a lifelong disease that requires medication. She simply must take it and it's important that you work on your own mental hurdles (fear of a hospital admission, if necessary) so that you can get her the lifesaving treatment that she needs.

Where do you live? Maybe your house needs to be sealed up better? Would diatomaceous earth help with the scorpions? You need a professional.

My husband, two of my daughters (one of whom is unvaccinated), my mom's husband. IDK about the covid immune wipe out but I do think that 2 years of masking did put a gap in the resume of a lot of immune systems. That combined with the natural cycle of many of these viruses created these huge, off-timed waves of infection. In our household, dh hasn't gotten sick at all since 2020. He takes a lot of supplements but once he was vaccinated, he did not mask unless required. Both ds and dd lived in dorms and had back to back viruses all freshman year. Neither had gotten covid at that point. Since then, ds has gotten covid (last summer) and continued to be sick all of his sophomore year, too. I got covid and work around a lot of sick kids but haven't caught anything else since then. So my personal take is that it's more about the prevalence of all of these viruses and our collective (herd, if you will) lack of immunity due to taking a couple of years off the natural life cycle.

I know one person with a failed tubal. Honestly, if you were to get pregnant while on birth control, with a vasectomy and a tubal (even a questionable one)- I would be flabbergasted. I'm not sure how much more a person can do to not get pregnant short of a hysterectomy.

Yes! Multiple canisters of hair are being vacuumed up daily (2 black labs).

1000% I was so weepy those last few months. But then they go and it's actually ok and pretty cool to see the growth!

I would not move just to be near a college-aged kid, especially if that choice would cause a disruption in your younger son's high school experience. I would stay in Poland. It's going to be absolutely fine for your college kid to be in the US without you. I don't consider that to be the same as sending a kid away to a new-to-them country and culture. How will you feel if that kid stops coming home over the summers (a lot of college kids take summer internships or classes) and you guys made all of these big changes to be in the US?

That is a perfectly normal non-fasting glucose level.

That makes so much sense. It's never just a single-layered thing to make these changes.

Love this reframing. This is excellent.

I'm the tightwad, haha. Dh has no problem ordering out but I start to panic when it gets excessive. I also really want to hire house cleaners but also keep putting it off because I'm cheap...

Everyone has variable schedules, with no consistency on who is home for dinner which nights. They're good about helping with shopping (mostly because they need lunch food). For that reason (and because they're working full time hours plus taking summer classes) assigning meals is not a hill I'm going to die on. Yes, that's the general feeling! Thanks for the tip! I'm really hoping this is a good solution for us. Yes and amen to that last paragraph! I think batch cooking may be more manageable when it's just dh and I. Really, everything will be more manageable, lol! It is a flawed way of thinking! And it's stickier than I hoped! I had a decent sized meltdown over this about a month ago and ds (who was the main non-contributor) has been much better about pitching in.

So those of you who can commiserate, is it a mental hurdle for you? In one way I have no guilt over not cooking for grown adults, but on the other hand it still feels like a failure? How do we move into caring for ourselves ahead of the family when we've been doing the opposite all these years?

(((Big hugs to you))) this is a hard time and hard position. It's a delicate needle to thread, being the spouse of a cancer patient. I'm an oncology nurse (with peds, which is different but similar). Dh also had cancer many years ago. From a treatment team perspective, we always encourage families to keep things balanced and also anticipate that at some points in treatment all we care about is calories- content will be impacted by so many factors but spiraling weight loss is problematic. I second whoever said keeping strength up is important. It's shocking how quickly muscle mass can slip away and that has huge ramifications for recovery/quality of life. As a wife, I know there were times that my suggestions were not well-received. They were sometimes perceived as accusation (your choices are the reason you are sick/aren't getting better). This is a long road. Make sure you find your own support people who you don't have to edit around.

Can we talk about this? Context: My kids are all out of high school and I have been working full time for the last year. Our current state of affairs at home is dd28 and dd26 launched, ds23 has special needs (receives FT care in our home), ds20 went to cc last year and will be home at least through December, dd18 home for the summer. Dh works from home 1d/wk and out of the house 4d/wk, I work out of the house 4d/wk, and we have care for ds23 4d/wk. The end result of a juggling act of covering ds23's care. Problem: In a family dynamic that has featured me fitting myself around everyone else's schedules, needs, etc, I'm hitting a wall now that I have my own full time job. There are several examples, most of which do have solutions, but I'll start with the one that my brain/ego/heart is having the most trouble with. I am the dinner maker. When I was in school, I switched over to relying heavily on meal kits and I have continued to use them this year. They're ok. The price works and I love having guaranteed meals on hand. The problem is that I hate coming home from work and cooking. I'm tired. I have very little time to work out or fit in any other self-care. If feels like I come home, cook, clean up, get ready for bed. Other family members are not going to be able to take on this task for various reasons. So I was telling my friend about this and she suggested Factor. I looked into it and decided to give it a try (they give a pretty generous nurses discount). It hasn't come yet but somehow I already feel like a failure. Like my family is going to have to subsist off of microwave dinners because I'm tired. Now, I *know* this is a flawed way of thinking. They're all adults, everyone can feed themselves if they want to. After 26 years of being solely responsible for feeding all of these people, I'm realizing just how hard it is to pull my mom identity out of this. And I don't even like cooking! I am not a person who has every felt like my identity is linked to my cooking abilities (thinking of my Mexican MIL who literally shows love through food). Any commiseration out there? Or other examples of making this shift (big picture, not just the cooking thing)?

Recently having similar conversations with my 26yo college drop out where she’s panicked about the constant hustle of working two jobs in order to live and I’m thinking, yes, this is why your mean parents were upset about the decision to drop out. Welcome to the reality that we warned you of. I’m a cranky old lady, too. I will say $23 is pretty low for HCOL. That same child of mine makes $28 nannying. Life will be the teacher for these kids. I just make sympathetic noises.

Common grace? Like things that are good and given to all humans?

The smallest home we lived in was 900sf with 6 of us. It was a short term situation- about 3 months. We had 5 kids in 1600sf for several years, and then 3 in 1350sf for the last 6 years. Ideally I wish we had another shower (we have 1 1/2 baths) and a slightly larger living space, though we’re comfortable.