Fjord every streeeeeeeeeeam

Well. The midwife just called, and one thing I don't have is diabetes. No diabetes and no pre-eclampsia. Here's my favourite thing on the internet, again, to celebrate.

The liver tests that were worrisome are coming back fine too, and the ultrasounds very very promising, as pertains to both me and Ren - Ren looked bloody magnificent, with eyes that open and close, and a face like a person. More blood testing tomorrow. Between all the blood testing over the last week (for the formal GTT test, they take three samples within two hours) and the acupuncture session yesterday, I feel like a fucking pincushion. I'd always visualized getting this many needles stuck into me as the onset of the heroin addiction I'm planning for my twilight years, but I guess having a baby is pretty cool too.

On a less positive note, getting some perspective from the fact that a lady in the family close to my age has an ovarian cyst the size of Ren, which is probably not cancerous, but isn't really the sort of thing that helps you sleep at night, is it? I need to shut the fuck up more. Mind you, I do rather shut the fuck up a lot, which is part of the reason I have a blog. Somewhere I don't feel the need to shut the fuck up. And it's cheaper than my analyst in Toronto was.

Yeah okay Australian healthcare

As of this afternoon's ultrasounds, will have paid more out of pocket for this pregnancy than a full-blown preemie caesaerian crisis in Taiwan. I think the F-word and I might have to accelerate our Australian plan. I don't necessarily want to have Ren's little brother or sister here - language barriers might be the least of my overall worries.

First of all an update - I don't have pre-eclampsia. The panic from Friday seems to be mostly unwarrranted though the rest of this week will see an ongoing barrage of tests, associated with liver function and an slightly irregular outcome to my GTT test which seems to be down to me having a huge lunch with dessert (even during this pregnancy, not something I usually do) with some desirable elements of the F-word's family who are up for a visit. Pretty stupid I know, but in my defense, nobody warned me not to be stupid. We'll see how the testing this week goes.

Dead Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes died last week. I spent a lot of time with his work, and loved some of it even to the point of wading through his lousy work, like his execrable autobiography. He was somebody I think I actually expected to meet and have a chat with someday because my first reaction to his death was suprise, even though he was enormously fat, not young, and obviously in very poor health for many years.

I read his most recent book most recently - Rome - just before I went to Rome in July. Of course the mental comparison was made with Barcelona, which I read just before going to Barcelona yonks ago. It wasn't nearly as good. I thought, reading it, "you can tell he's tired." Even too tired to remember. Hi most bookish book, in the sense of most academic. I mean, it's a good book - I didn't give up on it 3/4 of the way through like The Fatal Shore (at which point I also started getting the feeling he was tired). But Barcelona was a fucking great book.

Anyways, I'm sort of pissed off he's dead, even if he didn't really have any great books left in him and even if we weren't going to meet and have a chat. I've never seen Damien Hirst so ably bashed by someone people listened to.