Bionic

Wow.

I actually slept. After my usual five or six hours, I closed my eyes and slept again. First time in a month and a half. I'm a new woman.

A cool thing in my day yesterday: I met a soul sister. She showed up in the guise of medical student, trailing a patient on her journey through the clinic protocol. We have med students come through the clinic all the time, but rarely do they turn out to be superheroes. Lucky for me, I happened to be the counselor for the patient this particular student was trailing, because after observing my counseling, we got to talking, and boy do we have much in common. Blogging, for one (she is BionOc, proprietor of Bionic Octopus) but also we both had divorce on the heels of infertility, along with subsequent, and simultaneous, babies or not wranglings. And deep thinking about abortion and the abortion discourse.

"Saying there should be less abortion is like saying there should be less use of the jaws of life," BionOc said, or something close to it. "It misplaces the wrong. There should be less car accidents. There should be less unwanted pregnancy. But there's nothing wrong with the jaws of life. And there's nothing wrong with abortion. It isn't a 'tragedy', as we hear so often, even among pro-choicers." I agreed with this, but from the counselor perspective, added, "But for some women who have abortions, it is a tragedy. And they need to be allowed to grieve without turning the pain in on themselves, blaming themselves for the lack of help they had thinking about birth control, or the lack of support society would've given them if they chose to go through with the pregnancy."

It's a conversation I hope to, and plan to continue. Another new person I hope and plan to get to know. I acknowledge that this might be difficult. She is an overworked med student, after all. But luckily for me, I'm not overly isolated and tragically depressed. And I'm not afraid to be persistent.

A lot can change in just a few weeks.