They're starting to love me

Do I know my cows or what? After several weeks of dinging the bike bell and shouting cheerful greetings to my five new neighbors every morning – having given up on trying to get them to come over to me in the evening, when they can't see anything very well – they're now cautiously approaching the fence when I stop to tempt them with generous fistfuls of the luscious long meadow grass that grows just ever so slightly beyond their reach. This one actually accepted a mouthful from me the other day, thus initiating the next step in the glorious cycle of life: I feed you, and someday, maybe not so very long from now ... you will feed me.

Not that I'll ever eat any of these actual cows. But I do eat cows, on occasion. Given that, it seems like the least I can do is to take the time to get to know a few cows personally, and try to make their lives a little more enjoyable. Although as cows' lives go, these guys seem to have it pretty good, at least for now.

Sigh. Someday I do hope to be a vegetarian again. Maybe even a vegan. Or a raw food person! That would be the best and most ethical of all, I suppose. But for the moment I'm having a hard enough time keeping my blood healthy even including red meat in my diet. I'm also eating everything else I can find that has iron in it, plus continuing to take my supplements. And I finally dug up the tattered lab form on which my doctor, last October, wrote the instructions for the blood panel I'm supposed to submit to, to figure out why I'm always so anemic even though I eat pretty well. I will be going in for the tests next Tuesday morning.

When I was in Utah I asked my brother, who's a doctor, whether he thought it was possible I actually am eating enough iron, but just not absorbing it properly. He said it could be that, or it could be that I'm not getting as much iron as I think I am, or that I'm consuming and absorbing it okay, but losing too much each month with my period.

That had never occurred to me, but now that I think of it, it makes sense. Not to go into all the gruesome details, but I have always been a pretty heavy bleeder, and over the last three or four years have become even more of one. Like, to the point where I literally danced a little jig in Long's drugstore last week, because they have FINALLY started carrying the ultra-absorbent o.b.'s – which means that now, with one of those and a big fat night-time Gladrag, I should at last be able to sleep through the night without waking up the next morning in a pool of gore that would put Carrie White to shame. (Oops, I said no gruesome details.)

An aside: I know, I know about cloth pads vs. disposable products. Also the keeper, diva cup, sea sponges, bleeding into mother earth, and all the rest. I used only reusables for about fifteen years and am still kind of an evangelist for them. But when I moved in with a man who had never lived with a woman before, and who gets extremely woozy at the sight of even his own blood, I thought I'd break him in gently. Part of me thinks, hey, I'm a woman! And you know what? Women are bloody! But of course he already knows that. And he's so kind and protective of me when I'm bleeding, feeding me special vitamin-rich meals and warming up hot water bottles for me and rubbing my belly and feet – I just kind of feel like, why get all up in his face with the actual blood? Plus, now that I live in a house that has its own washing machine, there's really no need to leave them lying around soaking in big bowls of bloody red water.

Hrmm. All this makes me lonesome for my old cloth pads. I hardly ever see my own blood anymore. Maybe it is time to go back.

But the point of this whole discussion was that yes, I do lose an inordinate amount of blood each month, and it's possible this is why I'm anemic. My brother told me about a new-ish outpatient procedure in which they sort of heat up the inside of your uterus – not cauterization, less heat than that – which causes you to bleed less when the lining sheds. Or something like that. He also mentioned that it does not seem to affect fertility.

So it's good to know there are options, but in general I'm not a big fan of surgery. I underwent a cervical LEEP procedure about 13 years ago and it was the most painful thing I've ever been through – not the LEEP itself, but the big giant shots they gave me just before. I thought I'd prepared myself by spending hours in the university library reading medical books that told me I could expect to experience "some discomfort." I was going to breathe calmly and regularly, meditate on soothing images, take homeopathic doses of relaxing herbs, etc. ... all of which worked great until the foot-long needle went in, at which time I shocked myself and everyone else in the room by screaming like a grizzly bear getting its head cut off, and shaking so badly it took two people to help me stay on the table. Not too excited about going through anything like that again.

Anyhoo! Didn't this start out as a sweet little pastoral piece about feeding the cows? How did I end up here?