Breaking news from the Gosh, I Need A Life department:

I just realized today that I've come to recognize the various chewing sounds the dogs make. Emma, especially, tends to lay on the floor behind my recliner and chew whatever's close at hand. The Nylabones are very hard plastic (AND bacon flavored, might I add), and they make an appropriately irritating tooth-on-bone scraping sound when being gnawed. Rope, the dogs' beloved rope bone, squeaks as the fibers are pulled between Emma's teeth. Hot Dog Squeaky toy is a rubber squeaky toy, so that's not hard to figure out. Oh....And when Rabbit is treated for his numerous dog-induced injuries and sent back to the front lines, well, he's easy to discern thanks to the squeakers embedded his body.

The wisdom of this last toy was obvious after Emma systematically destroyed three other fuzzy squeaky toys. Rabbit has very long legs and ears, providing an excellent flop factor, as I dubbed it. He can be shaken roughly by any appendage or ear and he has a suitable dead-animal flop the dogs both seem to enjoy. (How do they fling their heads and necks around like that without getting a major dislocation, anyway!?) The second reason Rabbit was an exellent choice is the three separate squeakers in his body: one in his ample midsection, and one each in one foot and one hand. The advantage of this redundancy? Even if the dogs dismember this fella, they still have at least three squeaky toys, nomatter how odd the parts look when separated from the whole.

Any other sound - especially that which sounds like plastic wrap, tinfoil, plastic yogurt cups, tuna cans or, worse, like something too small to produce anything but lip-smacking sounds - is cause for immediate investigation. A twist tie or paperclip, though fun, can be deadly.

I found out from my second doctor's appointment that the discrepancy in my ultrasound versus the CT-scan is almost surely due to adhesions (scar tissue) that have formed at the site of a 1992 surgery. An ultrasound does not show them, but a CT-scan does. It's nice to know my pain is validated -- this has been going on for more than two years and getting worse, and it hasn't just been my imagination or low pain tolerance.

Anyway, I go back to see the surgeon on July 25, and by then this OB/GYN will have spoken with him and discussed what the best course of action will be for me. I wonder now if the surgeon will be able to do the surgery as outpatient. The hernia is up high, just above my belly button, but the adhesions are very low in my abdomen and in my pelvic area. So....I guess I just wait and find that out next Friday. It's my birthday, incidently, and I just can't wait to sit in a waiting room on my birthday, LOL. ;) But I do feel relieved after seeing the OB/GYN this week and hearing what she said.

I have to say, I have the best husband in the world, too. He went with me to the OB/GYN's office, not only to the waiting room, but to the exam room as well. I was really nervous and didn't know what to expect to hear, so he was willing to brave the estrogen-laden environs and be my ever-lovin' support. His only complaint was the glaringly obvious lack of mens magazines. He forgot to bring his computer geek magazines with him, so he instead perused the titles on the tables in the waiting room.

There were oodles of ladies' magazines strewn about on the tables: Child, Parent, Town & Country, Working Mother, Fit Pregnancy...But not an Outdoor Life or Car & Driver to be found! Not even a People Magazine, that staple of doctor office waiting rooms everywhere! What is UP with that? Surely a few men darken their doorstep every week, and why shouldn't they have something to occupy their minds while conversations around them drift toward things like When was your last period? How long did you bleed? How heavy was the flow? and other frank discussions of feminine hygiene and parts.

My man really did make a sacrafice. ;)