Tis' the season to write a grant (and other ramblings of my mind)

'Tis grant writing season at the Mayo Clinic.

Honestly, truly, positively, this is the most stressful part of my job -- by far.

My boss, Dr. K___ is submitting a grant to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Failure to get the grant onto a Fed Ex truck by Monday night will result in failure to get the millions of dollars from the NIH.

I called around this week. The last Fed Ex truck leaves Rochester at 9 p.m. That means that we now have just three full days to finish this sucker, bring it to the Fed Ex man, and wave to it as it leaves for Bethesda, MD -- home of the NIH.

Why do I hate grant writing? Let me count the ways:

• Deadlines. Deadlines stink. They ultimately create a reason to wait until the last minute. If the deadline was a day sooner, we would get the grant done a day sooner. So why can't we just pretend our deadline is earlier to eliminate the stress? Well, unfortunately, the other institutions, that we are waiting for information from, also know when our deadline is, and therefore respond accordingly.
• The NIH creates new rules and new forms and new criteria every year. You are supposed to, somehow, miraculously, keep up with every single new form and criteria and rule, and master these despite the fact that you only submit a grant once or maybe twice a year.
• Charts in Microsoft Word. Have you used these much? Those stupid things fly all over the place! I would love to use Publisher, however, we also use a reference manager (Endnote)which isn't friends with Publisher, and therefore forces me to yell at charts that disappear, hide behind tables, and get stuck in the dead space in between pages.
• Fatigue = poor performance. It's just how it is. The more tired I am, the more sick and tired of the grant I am, the more I manage to make mistakes in my editing.
• Researchers from other institutions who don't want to give stuff to us until T minus 3 days and counting. Everyone thinks that their multi-million dollar grant is more important than ours. Geesh.
• Long hours. I have done nearly 34 hours at Mayo during the last five days (Monday through Friday). It is now Saturday and I will probably do 4-5 hours today and tomorrow. That's 44 hours at a job I normally only put 24 hours into. RLSF works with me, and I do a lighter load for them, however, that is still a lot of hours. It flashes me back to coaching and teaching. How did I do that for so long? I have no idea.

Today, as I mentioned, is Saturday, and JB's brother Matt is returning to Florida this afternoon. I plan to work a few hours, then drive with JB and Matt up to Minneapolis, get some lunch, take Matt to the airport, and hopefully hit the MOA (Mall of America) for a few minutes. I need to look for some shoes for Keith and AD's wedding, and my foot size limits me to just a few stores. One of these stores in Nordstram's Rack in the MOA. I will also probably hit Tall Girl while I am there. They have pants longer than I need there! (I should, however, add a side note, that I HATE the name of this store. I just love walking around with a bag screaming my body size. Like people didn't know I was tall before I held this bag. I looked around but didn't see a store called Very Short Woman. I guess they do have a Big and Tall men's store. Okay, so I won't complain.)

Anyways, after our jaunt around the mall, I will probably head BACK to work at Mayo. Most likely, church will be out tomorrow as we return to try to polish this sucker off.

JB starts his Emergency Department (ED) rotation Monday. I think this should be a fun rotation for him. He gets to do an ambulance ride along and his shifts are only nine hours which means, even when he has a few overnights, he only has to be up a maximum of nine hours (instead of 36 or whatever it is.) The bad news is, he really doesn't get many days off, however, with those short shifts, I should be able to see him plenty.

Following the ED rotation, as I briefly mentioned before, he will be on a reproductive endocrinology rotation. This should be pretty interesting because this is the month that I will be doing all my "stuff". I am excited about JB taking a turn on this rotation. It is an elective which he chose for two reasons. One of the reasons is that it counts as a surgery elective. Now JB likes surgery, however, his surgery rotations have included surgeries that take 9-12 hours! That's a long time to stand there holding a retractor. Surgeries like the one I have take an hour or so and mean a lot less time on your feet.

I truly do not know how John did these long surgeries. You are scrubbed in so you can only scratch between a certain section of your body. You can't go to the bathroom. You can't sit down. I asked him once what he did during this time, and he said the ony thing you can do is try to imagine you are somewhere else. Now, one time, they were strapped for doctors, and JB was able to scrub in on a "whipple" (is this how you spell that JB?). He said that those hours FLEW by. But unfortunately, the people on down the totem pole, often end up holding a retractor for hours at a time. And I thought coaching a three hour basketball practice was bad! Yuck!

The other reason is that he gets experience with infertility, something he will see a lot of, unfortunately, as a family practice doctor. I also think he has a special gift now, of relating and talking to these women.

So now that I thoroughly jumped topics in this post, I might as well jump again, and discuss our next cycle which is about to start. We go in and see the doctor on Friday at 8 a.m. to sign off on all the surgery stuff and how many embryos we are going to fertilize (which we still haven't decided.) Ultimately, we would like to have at least 3-4 more chances with this next cycle. We feel like we should get more embryos since they will probably use the ICSI procedure for sure (although we don't have a "severe" male factor issue like this site talks about). So the question is, do we then still tell them to fertilize 14 with the hopes that instead of , like we got last time, we get more like 8-10? Or do we go up a little bit or even drop a bit? We have to talk to the doctor a bit before we make this decision.

I must admit that at this point, it is to difficult to imagine that IVF can work. However, I know many women who got pregnant after 3, 4, and 5 tries. Either way, we both decided that we feel like 2 1/2 tries isn't really enough to adequately say that we have to give up on IVF. The whole time we have done this, we have tried to not let money be a deciding factor (and JB is much stronger about this than I am). I don't want to ever say that we didn't try again because it cost too much and that wasn't worth it. I don't think we will ever feel like our child isn't worth this money if the procedure works. I do know my approach to this next cycle is different. While I am excited, I am guarded.

Well I should take a shower, quit boring you, and head into Mayo. I'm sure I'll write more about IVF during the next four weeks, as we prepare to go at this again.