the_modernity_ward reviews

And the Winner Is...

Bridget! One DNA test kit for you, kitten. I'll forward your info to 23andMe and they'll work out the details with you. Congratulations!

For purposes of disclosure, names were written on a piece of scribbled-on scrap paper, placed in an empty Marshmallow Fluff tub (I had to take out my bag of Trader Joe's UFOs, which for the uninitiated are little nubbins of dark chocolate mint heaven)(and then I had to eat a bunch), shaken around a lot, and then the winner was drawn.

Actually, the real winner here was me, because OH MY GOD I am just like all of you! I stink and I take on the accent of whomever I'm talking to (oh dear Lord, you should have heard what happened in Nashville) and I fall down all the time and stuff.

So thank you for all that.

Anyway, congratulations to Bridget, and the rest of yez can come over here and have some minty chocolate things with me. Alternately, you can order your own kit with a handy $50 off code:

8NHKRD

That's good for the first ten people who use it, before midnight on Friday, June 26. Good times, kids!

You Know You Want It

So! This is my last 23andMe post, and here's your reward for reading through my paid content: you get (a chance to win) a prize! I mean, besides the sense of smug self-satisfaction one usually gets from reading such challenging material as a Modernity Ward blog post. Ahem. Anyway.

To win a free 23andMe DNA test, here is your quest: Tell me, in the comments section, what most hilariously embarrassing trait you possess that you hope and pray is genetic, because the thought that either 1) it's just you, and you're alone in having toenails that smell like a neglected litterbox or 2) compulsively scratching your treasure trail is a learned behavior and has no genetic component -- well, it's just way too much for you to handle.

Yeah, not even 23andMe can test for that. Still, I'll do a random drawing of all the commenters, and winner will get a free spit kit. Official rules here. EDITED TO ADD: Forgot to specify an end-date -- let's say 6 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, June 22.

I Got All My Sisters with Me

As I write this I'm sitting in my mother's living room. My sisters, my mother, a couple of husbands, forty-three children (well, four, but the two who are not babies managed to open enough cans of seltzer to hydrate thirty-nine small people). Right now I'm wishing I had a 23andMe spit kit for every single one of them, so that we could discern once and for all whether what's genetic and what's just...Jo being Jo. I'm the dark horse when it comes to eye color, so I guess I could have been the genetic loser when it comes to Guitar Hero. Sure. Genetics. That's why I suck at Guitar Hero. Moving on.

So: back to those kids. I have two, each sister has one, and they sort of stairstep in age: four, three, one, four months. We've never been the kind of sisters who look like different-sized copies of each other; we have different coloring, different builds, different personalities. Seen in a photograph, we resemble each other very little -- but in motion, we're obviously related. It's all in the expressions, the way we move our faces and bodies when we talk, the sound of our voices. There's been a similar effect in our pregnancies. Bridget and I put on weight in the same places and at approximately the same rate -- if you held up pictures of us at 38 weeks, heads cropped out, you wouldn't be able to tell who was who. Well, as long as we weren't standing by anything by which to compare size -- she was starting from a size Very Small and I was starting from a, well, kind of an Extra Medium. The end product was similarly disparate in size, although in overall shape very much the same.

My second pregnancy was pretty different from my first -- I won't say radically because both were by and large uneventful, but the second time I only gained about thirty pounds and had that coveted "all-belly" look...exactly like my sister Gretchen's pregnancy. I have no earthly idea how that would relate to genetics -- since I had two totally different pregnancies -- but both matched up with a sisterly pregnancy. In every case, we all had some mild to moderate nausea, maybe some sciatica, but no other real problems. No preeclampsia, no blood pressure problems, no gestational diabetes (well, assuming I didn't have it last time. Which I do. Assume, I mean).

More striking is the similarity between the children. Of course there's that little matter of fatherly DNA contributed -- credit where credit is due -- but our babies were all on the big side, fattened up quickly, and were(are!) strong little truck-babies to boot. Each one was holding up his or her head by about day two, hitting the physical milestones ahead of schedule, easy to handle thanks to good muscle tone from the beginning. Half our sample has yet to walk or talk much, so it's too soon to make inferences on that count, but it seems that babies are a certain way in our family, and that's solid and chunky.

Kind of like one of the mamas. Ahem. And now that particular mama has to return to the crushing defeat of Guitar Hero, and pine for the simpler days of the Nineties, when there was time for Klax. Sigh

All Up in My Genome

My biggest concern when I sent off that little vial of spit to the 23andMe lab didn't have much to do with what I might learn about myself. Most of the big genetic bugaboos -- Parkinson's, diabetes of both flavors, breast cancer -- will have already made their familial presence known. Since I have a pretty good idea of what exactly is wrong with every single person in my extended family, and it ain't just diabetes, I didn't figure any nasty surprises awaited me in the results of the genetic analysis.

No, I was worried about privacy.

That may come as a shock to any of you familiar with the Grand Central Station of Oversharing that is my blog, but I wanted to know who was going to have access to this information. In-house scientists? Telemarketers? Insurance companies? Ex-boyfriends with boundary issues? How would 23andMe use my genetics for research without spilling the beans?

As it turns out, when genetic information (and phenotypic information that I submit in surveys) is used for research, it's divorced from my identity, so that's no problem. And the contracted lab doing the analysis doesn't have my identifying information, just a barcode (that 23andMe can associate with my identity, but layers of privacy blah blah blah so I don't worry about it). Okay then. So no fears of, say, being denied insurance coverage because of my genes -- which is the possible bad outcome everybody seems to bring up when genetic analysis hits the news. (Although, hello? Socialized medicine will nullify at least that concern. I'll just sit here holding my breath, mmkay?)

Anyway, my insurance company already thinks I'm diabetic. Fill one little insulin-sensitizing prescription regularly for five years, and the ideas they get! There's nothing I can say to them that will stop their Giant Pamphlet-Barfing Machine from sending me cheery red-and-white brochures depicting smiling elderly people enjoying a brisk walk.

Which leaves the power of disclosure pretty much in my hands. And you can see what direction that's taken. Does that trouble me? Well, no; although in my case it hasn't been a difficult decision. I'm extremely fortunate that genetically, anyway, there's not too much terribly wrong with me, and I'm not exactly taking a big risk sharing my slightly increased risk of developing Type II diabetes. You know, since you kind of already knew that, with the PCOS and all. There's not too much at stake for me. But what if I did have something uglier lurking in the A's and G's and T's and C's?

This is me we're talking about, so I'd probably blare it far and wide. A habit of broadcasting events that are not ordinarly considered community happenings -- say, childbirth -- has left me with as much modesty as a woman with a baby hanging halfway out her hoo-ha, or alternately a very drunk college student. (The two have more in common than you'd think: there is a lot of yelling, it's hard to walk, both will later be referred to as "the totally most meaningful thing of like my entire life".) I don't mind anyone knowing what there is to know about my genes. And honestly, I don't understand why it should be such a huge problem -- after all, your genome is one of the few things you're really not responsible for! If your eyes are blue, you're lactose intolerant, you're prone to psoriasis, hey! It's really not your fault! The great thing about genes is that they aren't moral failings!

Except...well, except that the above is a luxuriously post-eugenics viewpoint, no? But I refuse to lend the slightest bit of credence to any system of thought that dictates otherwise, so I'll stand by my statement: genes aren't moral failings. The fun and the mystery of the genome is as close as this ex-Presbyterian wants to get to predestination. If personal genome testing ever hits the mainstream, becoming something as common as a cholesterol check, I hope it nudges our culture into accepting that blame for one's personal, genetically driven health misfortune has no place in medicine.

Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children?

Another 23andMe post!

One of the more interesting things about producing children who are biologically yours is that you get to see the combining of your genome with somebody else's, the tug-of-war for dominance and co-dominance that provides you, a brown-eyed, brown-haired mother, with two blue-eyed dark-blonde girls. They have similar coloring thus far, those girls, but look to my eye pretty different otherwise. Sophia looks like Sean from the nose up, and maybe a little of me in the smile (final shape of nose TBD), with curly dark blonde hair like her grandmother and like my little sister. Blue eyes like everyone in Sean's family, and my sisters. Skin like skim milk, and that's definitely the Eastern European side. Daphne's eyes are sort of mid-blue, hair a light brown, but the shape of her features are 100% me and my own mother. Her skin looks darker than Sophia's, so maybe she'll tan brown as a berry, as they used to say of me. (And yes, I check my moles regularly now.)

And that's just the surface rendering, the phenotype, the tiny percentage of the genome that shows up to the naked eye. Did Sophia get my tendency toward Type II diabetes? Is Daphne going to be resistant to norovirus? So far Sophia has had one obvious case of rotavirus and one other stomach bug -- that's all, in her whole life! -- so maybe she's got that resistance. Are they, like me, free of the BRCA mutations (the ones that 23andMe tests for) that suggest a greater risk of breast and ovarian cancer?

I don't know, of course. And I don't have any plans to find out. Granted, it would be hard to get a three-year-old to comply with the whole spitting-in-a-cup procedure, but even if a mere eyelash was all that was required, I wouldn't sign them up for genetic analysis.

At first I felt differently. There's no harm in it, obviously, and I don't have to share that information with them until they're ready. And more importantly, genetics aren't destiny. All those things are still true -- but I want to save this choice for them, when they get older. If they want to learn about their genome beyond what I can tell them and what they experience, that's great. But it needs to be their choice. As a mother I know my daughters intimately in some ways, and not at all in others; this will be something they decide for themselves, whether and how and when to open that box.

Of course, I've already gone over my own results with my parents -- prompting my mother to do some genealogical research that unearthed a Mayflower family -- and clearly I don't mind sharing the juicy bits with The Whole Wide Internet. But again, it's all been my choice. I'm glad I got to make it for myself.

Come On, Get Haplo

Let us now take a break from the more controversial medical aspects of genotyping to talk about the fun part: ancestry! Well, not that learning I'm probably lactose intolerant wasn't fun. But it's more fun for me, unless you happen to share a bathroom with me. Which, by the way, you're welcome, Sean. And Sophia. Who recently inquired as to what I had been up to in the bathroom, and when I informed her, told me, "Well, I didn't smell it." So let's drop another quarter in the therapy jar and move on.

So. Ancestry! More accurately, the maternal haplogroup. (The who?) From 23andMe's website:

Haplogroups are families of mitochondrial DNA types that all trace back to a single mutation at a specific place and time. Technically, every new mutation creates a new haplogroup, but geneticists only label the ones that help them trace significant events in human prehistory, such as the migration of people to the Americas or the expansion of agriculture from the Near East.

Okay. So what you get is a representation of the purely female line of your genes -- your mother's mother's mother's et cetera mother. Your own personal Eve, kinda. The female mirror image of the paternal name lines of western Europe. Mine is:

U5b1c. Again, from 23andMe:

Haplogroup U5 arose among early colonizers of Europe around 40,000 years ago; maternal descendants of those early colonizers persist in the region to this day. After the last Ice Age two subgroups of U5 expanded across Europe and into northern Africa and the Near East.

Neat, yes? And then there's a world map showing the distribution of that haplogroup circa 500 years ago. For some reason I can't get it in here, but it's concentrated in the northern reaches of Scandinavia and shades down into western Europe, with a few outposts in north Africa and eastern Europe. Included with the U5 haplogroup are Lapps and Berbers, although they're not in my particular branch.

Here's where the forums are useful -- you get to find people with whom you share a haplogroup and learn about their ancestry, see how it compares to yours. Most of my maternal line (and paternal too) is Scotch Irish, and a lot of the other U5 people seem to be Irish or from the British Isles, which makes sense if you consider Viking invasion. Of course this haplogroup division represents something that happened 40,000 years ago -- we're talking pulses of people moving around the ice sheets as they wax and wane, encountering Neanderthals, moving south and back north again. It won't tell you about your great-great-grandfather who emigrated from County Down (just as a for-example) -- this is deeper history.

And frankly it appeals to the Clan of the Cave Bear fan in me. Because dude, that totally could have been me! Who singlehandedly invented, like, language and fire and weapons and childbirth! But really, this is some of the most fascinating research to me -- and the place I want to delve into more when I have a chance.

Let's Get Critical

It's entirely appropriate that we as a society subject new technologies to questions of ethics and risk vs. benefit analysis. For example, see comments on my last 23andMe post:

I can't articulate it very well (still), but I find it so strange that you and others of my favorite bloggers are advertising for this company. I get the intrigue with knowing something about your genes, but it also seems so iffy and potentially Brave New World and like something you might in other circumstances be really critical of. Can you write about why you're ok with working for them, or whether you have any qualms?

Posted by: caro | 04/22/2009 at 05:13 PM

I'm very against this whole thing -- it's soooo not ready for prime time. You're super smart, Jo (and you too, Cecily), and very able to understand some of these risk estimates (which, actually, some very smart people can't), but genetic testing for most illnesses is still in its infancy/ experimental phase. The potential for harm seems quite large -- people altering their behavior on what very well could be completely erroneous information. Eating fewer carbs isn't going to hurt anyone, but, say, continuing to smoke because your reading says you're unlikely to get heart disease or cancer would be.

...

Information is power, but misinformation is danger, and right now at least some of these interpretations are definitely misinformation.

...

Posted by: DoctorMama | 04/21/2009 at 10:54 AM

So let's talk about this, shall we?

As soon as personal genome analysis hit the market, I was fascinated -- I remember reading about it years ago, and thinking how cool it would be to get a gander at my mitochondrial DNA. That was my main reason for signing up as quickly and as enthusiastically as I did for the 23andMe service: the possibility of a look deep into the past, to the best of our ability to interpret the data. The other stuff, well, that came later.

A child of friends was in the hospital recently. His father, a scientist, marveled at the state of treatment at the most respected children's hospital in the country: "There's just so much we don't know." That's a phrase I hear again and again, with respect to the origins of PCOS, the development of Alzheimer's, so many different conditions about which we know a lot more than we did ten years ago but whose geneses remain largely in the dark. There's just so much we don't know.

For me, that's been the appropriate way to approach the question of personal genome analysis. It's a practice still in its infancy, as DoctorMama rightly points out. And in a world where the majority of people don't know how to interpret weather probabilities, the little nibble of information you get about, say, your chances of developing Type II diabetes can be baffling. 23andMe has made geneticists available for us to talk to about these things, which I think would be an absolute necessity for anybody who hasn't had a few statistics classes, but I also think this is the kind of information people need to take to their physicians. Having a slightly lower risk of developing diabetes doesn't mean you won't ever get it -- and having an increased risk doesn't mean that you will. And absolutely no gene will protect you fully from the effects dangerous things like smoking. Or, you know, inhaling asbestos or driving 110 mph without a seatbelt. Just because I'm resistant to norovirus doesn't mean I eat my cereal out of a preschool toilet.

Here's another example. My genes say that I carry a decreased risk of developing OCD -- but I did exactly that after Sophia was born. One genetic marker suggests a decreased risk for asthma, and another suggests an increased risk. Does that mean I break even and have an average risk? Does it even matter? Either way, I have asthma. I carry two markers that suggest I will have babies of typical birth weight (neither lighter nor heavier than average), and I had one 8 pound 3 ounce baby, and one 9 pound 10 ounce baby. Did I have gestational diabetes the second time? I do carry a marker for increased chances of developing GD. But I didn't get tested, so we'll never know.

Clearly, genes are not our destiny entire. We are complex beings composed of an interaction between our genome and our environment, with a little mystery thrown in if you like that sort of thing. Does this mean genetic analysis is useless? Of course not. It means it's a tiny little piece of the picture, a piece that will be more and more useful as we (general we) gather more and more evidence. I want to participate in the research because I think it's useful, I trust my own ability to interpret the evidence (with expert help as needed), and I find it fascinating as heck.

But that's just me.

Like High-Waisted, Pleated, Tapered-Leg, Acid-Wash Denim: Some Seriously Bad Genes

Although judging from what I see around Rittenhouse Square and the pages of fashion mags these days, that opinion may once again be in the minority. Gross. Anyway.

Familial jokes about heritable body odor aside, I seem to have done pretty well for myself in the inherited conditions department. (Excepting the body odor. 23andMe doesn’t yet provide analysis for what we call the E Gene, for Uncle Everett, admired far and wide for his eye-wateringly terrible pitstink, but I hereby offer up my genome to the search.) When it comes to Parkinson’s, Crohn’s, Rheumatoid Arthritis, I’m all Typical to Reduced Risk. Huzzah! But there’s one great big insulin-resistant elephant in the genetic room, and that would be...

Type II Diabetes. Dun-dun-dunnnnnn!

If you’ve been here at the Modernity Ward for long, you know that the whole reason I started blogging has to do with my Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.  Blah blah no periods, blah blah facial hair, INFERTILITY INFERTILITY, metformin low-carb two kids. Ta-da.

It should have come as no shock to me, with my family history of Type II Diabetes (maternal grandpa, paternal lots of people) and, oh, CONDITION THAT HAS BEEN LINKED TO DIABETES that I carry a genetically increased risk of developing Type II. Still, there was a sinking feeling in my gut when I saw it pop up in forbidding red type. It’s a lot easier to avoid thinking about the possible sequelae of insulin resistance when it’s not blaring from your monitor. I always knew it was a theoretical risk, but diabetes always seemed so far away.

Thankfully the facts are not nearly so horrifying. While on average, 21.9 out of 100 people will develop Type II Diabetes, those with my genotype develop it at a rate of 30.9 out of 100. A significant increase, statistically speaking, but not so enormous as to be a death sentence. More important, the heritability of Type II Diabetes is estimated to be about 26%. Does that mean the other 74% of the equation is within my control? Not really. While 23andMe’s explanation notes that “environmental factors” play a large role in who develops diabetes, they list the following as environmental factors:

“...obesity, gestational diabetes, giving birth to at least one baby weighing nine pounds or more, high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol levels, physical inactivity, polycystic ovarian syndrome, other clinical conditions associated with insulin resistance, a history of impaired glucose tolerance or impaired fasting glucose, and a history of cardiovascular disease.”

Bolding mine. Those are all things I have done/had/seen on the lab sheet, and while they might play into whether I actually develop diabetes at some point, they’re not exactly independent from diabetes in the first place. I mean, they’re all facets of the same problem, with insulin and inflammation at the center, and maybe some other single factor underlying even that. So it’s not like if can just keep my cholesterol down and, you know, not have another horse baby, I’ll lessen my chances of becoming diabetic. It’s that the appearance of those bolded factors in my own life is telling me that yes indeedy, I am on the Acela to injectable insulin if I don’t watch those carbs. This applies to me. No getting around it.

And as terrifying as that is, it’s awfully useful information to have. Ass-kickingly useful.

What I suspect, and what I’d love to see some data on someday, is whether those “environmental factors” listed above ride right alongside diabetes in the genome. I keep putting “environmental factors” in quotes because the term implies something separate from the diabetes, but I think they’re all just best buddies, diabetes and bad cholesterol and PCOS, and they like to hang out together flirting with the carhops at the drive-in and drag-racing their T-birds and smoking. And I’d like some scientific confirmation on that.

Better than Sassy

 Maybe it's the result of a teen-hood spent lying on friend's beds or camp bunks with my legs up on the wall, filling out quiz after quiz in Sassy, YM, and Seventeen, but my thirst for self-knowledge -- the kind that can only be imparted by an outside source -- is nigh unquenchable. What kind of girlfriend am I? What fragrance? My answers were mostly Bs! Tell me, glossy vehicle for cosmetic advertisements, tell me who I am!

The genetic analysis I got from 23andMe scratches that same itch. Except with actual research behind it instead of, say, a copy room full of Diet Coked interns, the results are a heck of a lot more interesting. And, to my pleasant surprise, even more fun than learning which New Kid on the Block was my best soul mate. The most amazing thing to me is how, as these genetic traits were revealed, a whole lot of things suddenly made a lot of sense.

There's a huge data mine I have at my disposal with which to entertain you (a good thing, since I'm running out of vajayjay-related stories now that the baby is safely out), some of it of a weightier medical nature, but I want to start with the curiosities first. I was expecting data about things like relative cancer and diabetes risk (and we'll get to that in another post, believe you me), but I didn't expect to learn that...

• ...I am resistant to norovirus. Which explains why, when everyone else in the world is hugging porcelain, I'm bopping along as happy as you please, saying things like, "Drink a lot of fluids!" and "Are you gonna eat that?" I suspect Sophia may have inherited this resistance as well, since she picks up every cold that zings through preschool, but never  gets the pukey diarrhetic illnesses. Knock porcelain.  While I may not fall prey to the wily norovirus, there's another surefire way to banish me to the latrine. According to the analysis, I'm...

• likely to be lactose intolerant. My first thought was, Ha! I sure dodged that bullet!   Then I remembered how, when we lived in Princeton, New Jersey, Awesome Ice Cream Capital of the World, I had a mental map of every public bathroom within sprinting distance of all ice cream shops. Yes, kids, I think the genes may explain that which I had chalked up to Irritable Bowel/coffee/metformin. I haven't eaten a lot of dairy in years, thanks to low-carbing and elimination diets (kid with eczema, does seem to be dairy-aggravated), but when I do, it's so long, Susan to whatever was hanging out in my digestive tract. So sprint I must.

• Fortunately for me, I happen to be a sprinter. What, you didn't know? If you've met me you know me to favor orthopedic-looking "comfortable" shoes and knees that creak like a haunted house. But! "Sprinter" in this case refers to athletic performance -- more specifically, to a certain protein in fast-twitch muscle fibers. And boy, do my fast-twitch muscle fibers rock. Which explains why I'm so awesome at short-term high-power endeavors (like hustling a stroller up stairs with a child in it) but not so good in the endurance department.

• So remember back to the lactose and the huge quantities of milk I can't drink? Well, one of the few places I kept on using dairy was in coffee. Cream or at least fatty milk was paramount to cut the bitterness of the coffee, although for some heretofore mysterious reason I would immediately have to dash for the ladies'. But wait! Says my genome. You, young lady, have an 80% chance of not being able to taste certain flavors, mostly bitter.  Well, nuts to that, I say. Or partial nuts. I don't know. I can taste the bitterness of coffee and beer, but brussel sprouts taste fine. There are other genes at work here, and apparently I have the ones I need to detect some bitter flavors. I wonder about Sophia, though. That child loves coffee and beer, broccoli and kalamata olives, every weird, bitter thing you'd think a kid would hate. (Look, it's not like we're feeding her a sippy full of beer; she goes trolling for unattended bottles and coffee cups. The price of a child who can't taste bitterness or at least doesn't mind it: Eternal vigilance.)

So there you have it. It's not my moral superiority that keeps me from getting the trots when everybody else does; I can't blame the metformin for the "EVERYBODY OUT!" routine my GI tract does when confronted with a milkshake. It's genetic. And it all makes sense now.

Next time: The Party Gets Serious. And then a whole slew of pregnancy-related issues, which is pretty much all of them.

I Spat. And HOW!

So I got this tidy little green box in the mail back in December, all cleverly packaged with a tube of...um, I’m not sure, but it was waiting for my spit, and some directions, and a hole to stick the tube in while I was spitting. Don’t worry, it wasn’t some crazy internet stalker thing (he prefers used Kleenex in sealed Ziplocs); it was a genetic testing kit from 23andMe. Yes, internets, I am offering up my genome for your amusement. Pictures of my kids and stretch marks just weren’t personal enough, so I’m contributing some DNA to science. For you, internets. All for you.

I was prepared to spend at least ten minutes milking my salivary glands for spit. The directions in the cute little green box said that as long as I had finished spitting within fifteen minutes, things would be kosher, and while it felt strange to be disobeying my own direct orders as a mom (“Would you for the love of God STOP SPITTING PLEASE! AND GET YOUR FINGER OUT OF YOUR NOSE!”) it was also strangely satisfying to drool into a funnel. After all, it’s something I apparently do for free all day long, and frankly it was the least humiliating and/or messy medical test to which I have been subjected in a long time. I didn’t have to take my pants off (okay, so maybe I did take them off, but only because they were so very uncomfortable. Nobody MADE me.), no lube or wand-like devices were inserted into any orifices, and best of all, the only strangers involved were thousands of miles away. So I guess I really didn’t need to say anything about the pants. Hi, lab techs! Ha ha ha! Eh heh. Whoo.

The hardest part of the whole spit kit experience was finding – nay, forcing – a thirty-minute window of not eating, drinking, smoking, or chewing anything. Hey, look here, pal: try being 39 weeks pregnant and not eating anything because you can’t fit more than a single piece of peanut butter fudge – no, um, I mean, a flaxseed and kale biscuit -- into your stomach at one time, or drinking anything because you are SO THIRSTY OH MY GOD, or chewing a Tums or maybe a nice plug of chaw!

Oh dear, I’ve said too much.

So I sacrificed a half-hour of perfectly good Hanukkah cookie eating time, and yet was sufficiently hydrated to fill up a tube with spit. If that doesn’t impress you, I don’t know what will.

And then? I waited. After all, I’m no stranger to waiting on the results of genetic tests; I’ve waited on the most awesome kind for, oh, about 42 weeks. Was it worth the wait? Oh, my, yes. I’ll keep you posted.

So I got this tidy little green box in the mail back in December, all cleverly packaged with a tube of...um, I’m not sure, but it was waiting for my spit, and some directions, and a hole to stick the tube in while I was spitting. Don’t worry, it wasn’t some crazy internet stalker thing (he prefers used Kleenex in sealed Ziplocs); it was a genetic testing kit from 23andMe. Yes, internets, I am offering up my genome for your amusement. Pictures of my kids and stretch marks just weren’t personal enough, so I’m contributing some DNA to science. For you, internets. All for you.

I was prepared to spend at least ten minutes milking my salivary glands for spit. The directions in the cute little green box said that as long as I had finished spitting within fifteen minutes, things would be kosher, and while it felt strange to be disobeying my own direct orders as a mom (“Would you for the love of God STOP SPITTING PLEASE! AND GET YOUR FINGER OUT OF YOUR NOSE!”) it was also strangely satisfying to drool into a funnel. After all, it’s something I apparently do for free all day long, and frankly it was the least humiliating and/or messy medical test to which I have been subjected in a long time. I didn’t have to take my pants off (okay, so maybe I did take them off, but only because they were so very uncomfortable. Nobody MADE me.), no lube or wand-like devices were inserted into any orifices, and best of all, the only strangers involved were thousands of miles away. So I guess I really didn’t need to say anything about the pants. Hi, lab techs! Ha ha ha! Eh heh. Whoo.

The hardest part of the whole spit kit experience was finding – nay, forcing – a thirty-minute window of not eating, drinking, smoking, or chewing anything. Hey, look here, pal: try being 39 weeks pregnant and not eating anything because you can’t fit more than a single piece of peanut butter fudge – no, um, I mean, a flaxseed and kale biscuit -- into your stomach at one time, or drinking anything because you are SO THIRSTY OH MY GOD, or chewing a Tums or maybe a nice plug of chaw!

Oh dear, I’ve said too much.

So I sacrificed a half-hour of perfectly good Hanukkah cookie eating time, and yet was sufficiently hydrated to fill up a tube with spit. If that doesn’t impress you, I don’t know what will.

And then? I waited. After all, I’m no stranger to waiting on the results of genetic tests; I’ve waited on the most awesome kind for, oh, about 42 weeks. Was it worth the wait? Oh, my, yes. I’ll keep you posted.