Finally feeling better--at last!

It certainly took long enough! Good grief!

Just an update to let ya'll know how I am. Better. Much better. And when I compare me now to me last year, I can't believe how much better I'm doing and how much better I'm feeling. My brain no longer feels like it's been hit with a shovel. Try it sometime. That will replicate just part of the feeling. That, and dropping without warning into a deep chasm...just walking along, doot doo doo, la la la, shovel, chasm. Or was it chasm, shovel? I think it was more like chasm, shovel. Started to collect myself and CLANG!!!

My point. My point? My point is, don't try this at home, kids. I really could have used some warning on this whole grief thing. Even a day to brace myself, I think, would have helped the whole cognitive dissonance/generalized WTF?!?!? sensation. I'm trying to describe it from a year and four months later. For some reason it's gotten harder to keep count. I've never been good at counting. Or math. I have downright dyscalculia (like dyslexia, but for math), frankly, and I'd get it officially diagnosed if I had the grand it would take to do so. Always have, but the whole mental rescrambling that grief has done to my brain hasn't exactly helped.

Life in general. It's better. I am actually feeling motivated to--get this!--wear lip gloss. OMG. What a step. A year ago any form of makeup, even lip gloss (at least of any color) seemed like a complete waste of time. Getting ogled at the beach actually annoyed me. No, not just annoyed. It made me mad. It made me mad that it wasn't Nelson to look that way at me, and that he wouldn't be there to look that way at me any more, and these random guys were a poor substitute.

Right now? I think I'd be more like, eh, who cares. So that's progress of a sort. I suppose.

I also wore an actual bracelet to church. A fancy silver cuff, from India, which I bought back in the '90s when both silver and gold were cheaper and when I had actual money (ah....money....for incidental expenses!). I've pondered doing such things before but this was the first time I felt motivated enough to actually act on it. I think that means something. I don't know what.

Also, unlike last year, I can contemplate dating a guy who isn't Nelson without feeling nauseated. Yes, last year (the first year) I would literally feel sick to my stomach at the thought of dating another guy. Now...I can at least ponder the idea. The thought of acting on it still feels like too much work. I have too much else to do right now. I need to get a job. I need to get my hospital chaplaincy training (CPE) application in. I need to get the other aspects of my life restarted. I need to take care of me before I start thinking about being with somebody else. It just seems like good emotional housekeeping. 

I'm not judging anybody who does/did it a different way. We're all in more or less the same boat, but we didn't all come from the same starting point, and things pan out slightly (sometimes very) different for everybody depending on all kinds of things. So I'm not being judgy. I'm just saying this is where I am right now. I'm just trying to take this thing one day at a time. I pretty much went "Splat!" I'm rebuilding. That's how it is.

I'm going to close by telling you one cool and very healing thing I've been doing this week, and that's going to the church services for the beginning of Great Lent. In the Orthodox Church, Great Lent (as opposed to Christmas Lent/Advent) starts on Monday, not Wednesday, and the whole first week of Lent is called Clean Week. Clean Monday, Clean Tuesday, etc. From Clean Monday through Clean Thursday, we celebrate a service that includes a wonderful hymn called the Canon of St Andrew of Crete. It's a hymn of repentence that includes scriptural examples from both the Old and New Testaments. It's really amazing how much scripture it covers. (I'm a church nerd, I like this stuff.) It's called Clean Week because Lent is kind of the Spring Cleaning of the soul. I like that idea. :)

The main hymn of the service was one that was going through my head a lot after Nelson died. I mean, it was going through my head pretty much constantly. And I never got to sing it last year--I missed the services since I was too much of a space cadet to figure out that they were having them in my area.

But this year, I've been going to the services and singing with the choir every night, and this hymn has been giving me chills every time. Every time. I love it! It goes like this:

My soul, my soul, arise!  Why are you sleeping?  The end is drawing near, and you will be confounded.  Awake, then, and, be watchful, that Christ our God may spare you, Who is everywhere present and fills all things.

I will close with the main refrain of the Canon, which is sung after every verse. Really, it is at the heart of Orthodox Christianity.

Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me.

If I have offended any of you, or given you any hurt, please forgive me.

It's been a rough month.

Really, really rough.

I'm on my fourth round of antibiotics. Two of them this time, twice daily. To go all month. Still on them.

And just at the point that I was starting to feel a little better, I caught my younger nephew's cold/stomach virus. I've been dizzy and nauseated all week. Which has been making taking the antibiotics a challange. Heck, everything's a challenge.

I applied for unemployment at the beginning of the month. Had to have a phone interview last week. Did I get it? I'll find out via letter. Soon, I hope.

I need a job. I need to move out. Things have got to change. Maybe I can couchsurf somewhere. I have just got to find some breathing room. My parents keep ratcheting up the pressure. Which doesn't help with the stomach virus and the kidney infection and, oh, by the way, the grief. But my folks think I should be over that by now....so they've said....

It's been an FML kind of month, really. Mis.er.a.ble.

Happiness, schmappiness....I just want to get the hell out of Dodge and be able to pay my rent while doing so. OMG. Why must everything be so hard?

Sick and tired of being sick and tired...

I am sick. I have been sick since the week after Thanksgiving. I got an infection that never really went away, and eventually turned into a kidney infection (acute pyelonephretis, for you Latin-lovers out there). If you're wondering why I haven't been posting much, that would be why.

On Wednesday, January 5th, I went to South Carolina with my mom and aunt, to visit relatives. This turned out to be a bad idea. I got worse, and there was nowhere to go but the local emergency room. In spite of my telling them that I had seen actual visible blood in my urine in the toilet the day before, nobody there even touched me. No doctor, no nurse, nobody. They just did a cursory look at the urine sample, gave me a ten-day course of Cipro, and sent me home to get worse.

After a miserable twelve-hour drive north (usually only ten, but twelve because of my being sick) last Thursday, I wound up seeing my regular doctor on Friday. She said I needed to go to the local ER to get a CaT scan to rule out appendicitis. I cried. I cussed. "F***!" I said. I cannot afford this. I cannot afford anything. I can't even afford my regular prescriptions right now. It's a good thing they don't charge you for breathing...but wait, they sort of do, since I'm asthmatic. Damn.

At any rate, I was able to get some sort of poverty help thing at the hospital. I was poked, prodded, CaT scanned, and appendicitis was ruled out. Everything CaT-scannable in my innards checks out fine. So there's that. They sent me home with a new, expensive antibiotic (thankfully, giving me the first dose while there!). They also gave me morphine, which was good, since all the prodding and poking only exacerbated the pain in said innards. And I am no pain wimp.

So, I saw my doctor again on Monday, my urine checks out ok--blood-free. She speculates I might have had a kidney stone. She tells me to finish the antibiotic, and if I'm still sick when it's over with, to call her up for another appointment.

At this point it looks like the agony part of my sickness adventure is over with and I am down to the tired/wrung-out feeling part.

I'd like to rest for a million years. But I have to find a job and beat off my scary bills with a stick. I almost miss how I felt a year ago, when I was so much in agony over losing Nelson that I couldn't really worry about practical things, at least not as much. Worry would nibble at me, but it wouldn't grab. Now...well, it's like worry has gone from goldfish to piranhas. I really preferred the goldfish.

And it's not like the missing Nelson part has gone away, either. That's still there. It's there with the piranhas.

And here I was thinking 2011 was going to be a better year...I've gotten off to an epically bad start! Oy. Bozhe moi gospodi. Gospodi pomilui. Oh my God. Lord have mercy.