Half as Much but not Half Enough

Yesterday was my half birthday. I am forty five and a half years old. Remember when it was your half birthday when you were a kid? It seemed like the kind of thing that should call for at least half of a celebration. Maybe a cupcake, or an extra hug or at least someone remembering it was your half birthday (Happy half birthday to my sister LM, whose half birthday was a mere four days ago). I’m not the only one who feels that way; if you don’t believe me, mosey on over to Pinterest. Now that I’m, well, more middle-aged, maybe it’s the sort of thing I don’t need to announce to the world, even if I am writing about it now and thus, essentially, announcing it to the world.

Instead, this half birthday of mine will be used to sort of reflect on the past half year, to check in with myself and see how I’m doing. After all, this is my twelfth of the twelve blogs of Christmas, and a little recap isn’t such a bad thing.

For the past few years, I have set myself a goal of writing twelve blog posts for the holidays, allowing myself from the beginning of December until roughly Epiphany, January 6, to complete this task. It isn’t as easy as it sounds, if it does sound easy, and if it does, you are either extremely prolific or extremely misinformed. I generally write 1000 words or so per post, so twelve posts is 12,000 words, because math. 12,000 words is roughly a children’s chapter book or a good chunk of a slim novel, so it isn’t a small amount of writing. It’s no month in the life of a James Patterson or a Stephen King, mind you, but chances are the likes of them aren’t in charge of all the holiday preparations in their house. Just a wild guess, but I bet I’m right.

In addition to trying to write 12,000 words in a month, I also plan celebrations for both Hanukkah and Christmas. That means I do all the planning, shopping, cooking, wrapping, and giving for two big holidays that occur roughly at the same time. If you think the holidays are overwhelming on their own, try coming up with twelve different topics describe and share at the same time. Nobody asks me do this, and even sadder, nobody pays me to do this. I put this on myself. I am the one who turns a fun little hobby into a stressor.

This year was different, though. This year, in addition to the two big holidays, and the relatively minor New Year’s celebration (because, let’s face it, I am not twenty five and in love, so who cares about New Year’s Eve, I just want to get some rest for fuck’s sake), I also planned and hosted my younger daughter’s bat mitzvah and mourned the loss of my mother in law. That is a whole lot on one plate. Shit, a platter couldn’t hold that buffet of stress, both happy and sad.

So, I am reflecting on all of this, right now, more for me than for you. Maybe you would like to reflect too. Just pretend it’s your half birthday, and join me.

·         I am pretty good at what I do. I don’t have a job outside of my house. I do, however, have almost all the jobs inside the house, except for the home repairs. I tackle these jobs regularly and repeatedly. They are mostly thankless, but honestly, if I didn’t do them seamlessly, everyone would notice. I run a tight ship, whatever the hell that means. I don’t know much about sailing, but I do know what is for dinner tonight and how much milk we have and whether we have enough food for the cats and the hamster. I know when the last load of laundry was completed and when the next will be started. I know who hasn’t done the homework, and I also know that we have plenty of white poster boards, paint, and glue sticks in case we have an emergency project. I know all the things in the house. If you can’t find it, come to me. I know exactly where it is, even if I haven’t seen it in two years.

·         All of the family’s health needs are current. No one needs any prescriptions. All the doctor’s visits have been either completed or scheduled. If there are runny noses, I have plenty of Sudafed, Mucinex, and Kleenex to cover them. I maintain a complete pharmacy at all times, and almost none of it is expired.

·         My daughter’s bat mitzvah was a beautiful thing. She was amazing, and her day was amazing. She had exactly what she wanted. I did not exceed my budget. I loved all my guests for attending, and I understood those who couldn’t be there. I enjoyed the day, no matter how stressful the days leading up to it.

·         I am glad my mother in law is at peace. I have been making dinner for my father in law several days a week since she has passed, and he has been joining us at our table. He gets out of his house, even if I don’t really like him driving. I love to have him over. He sees us as we are, discussing politics, history, whatever odd topic comes up at the dinner table. I am giving my children a gift in this time with their grandfather. We put down our cell phones, we turn off the television, and we are a family, like an old fashioned one, only without the pearls and post dinner cigar, and yes, with the occasional F word. My younger daughter burped last night in front of him, my southern father in law. He is part of the family, and she is comfortable to be a person, and he laughed and was okay with all of it.

·         I need to learn to stop setting crazy ass goals for myself like writing 12,000 words in a month and a half. Seriously, why did I even come up with that in the first place? Why not the 8 blogs of Hanukkah? Isn’t that good enough? Isn’t any of it good enough? Writing is not my career. It is something I do that makes me happy, when I have or make time for my happiness. I shouldn’t allow it to become a chore, unless I start to do it for money, in which case let me add it to the to-do list. It is very difficult to know when to set big goals, and when to give yourself a break. I need to work on that.

Don’t worry about me. I have plenty to keep me busy now that the holidays and the bat mitzvah are over. Don’t feel like you need to give me a call and ask me to do anything else, no matter how small or how much I like you. I don’t want to do more. My new goal is to do the right amount, and hopefully I will figure out what that is.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

 The nice part about my daughters having a two week break from school is that we all get to sleep a little later. Granted, we are all also staying up later, but it still feels like catching up on missed sleep. It might be that I don’t have to wake up at 6:30 every morning, or maybe the lack of rushing around all day, but I definitely seem to be getting more rest. For me, more rest means more dreams, and the more rest I get, the more vivid and bizarre the dreams.

Seriously, these aren’t your run of the mill dreams. Every night is a new indie film, not the good story kind, but the ones full of weird shit that is weird just to be weird. I attribute it to the tremendous deficit of sleep on which I normally function, so it is nice, really nice, when I can aim for more than six hours a night for a couple of weeks. The downside to the weird ass dreams is that I wake up exhausted from a busy night of mind fucking, so I question how much rest I am actually banking.

A few nights ago, I had a dream that I was babysitting a friend’s child. This was no particular friend or child, just sort of a generic one my mind created. Really, it wasn’t a dream about your kid. I had to watch the child in a hotel room, but for some reason I still had to go back to my friend’s house in order to take care of her pets. The child had a mass of curly hair on its head, more mop-like than bowl cut, but the style was so gender neutral that I had no idea if I was sitting a boy or a girl. Whatever it was, it was a real brat, whining and abusing the hotel fixtures and such. I threatened to tell on it if it didn’t go to sleep, and I left it alone at the hotel room to go check on the pets.

I don’t remember what one of the pets was, but the other one was a kangaroo. If you aren’t up on your Australian marsupials, then you might not realize how big kangaroos can be. This one was fucking huge, yet my friend kept her indoors and expected her to use a litter box, which are designed for cats that normally weigh less than fifteen or twenty pounds.

The kangaroo could not fit in the box. She sort of turned around and aimed for the litter box, but urinated all over the floor instead. I don’t know the output of the average kangaroo, but this one pissed so much it left about an inch and a half of urine flooding the floor of the laundry room. Which, incidentally, was the laundry room of my childhood home. I grabbed a couple of old towels from a pile on a shelf above the dryer and threw them on the ground to try to sop up the kangaroo piss, but they just floated on the surface until they were saturated. And as I was swishing the old towels around to absorb the urine, I thought, I am only getting paid ten dollars an hour to watch this kid and the kangaroo, which is not nearly enough to deal with this shit.

That’s all I remember.

The next night, I had a dream my husband decided to go back to school. He left the girls and me to go live near college, but was living off campus in an odd townhome. It had multi levels with stairs that required you go up and then down to enter a room, then a separate stair case that also made you go up and then down to get to the next level. It was the dream version of an Escher drawing, except for his bedroom. it was in a separate building, but only the top level, like a garage apartment. In order to access it, you had to climb a rope with a small plastic disc on the bottom.

E, my older daughter, tried to get into the room, but she didn’t have the upper body strength to climb the rope. I tried and was able to climb the rope all the way to the hole in the floor that was the portal to the bedroom. In the real world, I couldn’t do one pull up, but in this dream I was a bad ass.

When I got to the top of the rope, I had to move the petal-life covering over the entryway. They felt like some firm plastic or aluminum siding, but they were covered in silver duct tape, and you had to lift each one out in order to uncover the opening. The floor of the room was wall to wall mattress, with pillows thrown everywhere. A small lamp was attached to one wall, and the rest of the walls had windows with small blinds and long cords. I looked around and thought, what if he had to go to the bathroom? My husband would have to climb down the rope in the middle of the night and then go up and down all those stairs to get to a bathroom. What was he thinking, renting this stupid townhouse?

The next night, I had a dream that I corrected everyone’s grammar throughout an entire conversation. I don’t recall the conversation itself, to whom I was talking, the setting, any other details. Just that the grammar was atrocious, and I couldn’t stop myself. I am sure somewhere in the dream was a bathroom or someone going to the bathroom, because if it doesn’t involve a bathroom trip, it isn’t one of my dreams. I just don’t remember that part, unless the conversation was about going to the bathroom.

Now that the school break is over, I can go back to being sleep deprived. Sometimes it’s just more restful to be too tired to dream.

Shit Just Got Real

A few months ago, I didn’t feel too swell. I had an achy dull spot right near where my gallbladder used to be. It felt worse after I ate, and it didn’t want to go away with a tums or a heating pad or any of the other things that are supposed to make you feel better. I decided to see my doctor about it.

My doctor wasn’t available, so I scheduled an appointment with the physician’s assistant, and then I did exactly what I shouldn’t have done; I looked up my symptoms online. After a quick consultation with both WebMD and the Mayo clinic website, I decided I might just have a common bile duct blockage. Apparently, even if you don’t have a gallbladder anymore, you can still make gallstones, which then can still block your common bile duct and cause some pretty wicked pain.

Maybe you are lucky enough to have a functional gallbladder and don’t really have a reason to know what gallbladder pain feels like. Take two fingers on your right hand. Try to hook those fingers under your rib cage about two inches down and one inch towards your midline from your right nipple. Really dig those fingers in there. That’s where it hurt. Now imagine someone shoving a golf ball in that spot, just under the ribcage. Bingo.

I had my gallbladder removed about six years ago, and before that, I would have the occasional gallbladder attack. I knew this pain. It felt like my gallbladder, my phantom gallbladder. My online research indicated that if I did have a bile duct blockage, I could have it roto rootered during an endoscopy instead of actual surgery with the cutting open of the body and such. It seemed worth investigating to me, seeing as I was uncomfortable as hell and couldn’t bear to eat any more Tums. Tums are just not good enough to pass for after dinner mints.

I met with the physician’s assistant a few days later, who let me know that while she frowns on online self- diagnosis, I might be onto something. She ordered some bloodwork and sent me on to the next level of medical care, the GI specialist. Of course the GI specialist was very busy, which meant seeing physician’s assistant number two if I wanted to get this weird gallbladder-like pain checked out in the next six months.

By the time I got to my appointment a few days later, I was feeling much better. I had decided in my own head that I probably did have a little duct blockage of some sort, but whatever it was worked itself out, leaving me with only some mild discomfort. I kept the appointment more as a piece of mind thing rather than an urgent situation, and in hindsight, I probably should have cancelled it altogether.

This physician’s assistant didn’t really seem to listen to what I said about my symptoms, instead focusing on the fact that I had an upset stomach for a day or two and some nausea, symptoms that would be typical of any sort of digestive thing including a bile duct blockage or a gallbladder attack. She was more concerned about the nausea and upset stomach than the pain that made me go to the doctor in the first place.

Go back to those fingers under your rib cage. Poke them about a few times a day and see if you don’t feel a bit like throwing up or crapping yourself.

The physician’s assistant decided more bloodwork was in order. And an ultrasound to see if there was anything to see. And then, possibly, if all that was bad news, then we would do the endoscopy. But first, because she wasn’t convinced it was bilious in nature, she wanted me to get a stool sample.

No scarier words exist in the English language.

My first thought was I’m not that sick. You can tell when you are really sick because you are willing to do almost anything to feel better. Well, I wasn’t that far gone. I was feeling better, so much better that shitting in a cup didn’t seem necessary.

She asked me what lab service my insurance covers, and when I told her, she sighed and told me that I would have to stop by one of the lab's locations to get one of their specimen containers because they only like to use their own. I don’t blame them, really. Don’t we all have a preferred place to do our business?

I stopped by the lab on the way home to pick up my stool container and drop off my blood work order. The front desk clerk took a look at the order form from the doctor’s office, including the stool sample request, and asked me if I have ever given one before. I told her no, and she had me sit in the waiting room until she was free to explain the process to me.

After about a fifteen minute wait, which was enough time to start a really good panic attack, she called me into a consultation room in the back. I sat down, and she took out a bag containing five prescription bottle sized vials and a plastic tub with ounces marked on it. Oh, and a plastic spoon.

“You've never done this before?” she asked me.

“No,” I said.

“It’s horrible. I’m not going to lie,” she said. “You start with the collection container.” She held up the plastic tub. “This fits under the toilet seat that you sit on. You go in there.”

“Can I, um, urinate in it too, or will that cause a problem?” I did not want to have this conversation, and yet, clarification was needed.

“That’s fine if a little gets in the container. It shouldn't mess up the results. So you go in here. Do not return this. We do not want it back. Do not bring back this container."

I got the feeling that a lot of people try to give back the collection tub.

She lifted one of the five vials. “This one you should do first. Fill this container to the fill mark.” She indicated a line labeled near the top of the vial. “Do not fill it past that line. This vial has to be frozen. Do you know what happens when you freeze a container that is overfilled?”

It explodes?” I asked.

“Yes. It explodes. You do not want to clean this out of your freezer. The next one has red dye in it.” She lifted up another vial. “This one only needs a tiny scoop added to it. Again, do not overfill it. In fact, do not overfill any of these. This one goes in the refrigerator. See the cap that has a little spoon attached?”

I nodded yes.

“If you use that spoon, you will be filling it up all day. It’s like one of those spoons they used to give you at McDonald’s to stir the coffee. You don’t want to be making tiny little scoops all day, do you?”

No, I did not. I did not want to be making plastic spoon scoops, or thinking about McDonald’s coffee stirrers, or having this conversation.

“The other three you just fill up like normal, to the fill line. They don’t need to be cold. Or fresh. They have formaldehyde in them, so you don’t need to be concerned about a time limit.”

I made a “hot n now” joke, to myself, in my head.

“Also, we don’t need the spoon back. Just the five vials, not overfilled, whenever you’re ready. Do you have any questions?”

I did. I wanted to know if they all needed to be from the same stool, or could they be from more than one bowel movement. I wanted to know if they would be able to tell if I snuck something from the litter box and skipped the step where I shit in a plastic tub and used my plastic spoon to scoop and fill five vials. I wanted to know if they had a special drop box where I didn’t have to make eye contact with another human when I brought it in for testing. I had so many questions.

Instead of asking anything, I just thanked her for her help. Then I went out the car and tossed my hazardous specimen bag with the measured container, the five vials, and the plastic spoon in the back,  behind the yoga mats and the extra grocery sacks and the half empty water bottles, where I would never find it again.

Suddenly, I felt much, much better indeed.