Examining a gray mood (part 1)

I do not know why but ever since we had the frightening diagnosis on Snowy’s aggressive melanoma, it is as if I have lost a huge spark and sense of creativity. Was it the fear and the dark cloud that came so swiftly over us with the horrible prognostications the doctors made that blew out my flame and left me feeling empty and afraid? I’m not really sure, though that is a logical conclusion.

Even with the better news we have had since then about her situation, I still have the feeling of drowning in various shades of gray. I am tired all the time (in addition to my constant MS-fatigue) and am whelmed by the sense that I am behind, behind, behind with everything I need to keep up with and have lost the ability to think in any intelligent and/or creative way.

I don’t know what it is going to take to climb out of this drear. We’ve done fun and interesting things, we’ve had wonderful and excellent news, the weather has been beautiful and I’ve had the top down in order to soak it all in.And Alabama is #1 again this week after a heart-stopping ball game on Saturday.

Rather than ignoring less good things, I think I need to pull them together in a pile and look at them and figure out what, if anything, I can do to deal with them.

– Snowy’s surgery this Thursday, while greatly reduced and NOT including a general anesthesia, still needs to be faced and gotten through. Time will take care of that.

– Work is tough to take, it just is. This is a big portion of my daily life so its effect is proportionately big. While I like the vast majority of the people here, the few that I don’t care for (and don’t care for them because of how they react to and treat others and the lack of ability to do what is needed) are a tiny number but are in situations that give them power to hurt beyond belief. And protection from and recourse against is so limited as to be nearly non-existent. That’s a big part of the “tough”.

Another is the fact that with the carving out of 1/4th of the portfolio (to go to the litigating “owner” with his exit), there are apparently going to be cuts in staff. It logically makes sense, but on an emotional level it is going to be hard to witness. I’m told Doll and I are safe, Sis might not have been, but we are so lean now in our ‘group’ (of 2) that we can’t be whittled on. I don’t know WHO is on a list, didn’t ask, wasn’t told, and don’t want to know ahead of time if I don’t have to because that is a burden that would probably push me to my knees. Supposedly a few of the cuts may occur this week sometime, with the bulk of them to come after the properties are shifted sometime after the new year.

A further tough situation is that this also is creating some restructuring/reorganizing (assuming there has really been any structure or organization), and my ‘department’ is being put under another and I will be reporting to Supergirl and not my until-now boss at the top of the company. This hurt my feelings hugely — she’s new, she’s younger, she was given clout coming in where I was given nothing — it just hurt. But supposedly this will build in more ‘protection’ for my ‘group’ given the fact that the KGs work for her and if they try to ‘attack’ me, it will “really be an attack on her” who is their boss, since I will be working at her direction… It has a bit of rusty, contrived logic to it that I don’t quite see. But after the first deflation of my tiny balloon of ego, I acknowledged being a team player and willingness to go along with the plan. Until I have someplace else to go, and it is the right time to do so, such it is.

Another nag in the back of my mind is how destructive it is to work here where there are so few people who understand and/or care about doing things the right way. I stay keeled over from the choices that are made that make no sense in any context I’ve ever worked in, and I have to hum the mantra, “it’s their company, it’s their company” over and over to try to keep in check not being in my usual role (and what I thought I’d been hired for) of protecting the company from risk. They don’t care! And it saddens my soul. I don’t know if any of the pending changes will bring forward any improvements to the culture, but I will hope so. I must hope.  This is definitely NOT the worst place I’ve ever worked, but it one of the more upside down inside out

– Debt makes me sad and discouraged. It is being worked away at, but it is still a cement shroud on my shoulders and my psyche.

– I am just getting “older”. Chronologically I have no problem accepting it. I’ve always been figuratively “askew” from my chrono age so I don’t really tie huge amounts of significance to that. But I FEEL older, I feel like I’m less able, I feel shortness in the what’s coming up. It kills me that I am overweight in a way that looks bad and is bad for me, and that as hard as I try I can’t get any traction with fixing that. My sense of self, my identity and personality, are all buried under tonnage. Clothes don’t fit, what I can get into looks “old” and mostly uninspiring, and I find little to be proud of in how I present myself. (Debt means no shopping sprees for classy ‘big girl’ clothes, so that is not an answer.)

The appointment with the dermatologist’s nurse practitioner (more below on that) was taken up with a lot of insistent selling attempts of the services of the doctors (they are also plastic surgeons) — botox, facelifts, this, that, the other — because she was quick to point at different ‘opportunities’ I had to avail myself of these ‘aids’. She even suggested that I might want to have my small vesica pisces tattoo, placed just behind my inner right ankle, removed, although she said she did actually like it. The point was, I was there for a skin check of any problems and possible cancers, and I walked in looking like I should buy the smorgasbord ticket for all the obvious things that are unappealing about me. Sigh.

– I almost escaped the skin check without any real problems, but she did find a worrisome spot (looked to me just like the freckle it was next to below the back of my left knee. She quickly pointed to a disgustingly graphic picture chart of horrible skin ails and showed me which was her suspicion of that more-than-freckle. They did a “punch biopsy”, which I mistakenly watched, did a stitch, and then will let me know in 2 weeks when I come back to have the stitch removed if I have a mild or less whatever or a moderate or above whatever. Moderate or above gets me on the unhappy side of heading towards a malignant melanoma and would require more cutting away. Oy. Isn’t that just what we need to hear about? And she urged me to go to an eye doctor to have the inside of my eyes checked because malignant melanomas apparently can hide at the back of the eyes and then spread to my poor, sad brain. So, 2 weeks for pathology report. I’ll save up some money for an eye appointment if I can figure out who isn’t a quack.

– I’m dreading the potential of dealing with family members about some things they may not react well to (given historical data on that front), and it makes me tense and anxious as I will be the one who must absorb the reactions. Nothing I can do about it but face it in the very near future.

– I’ll end for now with a slightly humorous experience, from yesterday: I was sent out to retrieve the Charlie dog from his zipline as he had started doing staccato “woof-woof-woof”s just as Chick was putting Snowy to bed. I unhooked him from his double lead expecting him to go dancing up to the screen door as he always does… but I made the mistake of looking away at the ducks and duck food dishes and he followed my glance and headed west through all of the backyards along the lake. I called and called him, and he occasionally stopped and danced in place with a big cartoon caption bubble of “WHEEEEEEEE!” over his head, before he took off again.

Halfway down the lake I saw a fellow walk out to his backyard, look at Charlie, look at me, look back at Charlie, then as Charlie headed off, the fellow went back up towards his house. I was just about crying — I hurt (the fibromyalgia really hits me in the hips and I could barely make myself walk), I was frustrated because as much as I wanted to say, “FINE, GO RUN”, I knew I had to find him in order to get  him back home, I was embarrassed because I was essentially in “pajamas” with no underwear and my boobage was horribly obvious, bouncing like watermelons with each jog step I took. I went all the way to the end of the lake via the backyards of my neighbors, getting one “Saw him by the signpost” from the guy talking on his cell phone in the garage of the end house, and looked out in the several directions he could have gone.

I stopped cars and asked if they’d seen a little white dog (although “white” was definitely stretching the truth), getting “no” as the reply. I started down one road where I could hear kids playing and when I saw he wasn’t leaping around there with them and their dog, I knew he hadn’t gone that way. I started to head further west where more lakes and streets and green spaces lay, my legs and hips screaming at me, when I glanced back east along the fronts of the houses I’d just ‘run’ behind. I could spot a figure and almost discern a wave and then it started towards me. I thought it might be Chick and that she’d captured the Notorious D.O.G., but as I headed that way and so did the figure, I could make out first the “precious little lamb” being held (yes, Charles) and then realized that the holder was the fellow who had seen Chuck capering in his back yard.

As I got closer I was cringing about my appearance and trying to hold my arms across my chest until I could take Chuck from this wonderful fellow who explained how he had come to snag the beast, and I thanked him profusely with red going to my cheeks and face and neck. He tried to meet my eyes as he accepted my grateful relief for his help. I hugged Charlie so tight to my chest that he quickly began to squirm, but I didn’t let him go but used him for screening. And oh, did he smell like a pup who had been running free and getting into things. By the time I made it home with the scamp, Chick had become aware that both Charlie and I had disappeared and she was waiting anxiously at the front door for our return. Thank goodness, as I don’t think I could have made it any further, even walking around the side and back of the house to where we were supposed to have simply come in the house.

Some times I just want to crawl under the covers and stay there.