So I draft this from a small Winship Emory Midtown waiting room. I have my coffee from home, my phone, a white robe that has no tie at the waist like it should, and a bag with my tops inside. Jared is waiting in the main lobby. The diagnostic mammogram is done.
But at the end… The tech told me she was going to give me validation for my parking.
I do not know what that meant…. but it does not bode good things.
I have delivered two children at Emory Midtown — I have probably been here over 50 times in the last 18 years — and they never validated my parking before.
I know the ultrasound was an optional follow-up and the tech made out like I’d be having the ultrasound but then she backtracked and said it was pending the doctor looking at the images…
And now, wistfully, I wait.
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And the tech came back for me. We repeated the images, for “spot checks,” on the concerning side.
I am pretty sure I know what is coming.
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I sit and wait. At least six people have come and gone back and left. I texted with Jared a little, telling him I was sure I have breast cancer. Jared says to wait and see what the doctor says.
I waited over a month for this diagnostic mammogram and ultrasound. I panicked when the date was so far out and scheduled one at Tanner for October 15, but I ended up having a late-scheduled tele-health appointment with my endocrinologist on the 15th and had to cancel the Tanner appointment.
It meant waiting, but honestly if I have to deal with medical complications I am grateful to be dealing with Emory, not Tanner.
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The wait on the ultrasound table for the radiologist, after the tech did the ultrasound, was the longest ever.
Turns out, I am fine. No breast cancer, no problems under my arm at all. They were very thorough. The radiologist herself came in to explain the mammogram was clear, the ultrasound was clear.
I probably have a fungal rash (I have been telling Jared since my appointment last week that it is probably ringworm) like the dermatologist thought it might be. The spot is fading with the creams she gave me. I didn’t tell them that this morning though.
I still have zero idea why they validated my parking, though. Or why they repeated the mammogram on the concerning spots. At all. Oh well.
Thank you to everyone who reached out after yesterday’s post. I will be okay.
Today has been better; I still slept in until 9:30 and didn’t get up until nearly 10:30. Jared is gone to a day conference and left about 6:30 this morning but he made sure the boys were up and getting ready and I got up and took my meds and stayed up until the boys left for school.
One of the BIG bonuses to having a teen driver in the house is that he can take his little brother to school. We ask him to do it as little as possible, but this morning it felt necessary.
My solitary task for the day, the one non-negotiable, is that I have to get Oliver from school, after school today.
And I suppose if I’d had to I could have done it in my jammies– or more accurately– the clothes I put on after my shower last night. Most of my clothes double as jammies; one of the bonuses to living in leggings.
But, when I got up, I came out and got myself some plain greek yogurt and walnuts for breakfast. I sat down at my computer and I did my gratitude list for the first time since October 21. I actually journaled, as opposed to coming straight here to blog.
Things on the gratitude list for the day:
— I am grateful it was a Democratic sweep yesterday
— I am grateful for Abby
— I am grateful we have plastic to put over the windows because of the cold
— I am grateful I have the luxury of being bored
There were 50 things on my list, but you get the idea.
And then I remembered my Minolta lenses, and went to read a few reviews between the 58mm 1.2 (a lens I used to have and sold) and the 58mm 1.4 (a lens I currently have) and got the lens out and put it on the GFX:
And obviously, I took a photo of the GFX with the 58mm lens on it, with the X-S20.
And then I took this photo of Trixie, with the GFX:
I do love Minolta lenses. And this one works in regular crop, so I don’t have to use the 35mm crop setting on the GFX. See the above photos? They don’t have the same dimensions because the top one is APS-C and the bottom one is medium format.
And then after poking around online for a while…..I got myself cleaned up. And then I sent this photo to J:
And along with the photo, I sent this text to J:
“I cut on my hair so that it is now all close to properly one length; most of the layers including the thin section at the back of my neck are gone. Back to properly chin length but it felt good to give myself a haircut. And I got a shower. And now I am about to warm up 3-day old coffee. I feel not quite myself, but almost.”
The hair thing: I desperately want long hair. But my hair is extremely fine, and thinning by the day. So chin-length it may be. Regardless: now that it is all one length, it is so very obvious that my hair definitely needs absolutely not one single solitary layer in it at all. Too thin for that.
And yes, I do feel almost myself. A pizza is about to go into the oven for Oliver for when he gets home from school, and after I get him I am going to set to work about finishing the plastic-over-the-windows projects in both our bedroom and the living room. There is an awful lot more to do window-wise– the rest of the house– but if I can just get the hole in the plastic Trixie pierced the other day in the living room and the final door in the living room, along with the second window in our bedroom, it will be a successful day. I am determined to get most of this project done before the extreme cold hits next week.
Tomorrow is the diagnostic mammogram with potential ultrasound. I’m trying hard to not think about it.
If you’re new here, you can read more about me here.
Jared and I joke about my “sleep emergency” tendency a lot, both to each other and other people.
But it is a real thing. And it turns really, really dark if I ignore it.
Last night was one such occasion. And it has seeped into this morning.
In a matter of minutes I go from feeling relatively okay about my life to feeling like I am a literal waste of space on this planet.
And, I cry myself to sleep if I am lucky enough to fall asleep.
And the next morning, depending on things, is not good.
This morning, for instance, I had my alarm set to take Oliver to school. And I took my morning meds. But I climbed right back under the covers. I did not go check on anybody. Jared was already up and taking care of things because he probably knew I wasn’t going anywhere this morning.
After tending to me for a few minutes before he left, Jared encouraged me to think of this morning as a “refresh,” not as “hiding.”
We both knew I was hiding.
And, I didn’t go anywhere to help get anyone to school. I didn’t leave the bed until about 9:45– about 20 minutes ago. Jared took the car because it is not good to take Oliver to school on the scooter when it is this cold outside, and Liam drove himself to school in the other car.
And I won’t go into all the reasons my life is sucky right now. I know to a lot of people it wouldn’t make sense that I view it as sucky. But to me, it’s pretty dark at the moment, even as I sit here with my light therapy lamp on.
I try to clean it up sometimes. Both the state of the house and the state of my inner being. It just always ends up a mess again.
Because here’s the truth, for anyone who might actually read this besides the internet bots:
I sit in my house all day, every day, alone. My phone never rings. Ever. Unless it’s Jared or once every couple of weeks, my good friend Dena (who is really one of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life). Or random telemarketing bots. Nobody texts me except Jared, or occasionally Porter, or occasionally every few weeks my friend Sam (also one of the best friends I ever had in my whole life). Or random telemarketing bots. I don’t get emails except group ones related to church, or spam asking me to spend money we don’t have. My own family doesn’t even call or text me, generally.
And I’m sorry: I generally consider myself a decent friend to others.
But in the darkest of the darkness, which now apparently qualifies, I sit here in tears and wonder why, what is wrong with me, that I deserve to spend what should be the prime of my life sitting in my house, all alone, with nobody in the world besides my husband caring whether or not I am lonely at all?
And that, that is why I cry myself to sleep sometimes, saying to myself that life is just not at all worth it. It’s not the severe money problems that I blame myself for because I don’t have a job and haven’t had a good one in over a decade. It’s not the “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality that I have to fight because I was conditioned to be this way from infancy because that’s just how my family of origin is.
And yes. I could get out of the house. But literally anything I would do would cost money– gas money if anything– and we are in such a shape that I cannot afford even random once a week coffee out right now.
I wasn’t kidding– if we could afford to sell the house right now, my dream house– I would. It’s that bad. As I sit here: We have a broken garage door opener. We have plastic over the windows because our energy bills are regularly $350 (more than, it’s $350 because I signed up for flat bill) because we need new windows and new double doors in the living room. We have a dual wall mount oven and microwave combo unit that has had chicken nuggets nuked to oblivion for nearly 3 years in the microwave portion because the door to the microwave stopped working, and then eventually the whole microwave itself stopped responding, but the oven works so we just bought a new microwave to set on the counter instead. The flooring we put in is delicate– we need to have someone come in and repair a portion in a bedroom even though we have the flooring. We have a leak in the shower in the boys’ bathroom. The garbage disposal needs replacing. The air conditioning hasn’t worked in Liam’s car in over a year and a half.
We really cannot afford to fix any of it. And I’m out of expensive toys to sell that won’t harm my mental health.
And there’s more debt than I will name here that we will be paying on for years and years, which is why we can’t just take out loans to fix all of the above.
And I stupidly seek out drama as a way to soothe some portion of myself that feels not alive anyway, as I sit in the house and have no life while the world turns outside. And that drama turns into uninvited harassment, which I then blame myself for having invited the drama into my life all over again. And I tell myself I deserve it.
And I’m sorry: therapy just will not help loneliness. I need more than just the professionals in my life. I need a sense of purpose. I need a decent income. I need a miracle, honestly. I’m not afraid of hard work.
And so I sit. And I cry. And eventually the despair will pass.
And when you see me in public, I will have a smile on my face, and I will say I am better, when you ask how I am doing. And that part won’t be a lie, because I will make myself better in order to even be in public.
And maybe I will be better. Or maybe I just will publicly deny that I know I am headed next time I go home to sit alone while Jared works, while I have nothing to do while my relatively brilliant mind rots away doing nothing except making hand-type crafts which nobody really wants, and typing into the ether that nobody probably reads, either.
I don’t say that from a despondent sense. It’s true: last night, when we got home from taking Porter back to UGA, I hid in our bedroom, just after dark, telling Jared I was going to bed at about 6:45 PM. That it was a sleep emergency ( I have those).
But by about 7:15, I called for him, telling him I was hiding. He said he knew that.
I do that, too: I hide. Even in my own house. I retreat to the bedroom, to my bed, which is my haven when the world is too overwhelming.
Jared was able to coax me out from hiding about an hour later.
Back to the “interesting life” bit… Several weeks ago, I bought a fresh copy of Scrivener.
I had Scrivener several laptops ago, but I never did a whole lot with it the last go ‘round.
This time, though: there is already the pages for thirteen different chapters…
I’m going to write a fictionalized memoir.
My life would make an excellent fictionalized psychological thriller.
So anyway, that’s a thing that’s in process.
And maybe it will be an income-generating project eventually. But that’s not the primary purpose.
The primary purpose is therapeutic writing. I can pound out my heartache, my trauma, my life observations….all in fictionalized memoir format.
I can say things through fiction that I cannot say via a publication in real life.
And someday, it will be done. Probably someday sooner than later, if I can properly focus well enough this winter. I desperately need a project to channel my energy into, and writing has always been one of my stronger suits.
And goodness knows, my life story, drama-filled as it has been, is the perfect fodder fuel for a highly fictionalized work.
So yeah. That’s a thing. A thing I can sink my teeth into since gainful employment is elusive, to also vent my anger, heartache, hurt, grief, and trauma all at the same time.
