Ho hum…

The first time I tried to post this, Internet Explorer crashed, which is probably the Universe telling me I’m a tedious whiner wallowing in self-pity and I shouldn’t even bother. But I just need to get this off my chest, so I’ll try one more time. The following is all personal stuff and more or less a lengthy wail of woe, so I’m putting it under a cut. Reading is entirely optional.

So, yesterday, June 20th, was my 51st birthday. I am starting to regard my birthdays with great wariness. It’s not unusual for things to be hectic right around the Solstice, but the last two years have really been…ridiculous.

Last year was my 50th birthday–the big five-oh, half a century. But I didn’t get any celebration at all. My mom was losing her fight with ovarian cancer, which had recurred very soon after her last chemo and then was misdiagnosed, so that treatment for the recurrence was delayed by several months. By June of last year, she was refusing to come home, although she could have, because she insisted that my dad “couldn’t” take care of her. What she meant was that she was disappointed by my dad’s attentiveness and capability in caring for her. She signed herself into a series of nursing homes, until they finally told her that she didn’t need nursing home care badly enough to approve Medicare to pay for them. In any event, my family’s attention, understandably, was totally concentrated on my mom and her situation. I spent my 50th birthday driving more than an hour out to the nursing home where my mom was at that time to have lunch there with her and my dad, and then drove home. And that was it, that was my birthday. I think I got a couple of cards.

On top of that, I was completely freaking out at the time because I had just given my notice to Dracu-job, the Job From Hell, and was panicking about how they would react. I had sent them an e-mail! What a coward! I knew they would be very dismayed and upset, because I had (deliberately) not telegraphed or hinted in any way that I was thinking about leaving, and I basically kept the shelter running. I felt like my friends on the staff would feel betrayed and abandoned (just like I did when my co-workers quit!), the administration would see me as a disloyal loser, and everybody was going to hate me. I was an absolute wreck. That was entirely in addition to how wrecked I was about my mom’s cancer!

So, my mom passed away on September 10th, and since then, my sister and I have done nothing but worry about my dad, who now is living all alone.

Dad’s been doing okay, but he has diabetes and rather serious cardiac issues. He was sent to a cardiac rehab program this spring, and they noticed some incidents of irregular heartbeat on the monitors he was on during the exercises. His cardiologist had dad wear a monitor for 48 hours, and then dad had another anomaly appear on the monitors in rehab. So, quite suddenly, dad was scheduled to go in for catheterization and possibly either stents or a pacemaker/defibrillator implantation, depending what showed up during the catheterization. My sister, out in Chicago, is all anxious and upset about this. I get two kinds of stress from parental issues, you see. I get my own stress about my parents–and then I have to deal with my sister’s stress and emotions, which is related but different. I support everyone, but I don’t have anybody to talk to about my own feelings. Everyone else is just too stressed.

Dad and I had made some very tentative plans to do something for my birthday, but now this cardiac issue had come up. Dad’s appointment was…June 19th. At 6:30 a.m. And, he needed someone to drive him down.

I’m a night person, and I normally get up at 10:30 a.m., go to bed at 2:30 a.m. –and I have chronic sleep dysfunction, a life-long problem. I rarely sleep more than 3-4 hours without waking up. My ideal sleep schedule would be to go to bed just before dawn and get up in the early afternoon. That’s the only schedule on which I have ever, in all my life, slept well. But, with my parents needing me, even being self-employed doesn’t free me to choose my own schedule. I’m just mentioning this for reference. I’m pretty used to functioning without sleep.

So, Monday night I just stayed awake, left for my dad’s house in Winchendon at 4:40 a.m., picked him up, and drove to Worcester to the medical center for his 6:30 a.m. check-in. (It was a beautiful sunrise. We saw a deer!) I then stayed at the hospital for the next twelve and half hours while dad had his catheterization (he had a serious heart attack and a triple by-pass some fifteen years ago, but all that looks good–there’s no new blockage) and then had the pacemaker implant (because what dad does have is slow loss of strength in the heart muscle, aka slow congestive heart failure, which the diabetes is tending to exacerbate). I had my computer with me, and was able to use an outlet in the waiting area. It’s a sign of how long the wait was, that I actually got some concrete progress made on the book I’m currently working on. Usually I’d be too fidgety to concentrate, but the news wasn’t bad, dad slept a lot between procedures and the pacemaker procedure takes three hours in itself (no general anesthesia, but dad was nervous and requested the maximum sedation they’d give him). I’d have gotten more done if I hadn’t been so tired. I was also, after the receptionists went home for the day, answering the patient phone in the waiting room and calling people to the phone! I had a lovely talk with another patient’s wife for a while, too.

Meanwhile, my poor sister was having kittens because I was planning to wait until after the pacemaker procedure to make sure I had all the news, then go home and call her. I had my cell phone, but first, there was no signal inside the hospital (they did not say you couldn’t use your cell phone, but something was blocking it) and second, I had neglected to bring my sister’s phone numbers with me. I didn’t realize I would be at the hospital so long! But my sister called the hospital and got dad, finally.

Dad needed to stay overnight after the pacemaker was put in, so I needed to pick him up the next day–which was my birthday. So, I went home, and spent two hours doing all my Tuesday chores (litter boxes, bunny cage, clean the bathroom, put away the clean laundry, get ready to take the trash to the transfer station), plus did my cycling, because I work out seven days a week. I didn’t go to bed early because when you have sleep dysfunction like mine, you never do–a rigid schedule is very important. I slept very well. Turns out I can sleep for eight straight hours as long as I stay up for the previous forty. (Funny thing about that, *heh*)

So, on my 51st birthday…off I go to pick up dad at the hospital. The news is, at least, as good as can be expected. He sounds like he intends (after 75 years of resistance) to comply fully with his doctors’ advice and actually follow his exercise program and change his diet and try to keep his heart healthy and his diabetes under control. But, dad was still on medication, and he didn’t even remember that it was my birthday. I didn’t remind him. We talked about what he was going to need and I insisted that we stop and get his prescriptions before we got home. Dad’s concern was wholly on the band concert he was supposed to be conducting tonight, and getting the music to the substitute conductor. I took all the music home with me, promising to take it to the concert today.

I got home, bought myself some mint chocolate cookies and M&M’s, and did a workout. My sister called to wish me a happy birthday, and an old, old friend sent me an e-mail. And that was it. No cards, no one else remembered. *sigh* At one point I thought about taking myself out to a movie. Then the substitute band conductor, a very nice lady, called to ask if she could drive to my house and pick up the band music. I said sure, so there went the evening–I stayed in!

Today I observed the Solstice. That’s been okay. At least my Tarot reading for this octave was better than it often has been. At Beltane, my reading was fairly positive except that The Tower popped up as one of the “near future” cards. The last time The Tower had appeared in my Sabbat reading was last Lughnasadh, at which time no one realized that my mom would have passed away by the next Sabbat, Autumn Equinox. When I saw The Tower at Beltane, I had no idea that a dear friend was about to be diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, completely knocking me flat both personally and professionally, because I was preparing to publish her book. There’s no Tower this octave–or 10 of Swords or 3 of Swords or any of those scary cards which my Tarot readings tend to be peppered with because the Tarot Guardians hate me (or at least it feels that way sometimes!).

Oh, yes…in addition to picking up dad yesterday, I had another errand in Worcester. Often, when people are in an abusive, horrible job like my last one, and writhe with guilt about quitting because they think if they leave, the place will collapse, counselors reassure them that no one is indispensable and their employers will survive without them. Well, in my case…Dracu-job really has collapsed without me. After more than twenty years, it is now merging with another big agency! Which means that I just got notified, with less than 10 business days’ notice, that my health insurance is terminated as of June 30th, and I need to re-enroll through the new agency from scratch. On Monday, I got the letter from Fallon, my health insurer, telling me I was losing my coverage, and the packet from the new agency, saying they needed to have my application to re-enroll by June 29th. So, since I was in Worcester anyway, I took the application to them in person before I picked up dad at the hospital. However, I don’t know if this means I’ll be assigned to a new primary care physician, and therefore lose the appointment I have on August 20th and have to make a new appointment, even further out, when my coverage is under COBRA and only runs through January, anyway!

I’m just getting this nagging feeling that the big excitement for my 52nd birthday will be that -I- have cancer. *sigh* I’ve been trying to convince Fallon that I should have my ovaries removed, because of my mom’s history–but no one will listen. They just keep talking about “screening.” Well…with ovarian cancer, forget about screening. Once you’ve got it, you’re toast. I was by my mom’s side when she took her last breath, and let me tell you, you don’t want to die that way. I’m done with menopause and I want those suckers out. I never wanted them in the first place! If I could afford it, I’d pay for it out of pocket.

I called my dad this morning to see how he was doing, and he was in the middle of a big talk with the manager of the band, and wouldn’t talk to me! Oh, well, at least I know he was still breathing.

So that’s today’s rant. Happy Solstice.