Goodness, has it really been that long
Several of you have commented to me that I haven't been around in quite some time, so I thought I'd look and see when I last posted something beyond a quote. My next words were unprintable, but let's just say it's been quite a while hasn't it. Goodness.
To say that it's been a hard 4 months or so would be an egregious understatement. Really it all started going pear shaped when the same week my love, L, was terminated from a job he hated, my doctors decided to try something clever with my medications.
L'd been very casually looking for a while for a new position, as his boss was... how to I put this politely.... farking bugnuts. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to find something before it all fell apart. When her incompetence became clear to her superiors she decided to blame it on L, and as these things go... well, you get the idea. That was the last week in May. Currently he is still looking for a new full time position while he takes web development projects from those that are quite happy that someone with his skills is around to do the work. His current focus is Rails, and all manner of web development, for those that are interested.
At the same time, in a very well meaning, clearly articulated new plan, my set of my doctors decided that I really needed to be on a mild SSRI to help with what we all thought was anxiety. Much discussion was had about which med to put me on and how, and pretty much I don't remember anything for the month after that. Apparently I'm part of that 2% that can't remove those drugs from my system once they get in, and got to experience basically a month of overdose on an SSRI. I do not recommend it.
Once that nightmare was stopped, we realized I had become dehydrated and had what would turn out to be the worst UTI of my life. Heavy antibiotics where employed, but unfortunately even after we confirmed the infection was gone the pain was not. The pain continued to increase and increase until I was unable to even walk, and more specialists were engaged. I emerged by the end of July with diagnosis for "a 2D6 malfunction" (which is what made the head-med such a disaster), a rare form of endometriosis (which we'd long suspected I had, but never investigated until it was suspected as a source of the pain), and finally a visit to the Urologist got us a diagnosis for Interstitial cystitis complete with full pelvic spasms.
Yes, is just about as much fun as it sounds, having your bladder and entire pelvic area in complete and unending spasms. Imagine if you will, being at the peak of UTI pain, unending, for weeks. Diagnosis and then pain management took over most of July and early August, and now I've been through about 3 weeks of a PT, acupuncture, chiropractic rotation that has me at least able to sleep, eat, and work.
There are still lots of doctor, nurse, and specialist appointments, and it's been a godsend to have L home to take me around when I can't drive myself and to baby me when I need it. I can be.... difficult when it comes to taking medications, particularly pain medications, and it's been a hard thing for me to overcome. I still hold out hope that this is something I can work though a bit and come back off the pain meds, but at the moment I'm just happy to be back among the land of the "somewhat able bodied" after 3 months of medical insanity. The silver lining to it all was that we managed not to end up in the hospital at any point, but I suppose that that being the silver lining says something about the last 3 months right there.
On top of all of that, it's been summer, and I own a teashop. Every year this is a hard time. With the disaster that was the ’08 holiday season on top of the single largest, costliest change we've ever made for the shop, it's turned something generally stress inducing into a full on nail bitter of a situation. The good news is that we are ever so slowly starting to see the shop’s daily numbers recover back into the black. We tend to skim or live in the red for about 6 weeks every year, generally with savings put away knowing it will happen. This year savings was a wish and a dream.... but it looks like the red will only end up being about 4-5 weeks, and those seem to be coming to an end as the early fall weather hits. With any luck by the end of September I'll feel like I have the cash flow and customers to make holiday buying plans.
I have to say, having done much belated analysis of last year’s late fall and winter numbers, it's hard to imagine worse numbers than we saw last year. With all the move and snow and everything it was hard to realize at the time that it was probably the worst Q3 and Q4 the store had ever seen under my ownership. I expect we'll have a better, but not stellar season this year, and that suits me just fine. A healthy, non-crazy fall and winter is just what Tie Kuan Yin ordered for our little corner of the tea world I think.
All in all it's been not only a learning experience, but an amazing growth opportunity. Or at least that's how I'm trying to think of it. I'm back to being functional enough to be able to walk my dogs several days a week, and hold up my end of Teacup duties (if mostly from my couch). Having L out of work has us all fairly stressed, but so far the savings is still holding out, at least for a little while longer. I think I now understand at least some of what we had thought was "anxiety" was in fact low levels of pain that my brain was helpfully misinterpreting, so I'm trying to relearn that as well. The pelvic and bladder spasms have probably been undiagnosed for a while now, and having to relearn all of those impulses is taking some time and patience. All in all we are trying to be calm and gentle with ourselves around here as freaking out will help nothing and probably will just get us farther from our goals.
The last couple of weeks it's been great to be beyond that crazy insane hot weather we had here earlier in the summer. I've also been doing my best to catch up on my reading, plowing through at least 200 pages a day of fiction, plus online reading, plus non-fiction, plus audio books. I'm starting to feel a bit saturated with words, which actually feels kinda good. Hopefully it encourages me to do more than simply post 140 characters at a time on Facebook and Twitter to convince people I’m not dead yet. :)
To say that it's been a hard 4 months or so would be an egregious understatement. Really it all started going pear shaped when the same week my love, L, was terminated from a job he hated, my doctors decided to try something clever with my medications.
L'd been very casually looking for a while for a new position, as his boss was... how to I put this politely.... farking bugnuts. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to find something before it all fell apart. When her incompetence became clear to her superiors she decided to blame it on L, and as these things go... well, you get the idea. That was the last week in May. Currently he is still looking for a new full time position while he takes web development projects from those that are quite happy that someone with his skills is around to do the work. His current focus is Rails, and all manner of web development, for those that are interested.
At the same time, in a very well meaning, clearly articulated new plan, my set of my doctors decided that I really needed to be on a mild SSRI to help with what we all thought was anxiety. Much discussion was had about which med to put me on and how, and pretty much I don't remember anything for the month after that. Apparently I'm part of that 2% that can't remove those drugs from my system once they get in, and got to experience basically a month of overdose on an SSRI. I do not recommend it.
Once that nightmare was stopped, we realized I had become dehydrated and had what would turn out to be the worst UTI of my life. Heavy antibiotics where employed, but unfortunately even after we confirmed the infection was gone the pain was not. The pain continued to increase and increase until I was unable to even walk, and more specialists were engaged. I emerged by the end of July with diagnosis for "a 2D6 malfunction" (which is what made the head-med such a disaster), a rare form of endometriosis (which we'd long suspected I had, but never investigated until it was suspected as a source of the pain), and finally a visit to the Urologist got us a diagnosis for Interstitial cystitis complete with full pelvic spasms.
Yes, is just about as much fun as it sounds, having your bladder and entire pelvic area in complete and unending spasms. Imagine if you will, being at the peak of UTI pain, unending, for weeks. Diagnosis and then pain management took over most of July and early August, and now I've been through about 3 weeks of a PT, acupuncture, chiropractic rotation that has me at least able to sleep, eat, and work.
There are still lots of doctor, nurse, and specialist appointments, and it's been a godsend to have L home to take me around when I can't drive myself and to baby me when I need it. I can be.... difficult when it comes to taking medications, particularly pain medications, and it's been a hard thing for me to overcome. I still hold out hope that this is something I can work though a bit and come back off the pain meds, but at the moment I'm just happy to be back among the land of the "somewhat able bodied" after 3 months of medical insanity. The silver lining to it all was that we managed not to end up in the hospital at any point, but I suppose that that being the silver lining says something about the last 3 months right there.
On top of all of that, it's been summer, and I own a teashop. Every year this is a hard time. With the disaster that was the ’08 holiday season on top of the single largest, costliest change we've ever made for the shop, it's turned something generally stress inducing into a full on nail bitter of a situation. The good news is that we are ever so slowly starting to see the shop’s daily numbers recover back into the black. We tend to skim or live in the red for about 6 weeks every year, generally with savings put away knowing it will happen. This year savings was a wish and a dream.... but it looks like the red will only end up being about 4-5 weeks, and those seem to be coming to an end as the early fall weather hits. With any luck by the end of September I'll feel like I have the cash flow and customers to make holiday buying plans.
I have to say, having done much belated analysis of last year’s late fall and winter numbers, it's hard to imagine worse numbers than we saw last year. With all the move and snow and everything it was hard to realize at the time that it was probably the worst Q3 and Q4 the store had ever seen under my ownership. I expect we'll have a better, but not stellar season this year, and that suits me just fine. A healthy, non-crazy fall and winter is just what Tie Kuan Yin ordered for our little corner of the tea world I think.
All in all it's been not only a learning experience, but an amazing growth opportunity. Or at least that's how I'm trying to think of it. I'm back to being functional enough to be able to walk my dogs several days a week, and hold up my end of Teacup duties (if mostly from my couch). Having L out of work has us all fairly stressed, but so far the savings is still holding out, at least for a little while longer. I think I now understand at least some of what we had thought was "anxiety" was in fact low levels of pain that my brain was helpfully misinterpreting, so I'm trying to relearn that as well. The pelvic and bladder spasms have probably been undiagnosed for a while now, and having to relearn all of those impulses is taking some time and patience. All in all we are trying to be calm and gentle with ourselves around here as freaking out will help nothing and probably will just get us farther from our goals.
The last couple of weeks it's been great to be beyond that crazy insane hot weather we had here earlier in the summer. I've also been doing my best to catch up on my reading, plowing through at least 200 pages a day of fiction, plus online reading, plus non-fiction, plus audio books. I'm starting to feel a bit saturated with words, which actually feels kinda good. Hopefully it encourages me to do more than simply post 140 characters at a time on Facebook and Twitter to convince people I’m not dead yet. :)