Recovering

I have spent far too long today looking up various artists and compiling a list of potential people to write about. This was a favorite pastime of mine before- looking up erotic art- but now I have added incentive to fuel my interest. Win win!

In other news I've just been hanging out mostly. Every day I can tell that my body is a little bit more healed. I'm a little bit more comfortable. And yet, I'm not. My lower abdomen is pretty fucking sore and achy. I tried to go without the painkillers but I'm back on them. There's no reason to be uncomfortable, even if it's a low-grade mild sort of thing.

Tomorrow I'm going to the funeral of the person who passed away in my office. I think some people are meeting here at my house and we're taking a taxi to the service. It's going to be difficult. And it's a little bit strange that I'm going to see a bunch of people for the first time under these circumstances. But I want to go and I think it's important to go, so that's really what matters.

It's strange how time is passing. I don't really have a good grasp on the fact that I've been off work over two weeks now. That my life was completely thrown up into the air. Because when I'm not moving, I can forget for a moment that I'm recovering, I forget that anything is different. But of course everything is different.

I also should add that I've had some odd mood swings periodically. I'm not sure if that's just normal, or if it has something to do with my one remaining ovary adjusting to do the work of two. Or maybe it's just part of the mental recovery from what I went through. All I know is that every now and then I've been struck by some serious bouts of maudlin that pass as quickly as they came.

Good News

Finally! And what good news it is. I have managed to get myself a small side-job that I am so very excited about I could just scream. I have always thought that somehow I ended up in not quite the right place. Don't get me wrong, I really like what I do. But I like doing lots of things. And the one thing that I have never figured out how to satisfy is my more seedy side.

Thoughts of opening sex shops and why can't I write erotica or why wasn't I a better artist. But now, opportunity has come my way. I took a chance, and it worked out in my favor. I have just been given the position of erotic art reviewer for a website I've been reading for years. How awesome is that?

They're even paying for this position. And funny enough, when I sent my email of interest, it hadn't even occurred to me that it would be a paid position. Awesome, awesome and more awesome! I'm so excited!! It's something that I really love, that I am really interested in. And it's a little bit pervy! If I didn't feel like someone sliced my gut open about two weeks ago, I'd seriously be jumping around my flat!

(Now hopefully I haven't jinxed myself by being too excited too early....)

August is Not Kind

- I had to go to the hospital in pain and had emergency(ish) surgery where I ended up losing my ovary and fallopian tube.

- My mother, who came to take care of me gets a call from her cat sitters to tell her on the day she arrives that one of her cats has died- they just found her dead in the apartment. Yes she was old, but it's the other cat that is currently being treated for bone cancer.

- A well loved colleague suddenly passed away yesterday while on vacation with his family. It was sudden and in front of his children. My office will not be the same again.

- My mother ended up getting some sort of molar infection and had to seek emergency dental treatment here which is never particularly ideal.

- Everyone else seems to be getting sick.

- And it keeps raining and it's cold.

- Edited to add: And my boiler just broke.

Enough is enough. This is ridiculous. Good news, please!

Now That Was Unexpected...

Since it's normal for me to have a lapse in blog time, this current lapse is perhaps not unusual, but the reason is most unusual, so I suppose it is time for an update.

Last week on Tuesday I met up with SH for dinner which was cool. We had a really great evening actually and it was loads of fun. It was just really great to hang out and I am so excited about her moving here and moving in. As our evening wore on however, I started to get some cramping in my side which was somewhat uncomfortable and causing me to shift in my seat a bit, but I didn't think too much of it. If anything, I thought it was good timing that I was supposed to see the doctor on Wednesday, finally.

So SH and I parted ways and I headed home, the pain not going away at all. When I got home I tried to do some stretching and stuff but still could not get comfortable. I got into bed hoping it would lessen up, and it wasn't. So I called T. T was concerned and said I should go to A&E but I wasn't really sure because it didn't seem that bad, so she said she'd come over and we could decide if I really needed to go when she got there.

Getting off the phone, it seemed to get worse, and I ended up puking up my entire evening meal. I figured I should probably go to A&E so I called a cab and got myself downstairs. T met me outside where I was still retching into the gutter and about a minute later the cab came and off to the hospital I went.

Hobbling into the hospital and trying to explain to the man on reception what was wrong, the intake nurse just pulled me in her exam room and started taking my history. I explained about the cyst, and how I had an appointment (at the same hospital) the next day and that this had happened before which she was able to call up on her computer. So she called the gynecology on-call doctor to say they should really just admit me since they'd have to come look at me anyway and knew what the problem was, in the meantime I was going into one of the emergency cubicles to get a line in and some morphine.

Which is basically what happened. I was not comfortable and could not rest- twisting and turning and shuffling about. They gave me a bunch of morphine and I managed to calm down a bit, though there was still loads of pain, the body just tends to still. Then at some point they came to wheel me away and put me into a ward. The theory was- if the morphine seemed to be working, then the next day I could have a scan and they could decide how to proceed, but if the morphine wasn't working, then I was probably bleeding internally or something else terrible and there would have to be emergency surgery. Since the morphine took the edge off, it was into the ward for the night with me.

The next day I had an ultrasound scan which was pretty much the same as last time and in fact done by the same technician who indicated she thought the cyst had grown. So back to the ward and waiting for the registrar who said that they felt they needed to take care of it and I should be in surgery that afternoon.

I should also mention that in contrast to past attacks of the pain, it hadn't really gone away by morning and was still there at a low to mid-grade level, not as bad as the evening, but not gone. The past two times I'd gone to the hospital it had basically dissipated by morning.

So the rest of the day was something of a haze as I was still doped up on quite a bit of morphine. They came and had me put on special socks and a 'shower cap' and around five or so on Wednesday they came to take me away.

Waiting in the anteroom to the operating theater was very surreal. I also didn't know what to expect, which added to the bizarre quality of the experience. They knock you out there, before you're really connected to anything, before you are taken into the theater. I didn't know this. It just happened. Next thing I knew, I came to with a start in the recovery room where I was the only person since I had been the last scheduled surgery of the day.

Which was also very surreal because I have been there when other people have come off of anesthesia and they have been pretty out of it. And my surgery, which they had not been sure about going into it, had required both keyhole and full incision and had taken over an hour and a half (had it been possible to address the issue laproscopically it would have only taken about thirty minutes). At any rate, I came to like I had just woken up. Very alert. Though of course I'm saying I felt very alert and maybe I wasn't as alert as I remember, but we just talked and talked and talked as she monitored me and I was even cracking jokes because the machine kept insisting I wasn't breathing when clearly I was.

So after a while there they determined I was good enough to go back to the ward so they wheeled me out and I saw T and SP waiting on a window ledge and SP leaned in to T and said "She looks really groggy." to which I replied, "No, I'm not really groggy at all actually, I'm pretty alert." to which they both looked somewhat startled.

Then it was an entire night of self dosing morphine and hourly checks of my blood pressure and stuff. So Thursday, which was my birthday saw me fairly incapacitated and out of it, at least until they had me get up and move into a chair so I was sitting up which felt like someone was ripping into my gut and was most unpleasant. The nurses also got me a cake which was cool and I think by the end of the day I had managed to move spots so I was next to the window.

So there's probably loads more detail that no one wants to hear about. Catheters and laxatives and first showers and blood and pressure tape. There are also things about how my cyst went from 'large' to 'very large' to 'extremely large' by description. The most important thing to mention is how much of a star T has been throughout the process in terms of taking care of me and my life and being a contact for friends and family. I mean, it was bad enough that this happened the way it did, but if you consider that my birthday part was supposed to be this weekend and I'd invited a million people to my house, you can see how it was all going to be a bit messy. But I don't think I could say enough about how great she's been and helpful and organized so I think I won't even try to make any more of a mess of it, but just that without her, this would have been a complete disaster and with her, although unexpected, it has all been manageable and okay and that has made a huge difference that is immeasurable with simple words.

Anyway, my mom has just landed and should be here soon and I need to drink another glass of water. So I'm sure I'll update more later this week as I sit around being bored. But that was my birthday for this year. You know me. Gotta be different.

Grumpy

I'm just having a morning of being grumpy. I have another post in mind that I want to write, but it's sort of important that I get this out of my system first. Right now I'm feeling slightly abandoned by just about everyone.

Objectively I know this isn't the case, but it doesn't change how it feels right now. Let me run through my list and then I might feel better.

Mr.Aloof has gone AWOL since I changed the terms of our arrangement. Of course, the reason I changed the terms is there was too much shit going on in his life and toys life to accommodate our plans. So it's not really a surprise that what was a taught and stretched thread of contact has gone temporarily silent once the demand was released. Of course it doesn't help that yesterday and this morning I've seen him pop onto IC after a 20 day break. So what, enough time for IC but not enough time to drop me an email? I know this is crazy. Still, I'm irritated. It makes me feel like none of it mattered at all.

This morning I also got email from SH who is coming in for not one but two interviews early next week. We had talked earlier in the week where she indicated that R, her UK based boyfriend, was going out of town and I said well that's no problem, you can obviously stay with me. So she's arriving on Saturday morning because R isn't leaving until Sunday morning, so far, sensible. But then the email I got this morning suggests that maybe she and I can meet up for dinner Tuesday night before she leaves Wednesday morning. Which sort of implies that she'd rather stay in his empty flat alone rather than with me, in the flat where she is supposedly going to move to in a couple months time. And also where I could do stuff like cook meals, and provide someone to talk to since she's sure to be stressed and nervous about the interviews. So I'm annoyed. The past two trips I've stepped back so she could spend time with him (which made sense) but now he's not even going to be here and she'd rather be alone in a strange place and strange city rather than with anyone who might be able to help should something come up? It makes me feel like I'm only her friend when she needs me for something and the rest of the time I just drop in importance or estimation and am otherwise not important or useful to her.

On top of these two major cases of perceived abandonment, T also has plans for the weekend when I was really hoping to have some time there. And it may change, which would be cool, but I'm struggling a bit with again feeling like my time is wanted only when it's on someone else's schedule, not when I might need something. I know this is again not fair, but I can't help that it's how I feel, which I'm quite sure is being fueled by the other two cases above.

Oh, and M is going to spend all weekend worrying about and nursing her sick cat. I had plans (and may still have plans) to go over to hers either Saturday or Sunday night for dinner, but I thought maybe she could swing by during the day to help, but no, the sick cat takes precedence. But of course the sick cat takes precedence! I'm not even suggesting she should leave her sick cat, I'm just pointing out that it's bad timing for me personally.

So with all of this milling about, how I feel is just that everyone has abandoned me for their own pursuits. That I don't really matter to anyone and am otherwise under appreciated. But it's rather telling that I can only call up four examples and I should also point out that SP and F have already offered to help me out on Saturday so I'm not being fair when I say everyone, it just feels that way.

Maybe part of it is also living alone, which overall I'm really enjoying, but I do find that I'm feeling rather 'alone'. So whether all of these things are the cause or are just contributing to an underlying feeling, I don't know. All I do know, is that I'm a bit grumpy today because of it. Well, we'll see what happens.

I Am

An idiot. I have just put my phone through the washing machine. Needless to say it isn't working at the moment.

Luckily, I have my old phone available, so I took the sim card out of my soggy phone and put it in my spare phone and it seems to be working. I'm just charging up the spare phone now.

Also luckily, it happens to be time on my contract for a new phone. Although I had really wanted to just keep my phone for another year and take the reduction in monthly cost. Well, I'll check my soggy phone tomorrow to see if it's well and truly fucked or whether or not it has dried out enough to work.

I am an idiot.

Phew

Well, the weekend has arrived, and I'm very happy to see it. This week has been a bit mental, though I think it passed fairly quickly. Those tend to be the best sorts of weeks in some ways. Yesterday at work we did a huge 'office tidy' which I don't think they've ever really done and huge amounts of stuff were thrown out (or put out to recycle). It's a little bit strange though because now my desk is basically empty. If I was considering changing jobs, it occurred to me now would be a pretty easy time to do it.

But I'm still waiting for the salary letters to come out. There were lots of rumors flying around this week that we'd get the letters by Friday. I think this is because last Friday at office drinks our managing director said it would be soon and hopefully next week (meaning this week). But I'm fairly sure we should get them by the end of next week and then I can make some decisions about what I want to do about work.

I spent two evenings this week with a couple who are my mom's neighbors since the guy is over for work and his wife came along as a vacation. It's a little bit strange because they are sort of my mom's friends, but really they're my age. But that's cool, they're really nice and interesting people and I'm enjoying hanging out with them and showing them a little bit of my adopted city. I'll probably see them one more time before they leave next weekend.

I've also been back online and talking to new people which is good. Of course I've also already in the past week talked to people who are not at all suitable. It's the worst thing about dating- and in particular online dating, how many people are just complete freaks or jerks. But there are normal enough people tucked in between, and the bad ones just make for entertaining stories really. I've also been considering going to a club with someone as a way of potentially meeting new people. I was tempted to go last month, but I was too busy with things and probably not in the right frame of mind. My mindset is definitely in the right place now, but I think that the August club night is the same night as my birthday party, so that might not work out. I need to look it up.

Today I need to try and get stuff done around the house, and I need to pop by and feed and water T's cats. Tomorrow I'm going to the circus!