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It's been nearly 6 months, time for another post! :P
It's been a... not great few months. The last time I posted was in September, I think, and that was shortly before everything went a little bit to hell. I despair of being able to keep up with my friends' posts, too, which makes me feel like the shittiest friend ever. So, you know, sorry for not keeping up with all of your lives! I will try to do better, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
First, the very bad news. I will put it behind a cut because it is very triggery for some.
In October my mother was told that what was previously diagnosed as "totally not cancer" was, in fact, breast cancer. I am still annoyed that they waited about four months before letting her know. It's not like a cancer diagnosis requires prompt treatment or anything, right? *sigh*
Anyway, they scheduled surgery for mid-November, and all that was left to do was wait. Except then she got sick. Long-time readers may remember that she was diagnosed with stage 2 emphysema back in 2012. Sometime in October she managed to get one of the very first cases of flu in Quebec, before the flu vaccines were even available in that province, because everything in Quebec is mismanaged (I'd gotten my flu shot ten days before, if that gives you any indication). Not only did she get the flu, she was essentially asymptomatic until the moment she couldn't breathe anymore.
I will spare you the gory details, but she ended up spending 9 days in the hospital in the thoracic ward, being pumped full of many, many drugs. We discovered that she hadn't been to see her pulmonologist since her original diagnosis in 2012 (7 YEARS), and as a result not only was her prescription vastly out of date, her lung function had diminished to less than 50%. Part of that was due to the flu, but I cannot tell you how upset I was that she hadn't been to see a damned doctor about a chronic condition that is essentially fatal in the long run in nearly a decade. That is *bonkers*.
The first three days were the most intense, because neither of my parents has ever dealt with a long hospital stay before now, and my father was completely at sea about how to cope with any of it, especially given how worried he was about my mother. I was meant to visit that weekends anyway (she went to the ER on the Thursday and I drove down on the Friday), and it's a good thing I was there, becaus there was nothing for my father to eat, and he hadn't the first notion about what to pack for a hospital stay. I kind of took over for a while, showed him what to do, cooked him some freezer meals, and asked all of the questions whenever doctors came into the room. I also discovered that my mother is utter shite at self-reporting symptoms: she will insist that she is fine no matter how much pain she's in or how much she can't breathe. So I had to spend a lot of time correcting her, which I hated, because I want to let her speak for herself, because otherwise the doctors were ready to release her when she couldn't walk five feet without passing out.
We got all that sorted out, but of course the breast cancer surgery had to be postponed. They performed a million tests, and finally she had her surgery the Friday before Christmas. It went well, all of the cancer was removed, but my mother, being the melodramatic Eastern European that she is, decided she was definitely going to die and announced that she was going to refuse all further treatment because what was the point at her age? Cue me rolling my eyes and letting her rant. The good news is that she's seen her newest oncologist this week, and he was apparently super nice and gave very detailed information, and she is going to have radiation treatment once a week as well as a chemo pill every day for the next five weeks as a preventive measure, and he is confident that she will suffer very few side effects (which was part of her fear). So once her fears were allayed, the rest went very smoothly, and she was in very good spirits when I talked to her earlier today.
In short, things were deeply worrisome for a while, but they are looking better now. My father has stepped up in a major way, and is actually learning to manage household tasks on his own since my mother can't really do what she did before. He retired on December 31st, and the timing couldn't be better, because now he can spend as much time with my mother as he needs to without worrying about going to work.
So that's what was happening with my mother. In the meantime, I was still trying to juggle mediation training, my masters' classes, and work, which blew up in my face. We were facing another staffing shortage, and I ended up being called in for quite a bit of overtime. The money was nice, but I didn't really want to go in, and it cost me dearly. The short version is that I fucked up my health, and then my sleep got even more messed up, and I fell really, really behind in my classes, so much so that I ended up dropping one even though it meant losing the tuition money permanently. It was either that or fail both courses and flush the entire amount of money down the drain, so in the end the choice was a no-brainer.
The health thing has been weird. Part of it is a flare-up of Menière's (vertigo, puking, tinnitus, etc.), but there were a lot of mystery symptoms, too. My best guess is that a lot of them were stress related.
I ended up stepping down as clerk of First Day School at Quaker Meeting, and I haven't been back since August, for which I feel incredibly guilty. I should go back, but I'm a bit of a shame spiral about it, and the longer I stay away the harder it is to go back. I feel like I let everybody down, and I don't know how I'm going to look any of them in the face after giving up on FDS. Objectively speaking I know it was probably the best decision to make, as I've hated the position ever since I accepted it in 2015 and it stressed me out to no end, but there was never anyone around who wanted to take it up and FDS is too important to let it go entirely, so I just kept going until I absolutely couldn't anymore.
Mediation training is done for now, and I am trying desperately to get some experience, but so far I haven't heard back from the places I've reached out to. I've scaled back to one class this semester, and even there I am falling behind with every passing week. It's a little dishearteneing, but I am going to make a determined effort to catch up. At least I am finding the subject matter really interesting, and since I'm doing this for my own benefit and nothing else, that's what I'm focusing on. The moment this stops being interesting or enjoyable, I'm going to stop.
Work has also been extra amounts of not fun.
I didn't expect to get the job, and I didn't. What I truly didn't expect, though, was for them to give the job to someone with next to no supervisory experience who is universally loathed by everyone in the section. Not only that, but she'd made it clear over the years that she consideres me completely incompetent. I think I mentioned that a previous coworker/fellow supervisor who no longer works here spent a couple of years consistently undermining me for reasons I have yet to fathom, and she was his direct report for most of that time. It took me a year after his departure to recover from that, and now I have his acolyte as a boss. It's not ideal.
Still, there's nothing I can do about that, the decision has been made. I decided tat I was going to be an adult about it, and approach the situation in good faith. She has been on the job for exactly one month, and I am putting my best professional foot forward every day that I am on the job. If there is conflict of any kind, it will not be instigated by me, nor do I plan on giving her any more ammunition to use against me.
I am deeply disappointed in my NOC i/c, because I had told him about my misgivings (reluctantly, because I don't like painting myself as a victim even when it's warranted, because it feels like I'm trying to shift the blame for my "failures" on other people, which is not my intention), and he then turned around and told the new manager. I had not explicitly told him that I expected him to keep ths in his confidence, because I honestly thought that was implied, due to the nature of the conversation. I have had this assumption validated by a couple of friends and my therapist, so I'm not crazy, here. He also left on long-term sick leave, right before I could talk to him about it, so I guess that's not going to get resolved any time soon. I really thought I had made a meaningful connection with him over the past few months, and it's disheartening to find out that, no, I likely didn't.
Most frustrating of all is that I found out that the main reason for which I wasn't given the manager position is because of my extracurricular studies. The Director and NCO i/c decided that, since I was studying mediation, it meant that I had no loyalty to the unit and that I was going to leave no matter what. I am truly disappointed that they know me so little, and that they made (in my opinion) a pretty shitty choice for the well-being of the section. The new manager has been rubbing people the wrong way for a month, and I've had to talk two people out of quitting on the spot. One of my direct reports has been having panic attacks, and I'm pretty sure it has a lot to do with the micro-managing that's been going on. That, and due to a recent massive scandal within our walls (if you've been paying attention to Canadian news, you may have heard of the Cameron Ortis case: short version is that he had access to highly sensitive intelligence related to national security and he leaked it to a non-allied foreign power over the course of several years), communications security has been stepped up several notches, and we are all under massive amounts of scrutiny. So everyone is stressed out, and management is being unhelpful in many ways. The new manager is trying, I will give her that. She is putting in her best effort, I have no doubt of it, and the Director definitely likes her. She is good at cutting through the red tape we often encounter (not all the red tape, but some of it, which is helpful). She's alternating between trying to be nice to me and being super condescending abnout my abilities, so work has been an exercise in gritting my teeth a lot, and waiting for an opportunity to leave. I wouldn't have left if I'd become the manager, but as they have decided I am destined to be disloyal, I feel no need to prove them wrong just out of spite.
In the meantime, I'm training a new employee, after the unmitigated disaster that was the previous trainee on my team. I wasn't training the latter, but one of my direct reports was, and hoo boy was the new kid a terrible fit. He could do the work, but his attitude was garbage and he lacked any kind of good judgment. We didn't keep him after his probation preriod, and we'd had multiple disciplanry sessions with him after he demonstrated the aforementioned poor judgment. It was a clusterfuck. Anyway, the newest employee is the polar opposite: he is level-headed, responsible, hardworking... and is struggling really badly with the actual work. *sigh* I'm really hoping he starts to catch on soon. I'm running out of ways in which to diversify my explanations and training so that he'll understand. Until that time comes, we're both treading water a fair bit.
Work nonsense aside, I am trying slowly to come out of this nearly five-months slump. I am considering asking my doctor to up my Wellbutrin again, and see if that helps. I went from a non-therapeutic dose to the actual minimum therapeutic dose, and that did help a bit, so I wonder if a higher dose might not actually get my brain to cooperate more.
I've been doing poorly on the personal front at pretty much every level. I haven't been getting out enough, even to walk Peggy. I've been compensating for her not getting enough exercise with me by making sure she gets to daycare several times a week so she can run around and socialize and have a good time, but I need to do better for both of us. It's good for her to take longer walks, which is also good for me. She is still a delight in all ways, and as she's getting a bit older some of the more annoying behvioural problems have tapered off, although I'm still trying (unsuccessfully) to break her of the habit of jumping on people and counters and tables and basically everything. She's 99% housetrained, which is a relief. I was getting really tired of cleaning up pee a billion times a day. She's had a couple of accidents in the past two months, but nothing serious. She's not quite ready to accompany me to my parents', but I'm hopeful I can get her there by this summer. I just need to train her to stay, and not to get into everything the minute my back is turned. Easier said than done, I know.
I also haven't managed to get the house tidy at all. Every time I've made progress of any kind something has happened to make me backslide, and it's just really disheartenening. It often seems to come down to a choice between sleep and cleaning/tidying, or occasionally getting in some leisure activities and cleaning/tidying. Let's face it, when given those choices, I will always opt for sleep or leisure. I know I should forgo the leisure until my responsibilities are taken care of, but I just haven't, so there you go. Iwas considering hiring a professional organizer to come help me declutter the house completely, in anticipation of maybe moving out at the end of the summer or the beginning of the fall, but I just had to replace all ofd my winter tires yesterday (I got a very impressive flat, and I was planning on replacing them before next winter anyway, so I bought th tires while they were on clearance), so financially that may not be feasible for a little while longer. If I can rack up some overtime that might pay for it, but overtime generally messes up my health (see above), so I'm not sure I really want that. I still have a lot of work to do on my own before I can bring in an organizer anyway, especially my paperwork. I don't really want help with my paperwork, more the rest of my junk that I'm too anxious to get rid of on my own (because OMG WHAT IF I NEED IT SOMEDAY?), because I really want to downsize if/when I move to my own house. So the more stuff I can get rid of, the better. Also, it is a lot easier to keep things tidy when you have less stuff.
I don't know if I'll be able to make it all work. Maybe if I can get my act together a little bit, I can at least try to keep track of my progress (if any) here. I keep trying to check in reglarly here, but I keep getting overwhelmed and then not coming back. I have no idea if I can break that pattern. We shall see, I guess!
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My father is doing most of the caregiving these days, and I am doing the moral support thing because I live in a different city. He's doing much better than I feared he would.
None of this is stuff I want to put on Facebook either, you know? My mother's health stuff is personal for her and even if I were inclined to, I know she wouldn't want it broadcast out there. I have coworkers and former bosses and other people I don't know well enough on there to trust with any of this.
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