This isn’t what I started out to write. I started to write something else and realized that I wasn’t ready to put the concept in my head into actual words. I’ve been told that people think in language. I’m not sure that is true. I think in language when I am thinking about talking to other people, but I think in pictures and sounds and actions when I think about other things. Lots of the thoughts in my head play out like mini-movies – even the ideology and theory based ones – that must then be subtitled before they can be released at theatres.
I’m about to get back into my thesis writing. I’m close to being done – if by close you mean 2/3 of the way. When I run distances, I think of 2/3 as the home stretch – which is funny when the home stretch is 4 or 5 miles. Still, I’m most of the way there. The rest is doable.
I didn’t take a huge amount of time off of my thesis – just yesterday. I had to. My brain was not functioning. I got sick on Monday and ran a fever on and off from Tuesday to Friday. I could tell when the fever got worse because I would start getting the fever chills, and they would last for a few hours and then go away and I’d feel a little better for a while and then they would come back again and so on and so forth.
I worked through this – thesis work, not work work – and Thursday I even went to the library to get some more data, even though I was light headed and dizzy and prone to confusion. I kept having to rest on the stairs because I thought I was going to faint. But there really wasn’t much choice – or rather, the choice to not work means extending the level of stress that had made me vulnerable to illness in the first place, so better to get it over with sooner rather than later.
Friday night though I realized that I had nothing left to think with. I felt drained physically and mentally. So yesterday, instead of working like I had planned, I read. I didn’t even read anything meaningful or educational. I read comic books – comic books I’d already read once before even – for the whole day and did nothing on my thesis. I didn’t even go outside except to take care of the dog – not walk the dog, because I was still a little light headed – but take care of as in water and feed.
Today I feel more like myself than I have felt in a long time. Today I walked the dog. Today I will work on my thesis and hopefully move that 2/3 into the 3/4 zone. I’m still hacking and coughing and my jaw still hurts from the ear-ache (you know you have a gnarly ear-ache when it feels like your jaw has been dislocated and popped back into place) and standing up too fast is a bad idea, but I no longer feel like I’m going to fall down if I have to walk more than a block, or like I’ve been gargling battery acid.
Tomorrow I go in to have my wrist x-ray done – and if possible – schedule the surgery to get it fixed. Almost everything I do at this point hurts. Rolling over in my sleep wakes me up. Pulling the blanket up when I get cold is painful. And the numbness in my palm and thumb are growing worse. I’m almost positive at this point that whatever is growing in there is putting some pressure on a nerve – and not just the one that goes “ouch”. There was still some numbness in my palm from the last surgery, so it is a little difficult to know the exact line of old and new – but the thumb is definitely new and it is a very strange sensation.
Whatever happens, I am not going to let this summer pass with me in pain. I refuse.
Not long ago my boss asked if I am one of “those” people – as in one of the people to whom bad things just happen. And it sure seems to be true. Not that it stops me – or even slows me down that much. And it isn’t like the things that happen are all that devastating – though they have been in the past. They are just normal bad things that seem to happen with abnormal frequency. I don’t even mention most of them anymore – they just the way of things. But sometimes I wonder if there is any way I can change this. I do get tired of the extra struggle. For instance, my thesis is hard enough without getting sicker than I have been in almost two years, and without the damaged wrist, and without the rats in the attic, and without setting my hand on the stove, and without the hives on my sides and hips. Just the thesis is enough. The rest is dead weight. Itchy dead weight.
My positive thinking experiment is still working for me – despite not being able to work out regularly for two weeks now, and despite the frustration and depression that come with being sick and stressed out at the same time. I’m still ok with myself. And I’m starting to wonder if maybe something like that can change the way that things work for me. It is one thing to keep a positive attitude and not let yourself get too low when things go wrong. But it would be so much better if things just didn’t go wrong so often.
Ok. That is it for now. I wrote this to try and get my mind back in writing/thinking mode after a day off. I think this is as close as I’m going to get to functional. Back to work.
SecondHand Saint 