awake

I should be getting ready for bed right now.  Actually I should be in bed and have been asleep for awhile.  And I’m tired but I’m not sleepy.  My brain is still whirring from the day.  And not about anything exciting.  Tuesdays are just my really long days right now.  I go straight from work to a 3 hour cheer practice to the grocery store to grab something quick for dinner and then on to my small group (always arriving at least 15 minutes late) and then finally home.  So thoughts and ideas pile up all day and I hardly have time to process anything until the time I should be getting into bed.  I’ve found that I’m definitely someone who has to sit in front of the tv and watch something inane before I can even think about falling asleep (tonight it was 8 minutes of Friends, an episode of Sex and the City, and about 2 minutes of House Hunters International).  I don’t like that I have this habit.  Mostly because I don’t like that I depend on tv to help shut me down.  That doesn’t seem to be the healthiest thing.  I think right now I just need a break.  Good thing I’m taking next week off of work!  I’ve been feeling anxiety slip back into my mind/body/soul and it scares me because I know how paralyzing it can be for me.  And while I can see where having some concern about different things coming up or going on in my life would be okay, its the sense of dread and negativity always at the tip of my brain that just wears me out and gets me in a sort of state of nausea.  I think at the moment a lot of this stems from cheer (random different parts – it is by no means all bad right now) and I’m so looking forward to July just because we’ll be done with camp and we won’t have practice or many events until at least mid August.  It is reminding me a lot of my first 2 of years coaching when I’d wake up with worst case scenarios running through my head and then I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep.  Its not at that point, but I fear that it could get there.  Ok, I had no idea this post was going to get all deep and troubling.  Apparently that’s what’s on my brain that I hadn’t processed yet and can’t shut off yet.  Ugh.

good news…make that GREAT

So I had an appointment at the ear doctor’s this morning because a couple of weeks ago when I had a terrible headache for a whole week I went to my regular doctor’s office to see if they could do anything about it.  I saw a different doctor than I normally do and he looked in my ears to see if there was anything wrong that might be causing the headache.  He looked in my left ear first and said, “Whoa.  What’s going on here?”  Ummm….not what you’d like to hear from your doctor as they are poking around with their otoscope.  I’ve had 2 ear surgeries performed on that ear because I had a perforation in my ear drum during a particularly bad ear infection during college.  Which the student health center failed to correctly diagnose me with.  So the infection went on and on until finally on about my 4th trip to the health center I saw a doctor whose husband happened to be an ENT doc and she recognized the perforation immediately.  Anyway, I ended up needing surgery – the first one didn’t take – so I was sent to a specialist the next summer to have the surgery again.  This was back in 2002/2003.  The surgery is only day surgery, but it is not fun.  I had to wear a bandage around my head for several days and have packing in my ear (making me completely deaf on that side) for about a month.

Bringing us back to the tale at hand though – when the doctor asked what was going on with that ear I replied, “I’ve had 2 tympanoplasties (the type of ear surgery I had) on it.  Does it look bad?”  He said he couldn’t see an ear drum at all!!!  He immediately put in the referral for me to see a specialist here in town.  So for 2 weeks now I’ve been at a moderate rate of panic whenever I think about my dumb ear.  I was positive that I would have to have surgery again.  And every little thing I felt in my ear seemed really dramatic.  And to be honest, I’ve wondered about it for a long time (like over a year) just because it does feel differently from my other ear and I do have some loss of hearing in it.  So, I’ve been thinking about when I could schedule surgery and even earmarking some of PTO days for it (I said that to my boss and mom this afternoon and they both laughed – I hadn’t even realized my pun.).

So this morning I go to see the specialist and am totally nervous.  And completely sure that he’ll be scheduling me for surgery within the next month.  He comes in, checks both of my ears, and tells me that the good news is that he sees my ear drum and there is no perforation.  He says it just looks like a post operative ear drum and those look kind of different so that was probably the only reason for confusion from the other doctor I saw.  In fact the only issue he saw was that both of my ears are pretty waxy and gave me a little paper on how to take care of that issue.  I could not believe what I was hearing.  I’ll take stupid old waxy ears over surgery anyday!  (As I’m sure most people would.)  I cannot tell you the relief I felt from this news.  I almost wanted to run out of the office in case he was just teasing me and told me something different if I hung around too long.  On the drive back to the office I was smiling like an idiot and actually clapped my hands.  I was by myself and people probably thought I was nuts.  Oh well.

So now I’ve got those 5 earmarked PTO days that I’ve got to use before the end of June.  Hmmm…what to do, what to do?

survival

So I just got back yesterday morning from a Thanksgiving trip up to Alaska.  I had forgotten how brutal the redeye can be, but all in all the trip was great and the traveling went off without a hitch (unusual for Thanksgiving weekend!).  Anyway after being so tired from the flight and then sleeping until 1pm, I was not at all tired around the usual bedtime of 10:30 or 11.  Plus I was about two thirds of the way through Eclipse (the third Twilight book – and yes, I’m completely addicted now), so I just stayed awake and kept reading.  Finally at midnight I forced myself to shut the book, turn off the lights, and keep my eyes shut.  But sleep would not come.  Instead a very uneasy feeling settled in my stomach and the ever ready feelings of anxiety set in.  With the amount of times anxiety has come up on this fairly new blog it shows that obviously I’ve got some issues to work out.  I started worrying about going back to work, about the piles of stuff that I needed to get done there that I already knew about and the piles of new stuff that would have appeared for me after taking 3 working days off.  I worried about the first set of basketball games my cheerleaders would be cheering at tonight.  I worried about the 4 girls who are brand new to cheering for basketball.  And then all that anxiety led me to the normal big questions – “what am I doing with my life?”, “why do I feel so alone in this?”, “why do I so over commit myself?”.  And it just went on and on.  Finally I somehow fell asleep only to be wide awake at 5:30am with no alarm to even wake me then feeling that uneasy feeling again.  I wasn’t planning on getting up until 6:45 or 7 so I just stayed in bed and finished Eclipse (yes, finished – on to book 4!).  

Ok, so this long drawn out story about my sleeping patterns (or lack of) last night was not the main point of this post.  The main point is that after all the worry about the things I would encounter today, I survived!  Yes, when I first got to work this morning I had over 60 emails to sort through, and yes, some of them made me want to scream (oh, I didn’t mention – I cried at work two weeks ago – like blubbering sobs in the bathroom and now I’m caught in between this embarrassment about that and relief that I finally just let it out – so it’s not unreasonable to think that one of these days I really might just scream bloody murder over one of these annoying emails), and the fax machine decided it hated my existence and continued to beep even after I took care of the freaking paper jam (turns out I hadn’t, the paper was rolled up into a tiny little tube and stuck in the very middle of the insides of the machine – urgh!), but in the end there was nothing too horrible.  And we had a good staff meeting where everyone was in a good and joking mood.  And my boss and I went for lunch where we were able to have an honest conversation about where I am in life and how I’m not the happiest with it all at the moment.  Whenever we go to lunch together I am always reminded that both of us are human and that she has a lot of the same thoughts and feelings I have about our work life in general.  And then my cheerleaders were AWESOME at the game tonight.  Sure, there were a few mistakes on some of the cheers, but for the most part they were sharp and loud and super spirited.  I was a proud little mama.  And the games were great and exciting and I remembered that I do like coaching basketball cheer.  Plus my co-coach came to the games (she coaches the wrestling squad during winter season) and it was so nice to have her there to sit with me.  So not only did I survive today, I came out the other side feeling good about it.  Three cheers for that.