Sticks and Stars

I started reading How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk and it’s a good thing. I’ve actually read the book before, long, long ago, long before I had children (or any intention of having children) and I liked it back then, and I still like it today. In fact, I like it even more today because it’s actually applicable and even better, it actually works.

I’m following the instructions and waiting a week between each chapter so I’m only on chapter one, but already I see the results of making the effort to validate my four year old’s feelings instead of however I’d usually respond. I was pleased to realize that I actually instinctively validate his feelings much of the time, but now that this behavior has been pointed out to me and identified as such, I can make sure that it happens (almost) all of the time. I really try to be a good mother. I really want to be a caring, supportive, good listener of a parent but I often feel that I’m just blindly guessing as to what it is I’m ideally supposed to do. I try one thing here and another thing there with no consistency and no real results and I feel frustrated and ineffectual. Having some direction and guidance makes things a hell of a lot easier.

I absolutely love how validating my four year old’s feelings stops tantrums almost immediately. Yesterday evening I came home to find that he had “repaired” a broken train. Just as he was showing it to me, I moved and accidentally bumped him and it fell on the ground and broke again. As you might expect, he was furious. “MAMA! YOU BROKE MY TRAIN!!!” he screamed at me, his face full of rage. I kneeled down on the floor and said, “I broke your train and now you are so mad at me!” He paused, definitely not expecting that from me, but then continued, “Yes!! I’m so mad at you for breaking my train!!!” I replied, “I know. You worked so hard to fix it and then I broke it!” Again, the pause, and then, much more calmly, “I worked so hard and now it’s broken again!” Within a minute the entire tantrum had been diffused and we were discussing how I could help him fix it. Let me tell you, had I not taken the time to validate his feelings, that is not how this story would have ended.

We had one occasion where he was too upset for my validating to calm him but even though I still had to deal with a full on tantrum, just making the attempt to validate his feelings helped me to feel so much more connected to how upset he was feeling. Instead of just getting impatient with his upset that seemed so trivial to me, I was able to sit with him and empathize and even though the end result didn’t change, we both felt closer and happier afterward.

If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. Hell, if you have read it, you should probably read it again. Sadly, it doesn’t work so well with the pre/semi-lingual crowd, but with a little sneaky effort, it could definitely work with the grown up crowd.

My four year old and I are also tackling the first series of Bob Books. My four year old is on the cusp of reading (he can “read” by sounding out simple words, but he doesn’t actually read) and frequently gets impatient with the process. I thought (correctly) that having a series of small (tiny) books through which to progress would give him enough of a sense of accomplishment that he’d continue reading instead of giving up out of frustration. Indeed, he still gets frustrated, but he’s very motivated to see what the next book is about and if we take breaks when he starts getting overwhelmed, we progress pretty well.

One small downside of the books is that they are so simple that he tries to memorize them instead of actually reading the words, and so when I correct him and tell him to read, not just guess, he gets mad. I’ve learned to just stop when that starts happening (and to validate his feelings!) and hopefully I can keep him progressing well enough that he won’t have a chance to memorize, but we shall see. The damned kid has quite a good memory!

Oh, and one last thing, yeah, I know. Six freakin’ posts in one day! I have no idea what’s gotten into me. If it makes a difference though, they were all primarily written on the days to which I backposted them, I just hadn’t had a chance to finish them until insomnia booted me out of bed at 4:30 this morning. So I took the opportunity and got them all posted. Don’t worry, it won’t happen again…although I do feel compelled to write a post about all the linux command line stuff I’m learning at work…so you may want to eagerly anticipate that one.

I spent the weekend with fingertips glued to laptop, researching schools for my four year old (who will begin his journey into the exciting yet stifling world of formal education next year). For us, it’s a bit of a more difficult journey because I have all these crazy hippy educational ideas that will hopefully nurture my sons’ love of learning instead of squelching them into little boxes. As a result I’m just a bit picky about what kind of educational environment to which I subject them (thus this year’s entirely unaffordable Montessori preschool).

On Friday I received a…what’s it called when someone produces a magazine that is supposed to contain useful information but is really nothing more than advertisements wrapped around “articles” that were clearly just pulled off some website? Adverzine? Magatizement? Well anyway, whatever they’re called, I received one on Friday that contained ads for many local private schools and I realized that if private schools are starting to woo me (as the general adverzine reading public), then it must be time to start thinking about schooling for next year. And indeed, I knew this was the case because enrollment starts in January and we need to move (if necessary to secure a preferential spot for appropriate school assignment) before that happens. But of course, before we can move, we need to know to where we are headed.

I believe I posted a while back on how I was considering private school, how I was waffling back and forth really, and indeed, I have continued to waffle. One minute I’ll hear something crappy about public school and think to myself that there’s no way in hell I’m subjecting my son to that cesspool, but then the next minute I’ll think about my rapidly dwindling savings account and how nice it would be to not shell out essentially a second month’s rent every month for school, and how much work it will take to apply to a bunch of private schools in the first place and how likely we are to not fit into their rarefied environments and I’ll think that maybe public school isn’t so bad. At the very least I felt I should give public school a chance, so that’s where I started this weekend.

It was an interesting if exhausting process and much to my surprise I discovered many public schools in my city that meet my off-the-beaten-track standards. I’ve narrowed my choices to seven schools, possibly eight, with two standing way out in front. Of course, I can’t make any final decisions until I have a chance to tour the schools (since I’m basing my judgments on little more than their websites and whatever I could google up) and attend their Open Houses (which don’t occur until January), but I’m more excited about and pleased with the options than I expected.

Option #1 (and really, this is my top choice hands down) is Alternative Hippy School where they don’t have grades or tests, kids determine their own educational pursuits and interests and work at their own pace (with some limits and guidance from staff); the school prioritizes experiential and interdisciplinary learning, art (they even have an artist-in-residence), and social justice; kids learn mediation and problem solving in the context of handing the interchild conflicts that arise (I found a video of the process online and it was fucking awesome!); they take something like 35 field trips a year; and because of their unique program, they have almost zero incidences of violence, bullying, etc. Their standardized test scores are the lowest in the district, which concerned me a little (although really, not *that* much because I think standardized tests are largely bullshit…and if you’d like further explanation on my position, I’d be happy to clarify) but my concern was entirely alleviated when I learned that their low scores are the result of the majority of the families opting out the tests, which means that they get scores of zero, which obviously lowers the scores overall. Oh, and the school is K-8, which is also a priority for me. Sixth through eighth grades are what my friends identify as the most traumatic parts of their adolescences (I personally reserve that label for my first two years of high school, but middle school was certainly no cake walk) and I think that having a consistent environment with teachers and kids you know is one way to help alleviate at least a little stress.

My one relatively small concern is that technology as any kind of focus is barely touched on. I’ll be able to get a better sense of how technology is integrated into school life when I actually visit, but I’m guessing that, given the school’s deeply hippy underpinnings, technology is going to be regarded as a necessary evil instead of a vital and inspiring tool. But really, given the access to technology that my boys will have in their home lives, I’m not too worried about a somewhat lacking environment at school. And as new kids (and younger parents) continue to join the school, I am sure they will catch up. I, for one, have every intention of joining the PTA at whatever school we end up with and I definitely will be more than happy to suggest and help implement any technological improvements I can.

Overall, hippy kids are the kinds of kids I want my boys to grow up with and hippy parents are the kinds of parents I want to befriend. As I mentioned in my post about my new babysitter, I have no desire for my energetic and active but sweet and sensitive four year old to become some (toy) gun-toting, (mock) killing little boy who’s supposed to have a girlfriend at age 5. I thought it was inevitable, that I’d have to give him up to the influences of mainstream America, but now I see that there’s hope.

(There is also a slightly less hippy yet intensely social justice-focused alternative school that might become my second choice, but their sucky website has deterred me thus far. I will suspend judgment in anticipation of enlightening school tours.)

Option #2 (and it pales greatly in comparison to Option #1, but still stands far above the rest) is Fancy Language School. Their pedagogy and curriculum is fairly standard except for the fact that all incoming students choose either Japanese or Spanish and 50% of their day is conducted exclusively in that language. By the end of fifth grade, the kids are expected to be fully bilingual. The school itself also focuses strongly on integrating technology, prioritizes an “international” education, and has an international artist-in-residence.

While I recognize that I might be prioritizing the opportunity for my sons to be bilingual as a way to meet one of my own personal dreams, I still think that speaking more than one language is incredibly useful, not only so that you can more easily visit at least one other country in the world, but to expand your brain in that manner. Seeing the world through another language, understanding how languages connect (and don’t connect), having that outsider’s perspective on how language might shape a particular culture, how can any of that be bad? Plus, the kids in the classes are native speakers of either English, Spanish or Japanese, and the teachers are also native speakers, so this would be an opportunity to learn about aspects of other cultures far more directly than merely reading about them and then passing around some random “artifacts” the teacher picked up during his family vacation to Puerto Vallarta (ala my own education).

I think it’s pretty reasonable to say that if my boys’ dad did the research that I did over the weekend, his number one choice would be Fancy Language School and I’m not sure if he’d rank Alternative Hippy School at all. It’s funny. Back when he and I were together, we both held similar educational ideals for our kids (or so I thought) — creative pedagogy that inspired their love of learning and natural ability to achieve, a supportive and caring environment that allowed them to direct themselves, work at their own pace and ask endless questions, and access to resources that inspire them to live up to their potential. However, now that he’s with a woman who apparently holds more “traditional” views about getting a “good” education, his focus seems to be big name schools, test scores and this highly competitive achieve-or-die mentality that leads to ulcers in 10 year olds. It’s not that I don’t want my boys to achieve, in fact quite the contrary, but mine’s more of an “if you build it, they will come” philosophy, as opposed to my ex’ philosophy of “if you force them through it, they will arrive.”

Regardless, I think there are good options that will meet both of our goals for our kids. I never expected to be excited about public education, but I can’t deny that I am.

This morning I attended an art and architecture tour of my fair city. Just as I knew it would be, it was excellent and inspiring and showed me parts of my city to which I never paid attention or never even knew about to begin with. I love the city in which I live. I feel so happy to live here and with the possible exceptions of maybe San Francisco or maybe Vancouver (BC, not WA) I can’t imagine a more ideal place to live. Tours like the one I attended this morning only make me love my city more.

I just wish I hadn’t forgotten my damned camera.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should post about how I don’t think I’m going to apply to architecture school after all. My inclination is to say that I’m less interested in being an architect, but really I think it’s more likely that I’m just overwhelmed by all the work between here and there. It’s hard to think seriously about the steps needed to apply to school when I have a hard enough time tackling the steps needed to get my children out the door every morning.

I’ve been thinking about this for weeks and weeks and I resigned myself to the decision by telling myself that I just started this entirely new job that’s going to influence my career path in entirely new ways and maybe I should give that a chance and see where it takes me. Plus, I remind myself, how realistic was it to expect to go to school full time for three years while simultaneously maintaining my status as sole provider for my little household? But I never feel completely resigned to the decision. Architecture can just be an interest and a hobby, I tell myself, it’s not necessary to pursue a degree in every area of interest and/or hobby, is it? But still I feel a twinge of discomfort, like something isn’t quite right.

And then I attended the tour this morning and it was just so amazing. As I was waiting for the tour to begin, I walked around the offices of the foundation that sponsors these tours and learned a huge amount about the progress of architecture in my city just from their extensive exhibits and models. I felt (and feel) so inspired to learn more.

But still, it truly is not very realistic to expect to go back to school, at least not right now. I had this idea that if I just set myself on the path, all the potential obstacles would resolve themselves, and while I do think that’s true to some extent, right now I am just not determinedly enough on the path to do much other than stop and rest against the nearest obstacle and feel content to gaze out at the view.

But on the bright side, I have a whole other year to prepare for going to school, and a whole other year to learn about architecture. There’s a model making workshop I plan to take next month, and plenty more tours, and myriad other opportunities to build skills toward applying to school. Plus, I only get smarter with age, right?

Now that I’m in this new position I have to take a lunch break. In my old position my boss let me leave early instead of taking lunch, which was really awesome (and very useful for the retrieving of small children from far flung locations), and now it’s hard to break that habit. I see that it’s noon and I think, “Sigh. I guess I should take lunch,” and then I start working on something until the next time I look at the clock and see that it’s now 1:30. Then I think, “Jeez, I should really take lunch, it’s getting kind of late,” and then I keep working on whatever I was working on until the next time I look at the clock and see that it’s now 2:30. Then I think, “Well, it’s kind of late to take lunch now and my butt is so well planted in my chair! Maybe I’ll just leave early,” even though I know I can’t. And so it goes, and so I don’t take lunch, and so I feel annoyed because that means I’m working an extra half hour every day for nothing, and damnit, I already make little enough as it is!

So today I made myself take lunch. I don’t actually eat lunch on my lunch break, because that would mean either heating up my leftover turkey soup and wasting time sitting in our grimy breakroom while I shovel it down, or heating up my leftover turkey soup and then wasting time trying to find some pleasant spot where I can sit outside and shovel it down, so instead I heat up my leftover turkey soup and return to my desk and shovel it down while reading email. That way I get my full half hour (and no one’s watching or timing me, so I really just take however long I want) to engage in whatever relatively close escapist efforts for which I am currently in the mood.

Today’s lunch brought a visit to the gallery I visit every month to check out their latest exhibit (and this month’s was particularly cool) and then I headed to a nearby bookstore to browse (and inevitably buy). I decided that if I found something that I wanted I would let myself buy it and not think too hard about it as long as I could come up with a quick initial justification as to why buying it made better sense than just checking it out from the library. And indeed, I bought two books* and mentally added several others to my “To Read (and therefor to be checked out from the library) List.”

I spent a long time touching the blank journals and trying to come up with a good excuse to buy one, but in the end I couldn’t. I have no specific purpose in mind for a blank journal (and I tried to tell myself that the fact that I wanted one so badly was excuse enough even if I had no specific use for it, but apparently I did not concur) and the one purpose I could come up with, the idea of turning it into a “dream journal” (as in, “these are the dreams I have for my life,” not, “these are the dreams I had last night” seemed like it would only lead to anxiety every time I reread the journal and realized how much how much of a hassle my current dreams are without even having to consider all the dreams I had a month ago, or a year ago, etc….although now that I think about it, it might be kind of interesting to see what I was dreaming about a year ago, because I’m pretty sure my priorities have shifted.

But anyway, if I want to keep a dream journal I have another journal at home that, while not nearly as pretty, is a hell of a lot more free. And the conversation about where to track my dreams is really a distraction from the real point, which is that I need to get back to having some dreams, and, even more importantly, I need to start doing some things to get those dreams going.

I blogged about this a while back (although I don’t think I posted it), about how my process of pursuing my dreams and interests and whatnot is a lot like breathing, in that I breathe in all my new interests and all the energetic effort to pursue them, but I can only breathe in so deeply before I need to breathe out again, which is where my energetic effort pauses until I breathe in again. I used to berate myself for this cycle because I never recognized it as a cycle, and instead I just got angry because I saw myself as quitting or failing or stopping in some way, not just pausing. Now I realize that this is just the way I work, this is probably how everybody works, and I can accept the ebbs and flows.

I’ve been breathing out a while now and I definitely feel ready to breathe in. I thought I was going to breathe in when I started kung fu, but my surgery and the resulting recovery time forced me to postpone that effort until the next beginner cycle comes around, so I guess, I don’t know, that I’ve been holding my breath until distractions cleared up and suddenly I find that my lungs are about to burst. Or maybe “burst” isn’t the right word since that implies that I have all this pent up energy that I’m dying to focus toward my latest projects and interests, when really it’s more that I’m recognizing that my coffers are looking a bit empty, and so it’s time to restock.

*And now that I’ve looked those books up on Amazon so that I could link to them I feel mildly annoyed with myself for not just waiting and ordering them used off Amazon (which is how I usually buy books) because I could have saved so much money and because I would have discovered the Fast Food book, which would have been of far greater interest to my four year old, the target audience for whom I bought the Food Play book. SIGH. Oh well, at least I supported an independent bookstore.)

As you might recall, I recently started a new job. I am now part of Information Services at my place of employ. I am one member of a seven person team.

Before I officially started in my new position I had a week or two to play around at the job in a half-assed manner, and then I had one official day on the job before I needed to be surgerized. I returned to work yesterday, on the day about ten reports for my old job were due, to find 400 emails in my inbox and to learn that the person replacing me in my old position was a complete fucking moron somewhat less than competent. Needless to say, it was a busy day with little time for more than attending to the emergent data needs that I could quickly solve (aka the simple-as-crap stuff), and helping Bozo the Moron with his reporting deadlines.

Late in the afternoon I learned that three long time members of my seven person team had given notice during the prior few days (all for unrelated reasons). Two of other people on my team (myself included) have been in our positions for less than a month. And the one remaining guy deals exclusively in hardware. In less than a handful of weeks, I will be an old timer, if only in comparison to our brand spanking newbies.

This morning we had our usual team meeting and our manager told us that a) the other woman and I are who are new (but soon to be old timers) need to make sure to ask all of our questions now since we will soon be losing all the people to whom we can ask said questions, but b) not to ask too many questions because the short timers have to get a lot of work done between now and when they leave, and further, c) after they leave we can ask our questions to our manager, but d) he’s going to be extremely busy working with the new people so we need to be careful to respect his time, and e) to make sure that we do that, he’s moving to a new office away from our space so that he will be less accessible and will therefor have more time to work uninterrupted.

Right now I’m at a point in my job where I can probably work unassisted about…oh…twenty percent of the time…and some of that time partially results from how long it takes me to do everything. The rest of the time I have question after question after question. I don’t mean to have so many questions, in fact, I’d prefer to be entirely competent at my job, but I’m getting hit with all this stuff that’s entirely new to me and at least for the first time I deal with it, I need some guidance.

One thing I take pride in about myself is that I’m a quick learner. Perhaps I’m not the Quickest Learner in the West, but I’m good at quickly contextualizing information so that I can remember it and, most importantly, asking intelligent questions, the answers to which I pay attention, so that I can ascertain the appropriate context. But I need to be able to ask those questions. And now I feel like I can’t, which sits on top of already feeling like I couldn’t because there is crazy idea floating around that I already know this stuff, which means I really, really, really can’t.

I feel very stressed out. It’s so important to me to do a good job. I always do a good job at work! I am a lazy, blog writing, hooky playing slacker at work, and yet I still do a good job. No boss has yet not lamented my loss when I’ve left a position and that’s important to me. I like it when my bosses stroke me and pat me on the head and give me gold stars. I practically live for it! And seeing this path in front of me that contains no gold stars and maybe even a few disappointed frowns of consternation, god, my stomach clenches just to think about it.

My friend who took care of me post-surgery (post both surgeries now) came back today for one final hurrah of helpfulness. She cleaned my apartment, did my laundry, rearranged my storage unit and packed away summer stuff, cleaned my patio and weeded my container garden to prepare it for winter, vacuumed everything that could be vacuumed, loaded up my car with my Goodwill stuff, installed child safety latches on my toilet and fridge, bought me a week’s worth of groceries, gassed up my car and ended the evening by making me a huge pot of the most delicious turkey soup ever.

I’m feeling pretty good today. The ache is my gut is moderate and mostly I am just tired in that body-is-occupied-with-intense-healing-effort kind of way. But at the same time, a new week is starting, which means attending to any number of daily attention grabbers and remembering to make sure that clothes are clean and lunches are packed and items requested by school and/or daycare are procured and appropriate groceries are grocered and bills are paid and various follow up doctor/dentist appointments are scheduled and attended and so on and so on and so on, and all of that on top of a new work schedule that I can’t seem to quite get the hang of. Considering how I was just barely (and really, not at all) holding on last week, the thought of facing this upcoming week with absolutely no preparation made me feel too tired to move. My friend knew that and volunteered to come and do whatever needed doing in order to get me ready. And not only to get me ready, but to make sure that my week is easy, the kind of week needed by someone who is still recovering from having her innards sliced and diced, and who, surgery aside, feels at least a little overwhelmed on the best of days.

Sometimes I like to feel sorry for myself about how hard my life is, how stressful, how rough it is to “go it alone.” But I cannot kid myself that I am anything less than amazingly blessed when it comes to this particular friend and all she has done for me and is likely to continue to do for me.

For some reason when I’m ill or otherwise recovering from something, I really like to eat tapioca pudding. I’m not sure why, I don’t really care for the stuff otherwise, but it’s the first thing I think of when thinking of things I might eat while ill. I asked my friend who was here for the past couple days to buy me some and I don’t know how she did it, but she managed to find me the nastiest tapioca pudding in existence, a substance less like tapioca and more like paste that has hardened slightly and then been mixed up so that the hard spots are distributed throughout. My tapioca craving body is greatly annoyed at this tapioca travesty that is currently taking place in our fridge.

As I mentioned in my last post, I feel like I’ve been in a bad mood for a few days years now, a bitchy, grumpy, complainy mood, but I just gifted myself (and my aching gut) with a little percocet (I am not driving anytime soon and childcare + narcotics = a winning combination), which has brightened my spirits considerably, and so I am going to post about some actual nice things that have happened to me lately.

First on the list is the fact that the light outside my front door got fixed. Whoopdidoo, you are likely saying to yourself, but listen, my apartment is tucked into the back corner of nowhere and it gets dark back here! No pizza delivery person can ever find me unless I stand by the gate waving my air traffic control marshalling wands in the appropriate pattern and getting to my car in the morning when my path might be slippery and/or obstructed is generally an adventure in falling on my ass. I bitched incessantly about this problem last winter but nothing was ever done. Until today! Now, as evening descends, my patio lights up like a dimly illuminated and greatly diffused christmas tree. Ah sweet delivered pizza, come to me now.

Second on the list is that a new regular babysitter is within my sights. Before I was dragged under the knife I sent out a call of desperation to craigslist to see if a new school year might provide a likely candidate to replace last year’s regular babysitter and when I groggily checked my email post knifing, I discovered eleven responses! Considering that I usually get a grand total of one, eleven feels like quite the bingo jackpot. I’ve been following up with all of them and it looks like quite soon I will be able to abandon my children to strangers with gleeful regularity!

And the final item on my list, perhaps the best for the last, is that I’ve received two (count ‘em, two!) bouquets of flowers within the past two days. One, I’ll admit, was less exciting as it was merely from my workplace (although still very nice. I’ve never worked somewhere that sent me flowers, and flowers delivered to my doorstep, regardless of the sender, are such a treat).

The other bouquet though, that’s kind of a sweet story. Remember how I posted about my bad weekend? And how I wished something nice would happen? Well it turns out that that boy I’m seeing decided that sending me flowers might well be a nice thing that he could make happen. Unfortunately, when the flowers were delivered they were returned with information that I would be out for the week and thus he learned that something untoward had happened to me. I was happy enough to return home from the hospital to find an email from him asking if I was okay since he hadn’t seen me around for a while. It has only been a couple days and I didn’t know whether he would notice (or, really, whether he would care…maybe it would be nice to have a break from my incessant chatter?), but to learn that he was trying to send me flowers, that did indeed make me smile. Makes me smile still, in fact.

This boy is not one for effusive gestures of affection. I’m pretty sure he will never greet me with a big smile on his face, throw his arms around me and tell me how desperately he missed me while smothering me with kisses. And that’s okay. I learn to interpret his quieter, more subtle signs. But flowers…well…there’s really no mistaking flowers now is there.

I am so out of it right now. I can barely type and I can think even less (yet here I am writing a blog entry — one that involves more backspacing than actual typing) and I am trying my damnedest not to cough because coughing hurts worse than anything.

I am now the proud possessor of yet one more scar across my abdomen. For anyone who’s lost count, this brings the grand total up to seven (two for my cesareans, four for my gall bladder, and one candle on top in the form of an emergency repair of an incarcerated intestine that came by way of my inguinal hernia).

You knew about my hernia, right? The one that they were supposed to repair when they yanked out my gall bladder but couldn’t on account of me eating a box of Trader Joe’s deep fried grease balls (now microwavable!) at the last possible minute that I was allowed to eat before surgery, thus infusing my gall bladder with angry, angry bile? The one I acquired when my scarred up gut decided I had taken things one step too far by daring to cough?

And just a note to share: If you ever cough and suddenly feel like a previously unbeknownst to you zipper in your groin has rapidly unzipped, congratulations, you have a hernia!

My hernia has been causing me problems on and off during the year or so that I’ve had it, including many, many painful attacks where my intestines apparently sensed the light at the end of the tunnel and tried to break free of the smooth and slimy wall that holds them in my body. A few months ago I learned at Urgent Care that I could just *shudder* “push it back in” which, despite feeling really nasty, actually did the job. But I was always warned that if I couldn’t push it in, if I started vomiting, if the pain wouldn’t go away, if I got a fever, etc., that I should proceed immediately to the emergency room, do not pass go, do not collect $200, blah, blah, blah.

I’ve been dealing with it/avoiding it pretty well overall. Sometimes I am in so much pain that I’m counting the seconds until I can get to my car/desk/toilet stall so that I can crumple down in agony, but mostly I’ve learned to not eat too much, to watch my diet for the foods I know will trigger intestinal anarchy, and to follow some bizarre set of superstitious rituals that seems to more or less keep the demons at bay.

This past week though, I had one attack where I wasn’t so lucky, none of my usual tricks worked, and by all previously known definitions I should have been headed toward the Emergency Room but I was lucky in that the pain just magically went away. Until Monday night.

The pain started at around 10pm and I knew it was bad but I just kept hoping it would go away, because as we all know, there is just a little magic in hoping hard enough. I hoped and hoped (and cried and cried) through hours of agony. Until I started dealing with this hernia, I never understood how someone could be in so much pain that they would throw up because of nothing but the intensity of the pain. But indeed, intense pain brings with it that gift and it is a gift that keeps on giving.

At about 7am on Tuesday morning, I realized that I was at an impasse. There was no way in hell I could go to work and there was no way in hell that I could just lay in agony in my apartment all day (not to mention there was no way in hell I could take care of my kids and certainly no way in hell that I could drive them anywhere). So I called my daycare provider and told her that I had to go to the ER and asked if she could take my boys, and just like that, she was on her way to pick us up (she offered to drive me to the hospital as well), and then I called my friend who took care of me post gall bladder, who asked for my daycare provider’s phone number and told me not to worry, that they’d take it from there. Then I called work and left a bawling and incoherent message on my old boss’ voicemail (couldn’t remember my new boss’ number) and then I called my insurance company to figure out what I needed to do.

At the emergency room they were surprisingly blase about helping a woman who couldn’t stand up straight and dripped tears all over the paperwork, and I even paid my copay (the key to good emergency room service claims a friend who works as an emergency room registrar). But soon enough I was repeatedly bawling out my story to random medical individual replaced by random medical individual (could they not write the damn thing down??) and my tears were quickly replaced by spaced out euphoria when my bloodstream was replaced by an IV containing an appreciable percentage of dilaudid (”Wow, I just placed that IV in a location that’s going to be extremely inconvenient for you and is going to require you to keep your arm twisted at this odd angle for the next two days if you don’t want to block it! Sorry about that!”).

They made me drink Satan in a cup (a big cup!) and then gave me a CT scan (my first ever!) and confirmed that my intestines had tied themselves in knots during their joyful freedom dance and that if I didn’t hope to die a painful and imminent death, they needed to be untied posthaste.

My new best friend dilaudid and I were laughing uproariously over margaritas so I merely gave my distracted approval and continued watching mostly inaudible reruns of Roseanne while nurses and anesthesiologists fluttered about. Before I knew it, I was laying in a recovery bed noticing that unlike the last time I woke up in a post-surgery recovery bed, I did not feel unsure as to whether death might have been the better option. The key, I later learned, was that this surgery had not been accomplished laproscopically, instead they had just sliced me open, but as a result, they had not needed to fill my insides with gas in order to see better, and as a further result, had not needed to sew me up with said gas still inside, and as a final result, had not needed to leave that angry, angry gas with no possible way out. Let me tell you, hell hath no fury like escaping gas thwarted. And the comfort they offer you in your intense, intense agony? That it will work its way out in a day or three.

I’m not sure whether it was the incredibly bitchy mood I’ve been in for the past few days (weeks? months? my whole life?) but I felt like the post-surgery nursing care I received was about the least competent I’ve ever experienced. Although this time I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit, I kinda wasn’t shy about saying so. My, my, that dilaudid! Makes you feel insanely high and looses the tongue just a wee bit.

Anyway, I’m home now. Because this surgery and resulting recovery time weren’t exactly planned for, I’m not receiving the stellar aftercare that I received post gall bladder and will, in fact, be left to my own devices as of tomorrow, which means that today and tonight will see the last visits from my dear old friend percocet since I will have to actually drive tomorrow. Luckily, I don’t have to work until Tuesday.