Hang In There, Baby

Housekeeping

• PostHope finally came through with an explanation, and the ability to access my old posts! I’ve copy-pasted and back-dated them here, so the complete journal is now in one place. You can read their side of the story, if you’re curious.
• My post about the Harp Lady made it all the way to the actual Harp Lady, and we exchanged some pleasant emails 😊

This Past Week

I’ve done almost the entire week without painkillers on board! Bathroom trips, while certainly not comfortable, are at least not burningly painful anymore. The side effects are diminishing; things are healing. An answer to prayer. My mental health has been reasonably well also, though I did make an appointment to chat with a counselor in the coming week. I’ve been working more full days at my office job and a few nice people from church told me I look “great”. So nice!

This week I was thinking about something I heard more than once in the earlier days of this journey; that before long I’d notice who my true friends were. You’ve probably heard conventional wisdom like this as well. In a crisis, they say, the fairweather people in your life will melt away and leave you alone. It’s the real ones that step up to help.

Well. If you’re reading this and you’re worried or feeling guilty, don’t. I’ve reflected and realized that I have absolutely no idea who those fairweather people are for me. Either I’m oblivious, or everyone I know is wonderful, which is what I’m choosing to believe. But, honestly, it takes a lot of mental energy to create and maintain a list of people you feel could have ‘done more’, and I’m not interested in doing it.

There was a bit more to this thought but it got into heavy low-self-esteem stuff that starts well before my diagnosis, and I’m not ready to unpack all of that, here. Maybe that’s what the counselor will be for!

Looking Ahead

Almost the same as last week; we’re in the kind-of-nice, kind-of-difficult Between Space. It’s kind of nice not to have appointments and schedules to keep and weird procedures to do. But the difficult part is the waiting, again. We want to act normal, and we’ve had good times where everything felt normal again, but underneath, it isn’t.

This is a rabbit trail, and it might sound pedantic, so I hope I’m not in the wrong here. Here goes. So, I get up at least twice a night to use the bathroom. Sometimes I accidentally wake my wife, who would ask if I was okay. The question kind of bothered me, because as I explained one morning; in the moment yes, sure, I’m all right, go back to sleep. But the circumstances, the reasons I’m awake? No, I am not okay. None of this is okay. But she’s being concerned, and I don’t want to be mean and throw her concern back in her face, so I don’t. Once we talked it over she changed the question to “do you need help?” which I think is much better.

Anyway, that’s the rabbit trail. I’m okay, but also not okay at all. As I tell everybody, I’m hanging in there. (yes, like that kitten)