4:17am June 13, 2014

And yes, I’m very out of sorts right now.

(There’s a tl;dr in bold at the end if this is too long.)

I’m in a lot of pain from a recent medical procedure.  The meds don’t fully control it, and I don’t totally tolerate the meds that well, so I keep bouncing back and forth between too much and too little pain control.

And my family situation has me at a stress level I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced before.  At least not in this context.  I’m literally thinking about losing my father, and my mother, and my grandmother, and I’m not sure which one is going to happen when, but I know they’ve all got serious health problems right now.

I’m starting to go from numb to feeling every possible emotion, so I feel like I’m being bounced around like a ping-pong ball.

I’m on extra steroids so that the stress doesn’t trigger an adrenal crisis.  This isn’t helping my mood any, honestly.  Stress dosing is an art form.  I haven’t mastered it.

And now I found out that my father is so ill that he couldn’t eat, his abdomen is super swollen, and he had enough trouble breathing he needed suctioning, and everything is looking so bad that my mom is trying to get him admitted to the hospital.

Which is making me go, “How the fuck did this go from not knowing my father had any extra health problems at all, to them yesterday finding cancer that's metastasized to at least three different organs already in massive ways, to today things being so bad he’s going to try to get admitted to the hospital, without anyone fucking telling me anything until now.  Surely there had to have been some kind of warning sign or he’d not have been in the hospital getting all these scans done.  I’d kind of felt like something was going wrong with him for quite awhile now, honestly.  But surely he and my mother knew something was up, before it got this bad?  Because things don’t generally go from nothing to all hell broke loose like this without any sort of warning sign.  I mean, yes, they can, but in this case I don’t think they did, and I am so worried about him that now I feel like if anything happens to him really fast, we’ll all (the rest of the family) have been cheated out of time with him, and maybe it’s not fair, and maybe I shouldn’t be ranting about this in public, but right now it’s how I feel.

So please don’t expect anything right now.

Don’t expect me to behave rationally.

Don’t expect me to answer any ask that isn’t easy to answer.  I might, but I might not, just don’t expect it.

Don’t expect me not to go overboard in a thousand different directions, especially when I’m on high-dose steroids.

I can’t even sleep.

So I have to do things.

And some of those things are overloading

But they’re still better than sitting with my thoughts doing nothing.

So please just… no expectations… please?

Also maybe expect occasional emotional outbursts that are way out of proportion to whatever triggered them, because all my emotions feel like they’re on a hair trigger right now.

Whoever thought of the stages of grief… it’s not so tidy.  I’m having all of them, at once, and they don’t come in any particular order, either.  I can be accepting one minute, angry the next minute, numb the next minute, and then all three at once.

I guess the good thing is it means I care.  and I guess the other thing is I have to, have to remember to love, because love is the only thing that will get any of us through this.  And not loving right now, I would regret for the rest of my life.

TL;DR: My dad is in the process of getting diagnosed with cancer that’s already metastasized to a bunch of places and they’re trying to get him admitted to the hospital right now because he can’t eat; my mom has a bunch of illnesses some of which have a horrible prognosis and was just in the ICU recently and actually coded at one point; my grandma is dealing with ominous health problems of her own.  I’m in physical pain from recent medical procedures.  I’m on higher doses of steroids (which seriously alter mood sometimes) to keep the stress of all this from running my cortisol down to dangerously low levels.  I don’t know how I’m going to behave, like in my wildest dreams I can’t predict myself right now.  Please if you’re ever going to cut me some slack, do it now.

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