Nobody wants to go through the coping, we always want to have coped. I just have to keep telling myself that I will get to Have Coped.

You will. You are facing this bravely and it's going to get easier. It's not going to go away but one day it won't define every hour.

What Cass said, Connie. You are incredibly brave.

Argh. The kitty is sneezing a lot more blood. We have a vet appointment at 3:00 today, which I probably can't go to because of work*, and if we end up having to have her put to sleep because it's something horrible, I'm going to be so angry I can't be there.

*(I'm really not sure what the deal is with work. My boss -- who is generally absolutely fantastic to work with -- has told me one thing about when assignments are due, but then keeps asking me WAY before that date if I've been able to return them. And I've asked her for clarification once already, and she clarified the original time frame, and then goes back to asking me "Did you return anything over the weekend?" I finally sent her an email this morning saying, look, here is the exact text of what you've told me about due dates, and I've been working under the assumption that that's correct, but if you need me to work weekends, I need to know that now so that I don't miss deadlines that I didn't know I had. Which is really frustrating. And just, you know, stressful.)

Argh. Boss emailed back, "Oh, [original time frame] is correct!" THEN GET OFF MY SHIT LADY.

Plei: yes, that's the site. I didn't link it, but thought the posting would give Jilli and any other gothily inclined a chuckle.

Steph, my boss does that to me all the time. "Why isn't this done?" The deadline is 2 weeks from now! "Have you finished this yet?" The deadline is NOVEMBER! It's very stressful. I say, go to the vet with your cat. Work can wait.

She assigns manuscripts on a Thursday (or sometimes Friday) and explicitly said that they can be returned on Monday (if she assigns 2, then one can be returned on Monday and one on Tuesday; if she assigns 3, then Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, etc.).

If she sends me articles on a Thursday and I don't have any other work, I start right away, and I can often return stuff the next day. I think she got used to me returning things early, because when I've had other work (as in, work the AMA assigned, which she KNOWS ABOUT) and couldn't return things early, she gets antsy and asks, "Did you return anything yet?" (What I really want to answer is, "You know goddamn well that I didn't because you can see on the database that there are no completed articles under my name, so stop with the passive-aggressive shit.")

But then when I ask her to clarify (yet again) when things are actually due, she'll say "Oh, Monday and Tuesday are fine!"

Apparently when she sends me something, I'm going to need to reply right away with "I WILL RETURN THIS MONDAY."

(And the REALLY annoying thing about this situation is that when she assigned me this article, I told her that I couldn't start on it until Friday *because* of other AMA work, which she knew about. AND this is an exceptionally long article -- realistically it's almost 14 hours of work. And yet she wanted to know if an article I told her I couldn't start until Friday, an article that was 14 hours of work, was returned Friday. NO WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.)

I'll probably go to the vet, but I'm just stressed and really rushing my work now, and this is a shitshow of an article where all the statistical data (which is not one of my strengths) appear to be wrong, with no explanation of why the percentages are off by as much as 50%. So every other line I have to put in a comment to the authors to ask them to clarify their faulty fucking math.

Ugh, Steph, I despise editing papers that are math-heavy.

Because they're ALWAYS WRONG. How can you tell me that 41 of 250 patients is 70%??? Even *I* can see that without even using a calculator.