I will see my mother for the next time on Sunday, 1.22.2023.

I will be sending all manner of ~ma and vibes tomorrow for this. It is so very hard. I have had a couple of close loved ones have psychic breaks when they were ill and they would say the worst painful things imaginable. Even knowing it is the drugs/disease/pain causing the vitriol, it hurts the same. Do what you need to and take sanity breaks.

2022 was a fucking whirlwind.

Indeed! Quite a roller coaster of life events. I hope 2023 is calmer.

I am probably going to delete my long post. I love my mom, and I don't want to disrespect her. It was just a rough couple of months. We revisited things we'd already healed, and she doesn't remember most of it, but it was like acid on my soul.

Hec, I know JZ, Matilda, Emmett, and you are really going through it right now. I appreciate your support and candor. You know I want every good thing for Jacqueline, and for you.

Teppy, more than once during our whole ordeal, I thought of your stories about Tim's dad (I lurk). Thank you, honey.

Thank you everyone else too (JenP, dcp, Laura, Calli, Dana, and everyone). Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.

Erika, we thought she either had a sudden onset of some hip dysplasia, or something, or a stroke, or a brain tumor, or a seizure. It was so scary.

Jessica, I'm sorry about the job situation, and especially about Jason. IMO, all the other cancers think pancreatic cancer is an asshole.

discospondylitis

Cass, I hope the doggie is okay. Is this dog the dog formerly known as "Puppycat" (or was that a cat)? "Discospondylitis" would be a hell of a band name, but a quick Google shows treatment isn't so short. I hope your dog is feeling better soon. We've had this girl 10 years (as of December) and it still amazes me how much she owns every single one of our hearts.

___

For the record, my mother is doing so much better now. She is her again. And most of our bygones were already bygones, until she was awful (and she was mostly awful because the meds messed her up, and her injury was so painful). Now I've just got recently picked scabs that again need to heal.

Opioids do not agree with her. (At. All). I don't think I've ever seen my mother tipsy. She doesn't like the feeling, so I think (in addition to her injury) she has a bad reaction to opioids that brings out the worst in her, probably because she resists them.

One of my most amusing memories of the whole time was the first time she took Vicodin. About an hour after taking it, she slurred in a sitcom-drunk voice, "This isn't doing anything." I just kind of said, "Yeah. I can see that" The Vicodin was never sufficient, and she ended up on Oxy, which made her worse. Once she got off the opioids, she was much more manageable.

We're now mostly recovered from the COVID bout. Which I'm using as an excuse to not call my family members right now. See also, I don't even want to start.

Yeah. I kind of appreciated DH's Covid in a selfish way. I didn't want him sick, of course. We've been one of the most careful families in the world for the past three years (mostly because of C's course of immunosuppressants), but once the genie was out of the bottle, it was kind of nice to say, "I can't come over," without it coming from selfishness.

(Understand that from the time she was injured, until after the procedure and after Christmas, I actually felt much better when I was with my mother, than when I was home worrying about her.)

When mom was hospitalized, a couple of weeks after the injury, although it ended with the kyphoplasty (in addition to her L4 compression fracture, she had an old T11 [I think] fracture we'd never known about), it wasn't so much for the injury.

The hospitalization was for her gut (and this is a long story I'm not going to burden you with), so they did Xrays and a CT. The CT showed some inflammation on her bile duct. The first hospitalist hand-waved it. The second hospitalist was all, "We have to check this out NOW," but then the hospital couldn't accommodate the MRI order on account of emergency admits. Then mom just decided, I will wait until I'm over this, until I deal with that. And? I'm tired of fighting.

The slug for this thread reads:

Take stock, reflect, butch, moan, vent. We are all here for it.

I wasn't prepared, but I think I can.

I’m so sorry you had to go through all that. I’m glad your Mom is doing better, Cindy, but sheeesh that’s some traumatic shit. Take care of yourself!

That is so much, Cindy. Even knowing that your Mom wasn't reacting well to pain meds, that is so much. Very difficult even when there is love there. Hoping you do not see her like this again, It's so fraught.

Puppycat was a kitty but she passed a while back.

I thought I knew about dogs and super accidentally failed as a foster. After that, I had an unintentional dog but I love her without reservation.

Shelby (she has no nom de Net) and her interesting woes seems to be improving. It's a long road back to health for her, as you very accurately read. But here's hoping.

My mother said the pain meds she got after her breast surgery made her really depressed AND didn't help her pain that much.(there's a feature!) we are fortunate that she could just switch to ibuprofen like the native of Sparta she was somehow meant to be.(She is *hating* having less mobility and asking folks for help with the boot on...sadly,unlike in a feature in O magazine, I don't really have anything deep to say about that. Just, like, "No fooling," like Frank Zappa, which, guess Reese Witherspoon won't be adapting that.) Some people have really stepped up, but it's also kind of not enough, either.

I received cards from askye and Shir this week. Thank you very much!

Yay glad the card got there!

So either 2022 is hanging on or 2023 is just going to be more of the same. Work changed our insurance company and that dropped our contribution. For some reason even though the insurance companies didn't change the dental and vision dropped. However on my first 2 paychecks they are still taking out the 2022 amounts. I talked to HR and they sent an email. I'm going to remind co workers to check their paystubs to make sure that didn't happen to them.

And I got a cold that morphed into an ear infection...so...at least it wasn't covid.

Even though I’ve only recently heard of the term ‘goblin mode’, I’ve basically spent the last year in goblin mode; letting my apartment get to a truly disgusting state of cleanliness, while having zero motivation to do anything about it. As such, it was quite easy for me to not notice that my toilet was leaking some water on the floor each time I flushed. And when I did notice it, it was easy enough for me to ignore it.

So today, when the problem finally got bad enough that I couldn’t ignore it any more, I had a proper freak-out at the prospect of having to let the super and a plumber into my apartment. It’s not (yet) an emergency, so I scheduled an appointment with the super tomorrow, and I got my apartment to a base level of cleanliness (but not the deep cleaning it needs), which was far less effort than I anticipated. So, hopefully, disaster averted.

But seriously, I need to do something about this cycle of self-sabotage followed by intense shame that I’m stuck in.

Tom, that cycle is familiar to me as well. When you find methods to break the cycle and prevent recurrence I will be very interested to hear them.

I haven't heard the term "goblin mode" before, but it certainly resonates with me.