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I ATEN'T DEAD
Tuesday, 19 March 2024 05:15 pmRight, so, I lost a cat yesterday (Pandora, kidney failure, not yet up to talking about it), and my house is empty and there is no-one for me to talk to, and apparently I am driven back into the embrace of blogging because Teh Internets may or may not substitute for the largely one-sided conversations one has with a kitty underfoot. I have no idea if anyone is still reading Dreamwidth, I suspect not, but I am a bit of a mess and need to string words together as a coping mechanism.
This is the first time I have ever lost a cat who was my only cat; in all other previous losses I have been able to come home and hug the other cat to fill the void. And I can't, and the void is horrible. I have tried to round up all Pandy's stuff to stash in a cupboard where I won't keep seeing it, but keep running across something I've forgotten, and it triggers a new round of helpless crying. So this is a thicket of words between me and the absence. I think the loss is worse because I'm pretty much alone at home, not working, and have consequently had a fairly close and intense relationship with Pandy over the last six months or so.
The Granny Weatherwax subject line is valid, but I cannot say I've been at full health and vigor over the last year, my inner Granny Weatherwax has been somewhat subdued. I think I blogged the COVID bout I had at the end of 2022, which was, significantly enough, around the time that my blogword reservoirs dried up and I vanished from haunts of blog. That's because I ended up with long COVID, which has rendered the last year or so increasingly difficult. I have been at home for the last four months, not working at all beyond answering the occasional WhatsApp plea from a desperate person trying to fill my complicated shoes at short notice; over the second half of last year I was working mostly from home, with breaks of several weeks when my lovely doctor booked me off, in a desperate attempt to rest and address the fatigue. I'm now formally on disability, having wrestled various insurance companies finally into submission.
Long COVID is a horrible beast, as well as being a diagnosis one arrives at by elimination, after testing for everything else. It's hit me mainly with cognitive issues, with a side order of surprise!diabetes, although there's some physical fatigue. I cannot handle crowds, restaurants or background noise; I cannot do more than one thing in a day, which cannot take any longer than an hour or two; I cannot sit at my desk for longer than about half an hour. I am typing this from my armchair, my feet up, with my computer plugged into the TV screen and the keyboard on my lap. Things I have learned to do in the last few months: persuade PC games to work with a controller. Challenging, because the brain fog is horrible. I can also only play games I have played before, and I have to dial the difficulty down to the minimum, because strategically and in terms of co-ordination, I suck. This is causing shame to my gamer's soul.
My short term memory is shot, my executive function is non-existent. I haven't trusted myself to check a student transcript in about eight months. I am losing nouns in conversation at a horrible rate for someone of my literary proclivities and training; if you give me one of those cognitive tests where you have to list all the words you can think of starting with a particular letter in a minute, I manage about five, slowly, and then blank. I am an English PhD grad with a ridiculously large vocabulary, so this is, to say the least, terrifying.
Oh, and my emotional regulation is also extremely iffy. I will burst into tears at the slightest provocation, or lose my temper when minimal things go wrong. I am on disability at least partially because I should not be around students at this stage of my health crisis, the slightest hint of the average student post-adolescent narcissim and I'll infallibly bite someone's head off and spit out the skull with a genteel "ptooey" before collapsing in a sobbing heap on the corpse. Not, shall we say, professional.
I miss Pandy so much. The house is so empty. My state of fatigue has been emotionally muffling me a bit over the last few months, I haven't had the energy for, e.g., guilt at letting people other than me toss themselves into the crater of the orientation/registration volcano god, but this is the worst cat loss I have ever experienced, it's almost physical pain. I may have to go and find another cat almost immediately because apparently being a home-bound crazy cat lady without a cat leaves only the crazy.
This is the first time I have ever lost a cat who was my only cat; in all other previous losses I have been able to come home and hug the other cat to fill the void. And I can't, and the void is horrible. I have tried to round up all Pandy's stuff to stash in a cupboard where I won't keep seeing it, but keep running across something I've forgotten, and it triggers a new round of helpless crying. So this is a thicket of words between me and the absence. I think the loss is worse because I'm pretty much alone at home, not working, and have consequently had a fairly close and intense relationship with Pandy over the last six months or so.
The Granny Weatherwax subject line is valid, but I cannot say I've been at full health and vigor over the last year, my inner Granny Weatherwax has been somewhat subdued. I think I blogged the COVID bout I had at the end of 2022, which was, significantly enough, around the time that my blogword reservoirs dried up and I vanished from haunts of blog. That's because I ended up with long COVID, which has rendered the last year or so increasingly difficult. I have been at home for the last four months, not working at all beyond answering the occasional WhatsApp plea from a desperate person trying to fill my complicated shoes at short notice; over the second half of last year I was working mostly from home, with breaks of several weeks when my lovely doctor booked me off, in a desperate attempt to rest and address the fatigue. I'm now formally on disability, having wrestled various insurance companies finally into submission.
Long COVID is a horrible beast, as well as being a diagnosis one arrives at by elimination, after testing for everything else. It's hit me mainly with cognitive issues, with a side order of surprise!diabetes, although there's some physical fatigue. I cannot handle crowds, restaurants or background noise; I cannot do more than one thing in a day, which cannot take any longer than an hour or two; I cannot sit at my desk for longer than about half an hour. I am typing this from my armchair, my feet up, with my computer plugged into the TV screen and the keyboard on my lap. Things I have learned to do in the last few months: persuade PC games to work with a controller. Challenging, because the brain fog is horrible. I can also only play games I have played before, and I have to dial the difficulty down to the minimum, because strategically and in terms of co-ordination, I suck. This is causing shame to my gamer's soul.
My short term memory is shot, my executive function is non-existent. I haven't trusted myself to check a student transcript in about eight months. I am losing nouns in conversation at a horrible rate for someone of my literary proclivities and training; if you give me one of those cognitive tests where you have to list all the words you can think of starting with a particular letter in a minute, I manage about five, slowly, and then blank. I am an English PhD grad with a ridiculously large vocabulary, so this is, to say the least, terrifying.
Oh, and my emotional regulation is also extremely iffy. I will burst into tears at the slightest provocation, or lose my temper when minimal things go wrong. I am on disability at least partially because I should not be around students at this stage of my health crisis, the slightest hint of the average student post-adolescent narcissim and I'll infallibly bite someone's head off and spit out the skull with a genteel "ptooey" before collapsing in a sobbing heap on the corpse. Not, shall we say, professional.
I miss Pandy so much. The house is so empty. My state of fatigue has been emotionally muffling me a bit over the last few months, I haven't had the energy for, e.g., guilt at letting people other than me toss themselves into the crater of the orientation/registration volcano god, but this is the worst cat loss I have ever experienced, it's almost physical pain. I may have to go and find another cat almost immediately because apparently being a home-bound crazy cat lady without a cat leaves only the crazy.
