I ATEN'T DEAD

Tuesday, 19 March 2024 05:15 pm
freckles_and_doubt: (Default)
Right, 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.
freckles_and_doubt: (Default)
I seem to be vanishing into myself in strange and alarming ways just at present, so herewith a Resolution to resume the meeping into the void which constitutes my blogging activities: perhaps, if I write, I will persuade myself that I exist. I do not like the twilight limbo occasioned by my continuing, repulsed and miserable desire to flee my job, and by the identity-crisis-induced helpless inaction which that desire generates in the absence of any immediately obvious alternatives. It's a shadowy, liminal hellscape, and I'm a shadow in it. On the other hand, I lost myself in my own ten-year-old blog posts for half an hour a few days ago, looking for a book reference, and it made me feel more real than I have in months. Words, it turns out, when they are my words and I have wrought them to my will, flood the shadow space with light: they give me a sense of identity. Thus blogging again. Go, little words! construct me!

Also, the blog dive reminded me of the Bunny. Remember the Bunny, and the anvil doom which ended his miserable twee existence? I remember it fondly.

I have, in the last few months, negotiated two massive and prolongued doses of 'flu, with added sinus infection and glandular wossname, and am still very tired, which may be implicated in the sense of vanishing. I am also stressed, because my small Jyn kitty picked up an abscess while I was away last weekend but one, and I didn't find the Suspicious Lump until Tuesday night. I made a vet appointment the next morning, but by the time I took her in on Wednesday afternoon, the horrible thing had ballooned to about three times its size, and had to be lanced, mere antibiotics no longer being sufficient. She has a giant shaved patch and interesting drains and things (man, feline healing is weirdly fast, and occasions strange workarounds) and has been bleeding gently on pale surfaces for the last week. She recovered very quickly after the op, and was almost immediately full of beans again, to an extent which made me realise how horrible she must have been feeling; I'd put the subdued affect down to Feline Displeasure at my absence. But I used to suffer from recurrent abscesses as a kid, I know only too well the enormous, incredible relief of having the damned thing dealt with, both in reduction of pain and pressure, and in the recovery from the general nausea and an infection causes. I feel her. Poor Jinian. Also, being me, I feel horribly guilty that I didn't pick it up immediately, before it got to the point of needing lancing. Cat owner fail.

Pandora is being quite kind to her, which is nice. Proof of a photographic nature (Jyn's wound is on her neck behind her right ear, and thus allows a pleasing illusion of wholeness):

20180903_145320

In parenthesis: it is my almost invariable habit to sign all of my emails, other than the most absolutely formal ones to Big Cheeses, "jt" - my initials, in lower case. I've done this for years, at least as long as I've had this job. It occurs to me, in the context of vanishing, that this is a self-minimising technique. Little lower case me. Unassuming, and unlikely to infringe on anyone's space. It figures.

December 2024

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