So today for some reason (probably the long weekend) I had a wild hair and made all kinds of phone calls that I'd been putting off** and went through my mail . Okay ... actually I discovered a huge festering pile of mail in my carrier bag where I'd been hiding it from Dave and that is what put that hair up my ass.
Apparently I'd successfully hidden it from myself as well. See, for some reason a pile of mail is a trigger for Dave and he throws tantrums - and my mail - all over the place. Never mind that there are little piles of his shit all over the place ... ahem. Newlyweds, yay! So if I don't feel like dealing with it that second and I feel him giving my mail pile the hairy eyeball, I've gotten into the habit of stashing it in my bag for the time being. Only the time went and then before I knew it, it was July and I was looking at shit dated back in May. Oops.
Whatever. I dealt with it right then at work and actually no services have been cut off (and won't be now) and then ran errands (got key cut for house cleaner, got eyebrows waxed, yadda yadda lobster bisque) and actually got home and filed the piles I'd made at work and paid the rest of the bills. Self pat!
And now I'm blogging, something else that's been lurking at the bottom of my psyche like the mail at the bottom of my bag. Self pat again!
And I got up this morning and actually got some writing done that wasn't an email or a blog. Self-pat! Granted, it was only a dream (but a very bizarre one, a nightmare involving bleu-cheese-throwing zombies in the Civil War era) but it was super vivid (thanks*, Lexapro!) and I woke Dave up twice in the night because I was screaming. I felt bad when I learned about it this the morning.
And the dream was so vivid and long, with many semi-awake interruptions, that it felt like a short story or something. And that was a terrific realization, since I have been complaining for a while about not having any creative spark or ideas or being able to write anything other than emails, which is basically what blog entries are for me. Apparently my creative well-spring hasn't totally dried up, it's just gone underground. But I know it's there now, and so the nightmare feels almost like a gift. And a wise friend (who is also a writer) advised me to write down the dream before those zombies really started coming after me, so I did, and hopefully it will at least help with the screaming. I don't mind the nightmares so much but for Dave's sake I'd like to not wake him up by yelling. It's his first day of a new semester today, too.
And really tonight I should also call my sister (it's her birthday) and make dinner (Dave gets home late and starving) and finish up a project for work, but somehow the work part of the equation always seems a lot less pressing once I've left the office.
*Vivid dreams and somnolence are my only serious side effects from the Lexapro, so on balance: totally worth it. Especially since my anxiety and depression were starting to impact my ability to do my job, and other aspects of my life.
** calls included a talk with the vet about Zoe. I realise that the last cat I wrote about was Inty, but force-feeding Inty a regime of steroids and Pepcid and Reglan (anti-nausea) for the last two months (plus a couple thousand dollars in diagnostics and prescription food) has finally worked and Interim is beautiful and perky and glossy and has put weight back on and has stopped barfing so much. Not entirely, but it's like four times a week instead of four times a day. Which is good since she was scarily lethargic and scarily thin.
You may or may not be interested to know that I estimate having spent $8000 on Inty for vet bills and transporting her from Scotland to New Zealand and then to the States. She only weighs seven pounds. Ounce for ounce, she is far more expensive than fresh beluga caviar. (Still less than gold, though. Metal market always go up when the economy is uncertain like it is now.) She is eight years old - that's a thousand dollars a year. And now that she's got a chronic condition (IBS), she is uninsurable. She's cost more than the current blue book value of my car. A few more years like this and she'll reach what I paid for my car.
But almost as soon as Inty started to recover, Zoe took a turn for the worse with some kind of neurological episode wherein she circled hundreds of times to the left and rolled over in a leftwards direction, the poor bean. We took her to the vet for a blood workup and found no evidence of lasting neurological damage, so the next step is a cat scan (yes, for my cat) and dental work and of course x-rays to rule out a regular tumor. So those were hard things to think about - the trauma of putting her under anesthesia for dental work at 14 versus the possible benefit from the dental work, the idea that if a tumor showed up we probably wouldn't operate, the expense of all this stuff. I know cats are for life and with you in sickness and in health but I've spent three or four thousand on vet treatments so far in the past twelve months and my pocketbook is empty.
Plus - and I asked the vet this - would the dental on Zoe, at age 14, be the equivalent of putting a new hip in a 90 year old human? How many eating years does she have left, anyway? And the vet was great and talked me through everything. So we're gonna x-ray to rule out any kind of growth and we'll try Zoe on a course of painkillers and antibiotics, and if the main problem is infected rotting teeth then she'll respond to the meds and hopefully put on a little weight and we can do the dental; and if she doesn't respond to the meds, then it's unlikely the dental would be helpful. And neuro work is pretty much out of the picture now - since if we found something, we wouldn't operate. And I wish I didn't have to think about money in all of this but it's possible that Zoe is going to have a better old end of life because I can't just throw money at the problem than she would otherwise.
Apart from being kind of lethargic Zoe has no idea she's circling the drain, so maybe she'll make another comeback. I'll keep you posted. Swear. Thus ends the longest end note to a blog entry ever.
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