One Step at a Time
The last few weeks have been really hard. Extremely hard.
- My Crohn's is still causing me trouble - nausea, lack of appetite, abdominal pain. It's a major challenge to eat enough to keep myself fueled to keep my normal life going, which means I'm just tired most of the time.
- My husband had a sudden attack of debilitating joint pain that required an ER visit and a week of not being able to drive. We still don't know what's causing it, which is stressful enough, but it's also really hard to keep the house going, and support my husband, while I'm at less than full steam myself.
- My husband's parents were on a road trip throughout the Midwest, and actually stopped at my grandmother's house to meet her. I haven't seen my grandmother in nine years, since before my dad died, and it was very, very emotionally weird to have those two pieces of my life collide. It gave me a major emotional hangover of Dad-grief and grandma-guilt.
And it's not over. This coming week, I have a business trip for three days; the following week, I'll be volunteering at a major roller derby tournament, so I'll be in for three 12-15 hour days.
After that, I have surgery scheduled for Nov. 30th - I'm having a small bowel re-section again. (In other words, I'm having a piece of my small intestine removed.)
It's a lot. It's just a lot.
So I've been falling back on my old coping mechanisms - shutting down, hibernating, keeping my feelings locked down, just ducking my head and continuing to put one foot in front of the other. It's not ideal, but when I'm as tapped out as I am, it's what feels the most do-able.
At this point, I think I've done everything I can to make this time in my life easier, and I'm just looking forward to those two weeks where I'll be recovering from surgery, and then ahead to 2017, to a fresh year and a fresh start. The most I can do is be kind to myself, take good care of myself, and try to get through.