So many things

 

Well I’m sober right now. 

I’d love to tell you that it is because I had a brilliant revelation and I see the error of my ways and blah, blah, blah.  

But no, that is not the case. 

I am currently not drinking because we had to abandon our house and evacuate to my father in laws due to a wildfire that is about two miles from our house.  I won’t drink in front of him. 

We first came out here on Wednesday night just as a precaution. I felt safer. I smuggled a couple of hard seltzer’s in and drank those right before bed behind the closed bedroom door but they didn’t even give me a buzz. It was more to help me sleep. 

The next night we decided we were safe enough to stay in our house for the one night and so I started drinking around five in the evening. 

Two hours later they called for a mandatory evacuation ending a quarter mile above our house. I stopped drinking and over the course of the next three or four hours we gathered all the important items and loaded both cars. 

By the time we headed out to my FIL’s I was sober enough to drive. 

That was the last drink I had. Hardly an earth shattering amount of time but the funny thing is, I haven’t wanted to. All I’ve wanted to do is sleep. 

This morning the mandatory evacuation for my house was set in place. No going back now. 

They are calling for dry lightening storms starting tomorrow night and that can only make things worse. 

There is a very good chance we are going to lose our house. Worse than that, it’s my husbands grandparents house. We rent it from his dad and it’s been in the family forever. 

Ready for more?

My mom has taken a turn for the worse and was moved to hospice end of life care yesterday. She’s in Maine and I’m in California. I just tried to call and she’s so doped up she can’t be woken up. There is a good chance I may never speak with her again.  It could be hours it could be weeks. 

I’m not built to handle this. I’m a wreck. 

I want my mommy. 

ETA: mom passed away tonight. I’m so very lost. 

Dear Universe...

Can we please stop playing the game of “How much more can we pile on Xay until she breaks”?
It’s been going on for well over three years now and I’d like to think I’ve been pretty fucking bendy, but I am only human. I am going to break, and I feel like I’m going to break soon.

You are testing my health, my marriage, my sanity and my emotional well being…and those last two were never really good to begin with.

I hate almost every single thing about my life. 

I hate going to work because my boss is a manic/depressive, bipolar sociopath that triggers me daily because she acts JUST like my father and my abuser mixed into one. And because for some stupid fucked up reason (thanks universe!) she adores me and keeps me as close to her as possible both in terms of physically and as a confidant.

I hate coming home because since quitting nicotine and having to work from home during the last few months, my husband has turned into a depressed person that blames all of his misery on me (or at least takes it out on me) while maintaining that his mental health is fine.

My mother is finally home from the hospital/rehab only to tell me tales that make me realize that she is not okay to be living alone and will probably end up in a nursing home sooner rather than later. 

Knowing that is her worst nightmare and knowing there is NOTHING I can do about it because I live 3000 miles away under a lockdown while my abuser (my brother) that lives locally to her does the bare minimum because his wife hates our family.

I can’t even look at what is going on with the world without crying constantly. So much death and unfairness and people fighting. As an empath it is just too much.

ALL OF IT IS JUST TOO MUCH!!!

I go to work and have to perform for my boss to keep her calm so she doesn’t go crazy psycho on the rest of the staff (not even kidding, it’s a thing). 

I come home and have to perform so that my husband doesn’t sense a single bad mood in me so that he can use that to play like everything is all my fault since I got off the anti-depressants THAT HE NEVER WANTED ME TO BE ON IN THE FIRST PLACE and therefore prove that his lot in life is to live with a heinous bitch for the rest of his days. 

I talk to my mom every night and have to be in a good place for her because she is scared (understandably) and doesn’t know what the heck is going to happen from day to day with her health and or living situation. 

And that is all I do other than drink and sleep. I can’t leave my house other than work and grocery, and I’m a hypochondriac so I wouldn’t want to anyway, to see friends and vent.

I have tried to reach out in facebook messenger chat or text, but admittedly not much and never while drinking-not even playing THAT game. I always get the vibe that they have a lot going on and can’t deal with my drama and I get that. It just leaves very little to no outlet for my pain.

I was doing online therapy but it was super pricey and I can’t justify it knowing that my work might be shutting down by the end of the year. I need to save as much as I can because I don’t know how my job or my marriage might turn out lately.

So yeah.

I’m just venting right now, but I’m getting very close to a breaking point and I don’t have the time or the money to break. 

So universe? A little time off to cool out would be nice. Maybe a whole week where nothing goes wrong? That would be rad. I shouldn’t even tempt fate with that.

Updates

 Things have been…well, things suck. Having said that, the last two days I feel like I have started to make the slow climb out of my own head to some sort of non depressive/angry state.

First things first. Mom spent about five days at the hospital. They ran tests and took an ECG and it was determined that the she had pulmonary hypertension on the right side of her heart and also surface blood clots and one deep vein blood clot in her legs. This has all apparently stemmed from her never using the CPAP machine she was given about 12 years ago due to her sleep apnea. All this time she has been causing her heart to work overtime because she never used it. Couple this with the fact that she basically hasn’t moved much in the last two years and boom, heart problems and blood clots.

She is currently in a rehab facility. She had to get a COVID test to go there so thankfully she tested negative after being the hospital for that long. Also, thankfully they are testing everyone before they let them in.

She is doing PT and on blood thinners and a Lasix. As of yesterday the fluid wasn’t really leaving her body and in fact she was gaining weight daily while not really eating a lot.

She told me last night that they were going to double the Lasix starting today.
Her insurance company wants her out of there by the 9th but the facility is hoping for longer…we will see how that battle goes down later.

She admitted to me that she has been aware of her swelling legs for quite some time and had been keeping it a secret from the both my brother and I as well as the staff at her assisted living. 

I know now and have known really from the past that she can’t be trusted about these things, but how can I police them from 3000 miles away? I can’t actually see her. And for months she has been pushing me off the phone after a few minutes when I call because she is scared she might slip and say something….or I might suspect something.

After a certain age, the child becomes the parent and it is truly scary when you don’t live near your new “child”.

The good news is, is that she doesn’t appear to be in a depressive state any longer. Every time I talk to her she sounds really upbeat and realizes that she caused this all herself. The other good news is that her assisted living doesn’t appear to have a problem letting her back in once she gets out of rehab. That was a HUGE concern of mine when this all started and I’m glad it doesn’t appear to be an issue. *knocks wood*

In other news, I’m still not sober.

Between the virus, having to go to work every day in fear because I work with people who don’t really think it’s real and go out gallivanting all the time, and my mom…yeah, excuses excuses.

What I can tell you is that I have not enjoyed the drinking hardly at all. And the hangovers are getting worse. The anxiety level in the last couple weeks has been almost unbearable. 

I was never a person that really got bad hangovers. I always hydrated at night before going to bed and it was never really that big of a deal.

It has been lately.

I know what all signs point to and I’m almost grateful. 

I can’t keep going on like I have been and with no “events” on the horizon like I used to use as excuses to not stop drinking, I think it is time.

I’ve been looking into Annie Grace’s 30 day challenge. 

Not putting a forever date on it has always worked well for me at least getting some sober dates under my belt. Forever seems such a daunting task and while I know it is the only way, I clearly cannot moderate or I would have by now, I just can’t seem to say the word because it makes me immediately want to dive into a bottle of vodka.

30 days seems almost doable.

I know once I get a good amount of days in, I will feel so much better and want to continue. I just need to get to that jumping off point.

At any rate, thank you all for your comments. You guys are the only thing that is really giving me hope and words alone cannot tell you how much that means.

Because I felt kind of okay…

 Welp, of course.

My brother called me about two hours ago and told me that my mom is heading for the ER. Her night nurse felt her legs and they were very hard and she was concerned so she called Rescue to come get her and bring her to the hospital.

He will keep me posted on what he learns. My brother is my abuser, so this is always hard to deal with in the first place.

He said she told him to call me instead of calling herself because she didn’t want to get too emotional and she knew she would if she had to call me.

I don’t know anything at this point, but I know it’s not an emergency like when she had her stroke…it’s more like a wait and see what they say and about the tests they run.

The biggest problem is the mystery surrounding her housing situation if they let her go home tonight. It’s too late to call the office to find out if she will be allowed back in after being exposed to the ER and what if she isn’t???

My brother didn’t seem to concerned but he’s…well, my brother.
I am just sitting here, wondering how in the f*ck I have even been able to function at this point and now there is more. I know that is a total “WOE IS ME” situation but … yeah that is where I am going right now. I’m sick of taking a different blow to the face every week and really would like some time to be able to settle down and just relax.

I guess it serves me right for thinking earlier this week that work seemed to be getting a bit less frantic for me since I was no longer at the front desk. Right after that we got served with some more paperwork for an ongoing lawsuit and yesterday it seemed everyone up in arms about shredding a bunch of paperwork and “it’s all very secret, but don’t you worry about it, it’s fine!”

Accompany this with the whole never being left alone thing… Seriously this morning while my husband was out of the back porch drinking his coffee, I slid into the kitchen to make myself some avocado toast. It takes mere minutes and it would satisfy me before I had to go out to the store.
As soon as I put the toast in the toaster he was on me. “Can I help? I’ll slice the avocado. Oh wait, I now how to clear off every single surface in the kitchen and then slice the avocado with an amazing precise skill of a ninja…”

So I didn’t say anything, just went over to the toast and popped it back up because clearly, we are going to be here a while…

He finished about two hours later (sarcasm) and asked for the toast, I told him I would have to toast it again because I knew he wasn’t ready for it at the time it was toasting and he got butt-hurt ONCE AGAIN.

This is an obvious exaggeration, but this is also what I have to deal with every fucking day. I just wanted a nice quiet morning to make myself a snack and take it back to bed before I had to face the world and … yeah.

I’m gonna break eventually. A human can only take so much before they snap.

Now with my mom. I can’t even.

I just want to freeze time so I can take a week-long breather and then come back and deal with all this shit.

Alone? (mom update, but read through to my crazy…)

 

Hey guys, thanks for your kind words as I’m working through my mom drama. As an update, she is feeling much better. She is walking downstairs almost every day and feeling like her old self again. Her doctor had two phone visits with her and wants to have some blood work done, to rule out her kidneys. The good news is that they are able to take the blood draws in her building so she doesn’t have to go out and come back in…the bad news is that they only to it bi-weekly and she just missed it.

I think she is happy about this because, much like her daughter, she doesn’t want to hear any bad news and the longer they can keep it from her is best for her. Meh.

She is in good spirits and walking again so that makes me very happy. I should have been on the tail end of my visit to her at this point. We were set to fly out last Friday and come home this Tuesday. I’m kinda sad because this would have been the first Momma’s Day we would have spent together in 20 years but I know there is nothing we can do about it.

The best news is that my brother was able to find her a large amount of toilet paper and it was delivered a couple days ago. I can stave off that worry for now.

I did have a small worry in our conversation as she asked me if the phone lines were busy on Mothers Day. 

I didn’t understand what she was asking and wondered if she was worries about the lines for the flowers we ordered online. No, she was adamant that there were ALWAYS problems with the phone lines on Mothers day.

I just kind of agreed and let it go, but I worry if this is the beginning of dementia. She had it years ago when she let her diabetes get out of control. It was blood sugar induced, but it was scary AF.

I have talked to her a couple times since that, and she’s been mostly okay, but I am super scared that this might be the beginning. 

I’m scared I won’t get to see her before something might happen given the state of the world. I worry about everything.

I haven’t been my myself for 2 months.

I have never NOT worked during this shelter in place and my husband has been working from home.
I work all day interacting with people and then come home to a husband that is so starved for human interaction that he can barely let me get through the door. 

I am normally a person that gets overwhelmed with too much interaction. I am an empath, it is too much.

My new normal is to present too much at work, come home and have to do the same damn thing all over again and maybe get an hour if he decides to go to bed early where I can decompress.

Yes I am still drinking…that doesn’t really factor into this at this point.

I am normally a person that cannot handle too much human interaction…thus the Empath thing. Twice a year, I pay for a hotel room locally (not a cheap feat where I live) and hide away from people. My husband approves and it has helped out marriage.

I’M OVERDUE FOR THIS NOW AND HE DOESN’T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND IT!!!!!

I’ve told him this and yet, ten minutes after arriving home, he is right behind me: “How was your day, what are your plans for tonight?” And the worst after I just wake up on the weekend: “What do you want to do today? There is nothing worse than a wasted day!”

I have told him I need some throwaway days and that I cannot just ENGAGE right away after work…he understands for about a day and we are back to “normal” If I try to call it out, he gets butthurt. 

HELP!!!

Update On Mom

 I talked with mom tonight. She is not having any breathing issues, no other issues in fact other than the leg swelling…although she did tell me that it was really hard going downstairs to get the boxes was very taxing on her and she felt very winded, but once she was able to stop and sit for a minute it was okay. I get this because she literally does not move farther than her chair to the bed to the toilet…that is all the activity she gets, maybe three times a day.

She called her doctor first thing this morning and left a message with an actual person about what was going on. She said they haven’t called her back.

She said that she did tell her caregiver last night what was going on with her legs and she agreed that my suggestion to sleep with her legs elevated was sound and to wait to hear back from her doc.

She sounded in much better spirits tonight but I know that is mostly because she finally told people what is going on and she isn’t internalizing it any longer.

I told her that she can’t just wait for her doctor to call her back, she needs to call them back first thing tomorrow and tell them again what is going on.

She came up with a theory while we were on the phone that the water retention might be due to all the food she is now eating since the shut down. She used to never go down to the dining area to eat, choosing to eat her yogurt and toast up in her apartment. Well, since this lock down, they have been bringing the meals that they would normally serve in the dining area, up to the residents. My mom isn’t used to a bunch of rich foods (they do not to food restrictions there at all) and is now eating two to three times the food she normally would and she said she’s been salting everything.

I told her to knock it off and she said she would.

I told her (as I always do) that she needs to start walking again, a little at a time. When she initially had her stroke, she would do her little leg strengthening exercises and they helped a lot. I keep trying to get her to go back to doing those and she has always resisted. Like once she recovered, she didn’t need to put in the work anymore and now here we are.

I told her to go for a small walk around her apartment floor tonight and elevate her legs again and make sure to call the doc tomorrow and I would check in with her tomorrow night.

I feel better that she feels better, but I know this is far from resolved.

I feel like the worlds worst daughter and this is exasperated by the fact that my brother (my abuser) and I do not get along so we cannot discuss these things like normal siblings.

I really hate this shit.

Not okay right now

 I’m so effing scared right now. I just talked to my mom. She admitted to me that she has been having some leg swelling from the knee to the ankle that started “a while ago” and she didn’t think anything of it. It started with one leg and then the other leg caught up.

Tonight when I called her she admitted that to me and then told me that her upper legs were now completely swollen too and she didn’t know what to do.

She lives in an assisted living facility that is on lockdown. If she goes to the hospital, she may not be allowed back into the facility that has been her home for the last ten years and she might have to go to a nursing home. Most of the nursing homes where she lives have been infected by COVID19.

She is very scared to tell them, but she is also worried enough to tell me and my brother who she called earlier tonight. If she’s worried enough to tell us, she is really scared.

She said my brother told her to go to the hospital. Don’t even get me started on my brother right now. I don’t disagree that she should go to the hospital but I totally get her fear that she might not be allowed back into her own home and that she will start a downward spiral because of the virus. She has a lung disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease….ALL the risk factors for this stupid thing.
She said that the staff was giving her some tough love and making her go downstairs tonight to go help gather the fan that I sent her after she told me hers had broken. They are doing this because she never leaves her apartment. Like at all, before the virus, but now especially. I think that might be part of her leg swelling, but I don’t know. They said they were going to have her accompany them down to get the box and then back upstairs and she could take as many breaks as she wanted to along the way.

She is hoping that the activity will help her with the leg swelling. From what I read it is true that the inactivity she has been going through can cause the swelling…

I just don’t know what to do or think….I can’t. I literally cannot. We were supposed to go see her next month but had to cancel our trip. She lives 3000 miles away and there is NOTHING I CAN DO RIGHT NOW and it is freaking me out so bad.

She was thinking of telling the caregiver on call tonight that was going to walk her down about her legs because she trusts her but she didn’t know. She is afraid that the person might have to report it because of her job.

At the end of the call I told her to please have someone call me if she ended up going to the hospital tonight and that if not I would call her tomorrow for an update.

I’m so fucking scared right now.

My mother is kind of my everything and there is nothing I can do about this….it’s too much.