(no subject)

It occurred to me this morning that I'm doing a rerun of the mental state from almost twenty years ago, the year or two before I stopped working. Just minus the suicidal ideation part. I'm hoping to avoid that part this time. Last time, it came later on as the stress piled up.

It was never depression. It was always pain and me feeling like I was weak not to have energy left over to deal with other things.

As then, I'm getting things done late or not at all because I can't seem to find it in myself to expend the energy I need for starting whatever it is. I feel both vaguely happy and, under that, blazingly angry. I'm not sure how those two coexist. I also know that, the more of this necessary stuff I do, the angrier I'm going to be.

None of the people I'm interacting with either deserve the fallout of my anger or will be more cooperative if it erupts at them or even in their general vicinity. As long as I let myself glide along without touching any of the hard stuff, I'm not going to shriek at clerks or waitstaff or high school guidance counselors.

If I start, I'm probably going to keep going until I fall over with exhaustion. I'm also almost certain that the only reason that I can do this glide over the stressful depths without depression is that I'm taking CBD oil every day now. Well, likely that with the propranolol cutting down on the migraines and muscle spasms.

This is not a good place to be, but it's better than my other current options. I've been reading a lot of fic.

I haven't managed to submit a GM signup for UCon. The deadline for having an event open for pre-registration has passed. I can still submit events, but I won't get much say about when they can fit in, and I'll have a harder time getting players. I have reserved us a room for the convention, so we're going. I'm just concerned that I'll end up spending the whole convention sitting in our hotel room and saying that I'll go to a game in the next schedule slot, really I will.

Signing up shouldn't be hard, but I haven't been able to do it. When I've got energy enough, I'm having to direct it at things that are harder to do and more urgent (everything connected to the LTD appeal is urgent. Having a gap in my benefits would be Very Bad for our family in several different ways).

My mother is helping me work on my appeal of the University's denial of my long term disability benefits. Most of her case work over the last couple of decades has been disability related. She's 74-ish and mostly retired, but she's still a licensed attorney, and so is her brother who lives nearer.

I'm having trouble talking to her, though, which impedes the process. Part of that is that the talking is tiring, and part of it is that I need an immediate impetus for talking/writing that isn't happening reliably. Also, she's in Louisiana which means that I have to do all of the record gathering and such.

Mom has been talking to Scott about my health. This is with my knowledge and consent. Right now, he's more able to respond in a timely way than I am even though I'm home all day and he's without personal cell or internet access while he's at work. (That part of the building blocks the signal completely. He can get signal in the cafeteria and the parking lot. I'm almost certain that it's because the building is pre-cell phone era and built to insulate the offices from factory floor noise rather than it being a nefarious plan to cut employees off from the outside world. Also, phones work on the factory floor, just not in the offices.)

Mom's using the word 'decompensation' a lot. It's a specific term that Social Security uses that means that a person is good within very specific limits and then unable to function when those are disrupted. In my case, it's not just that working would cause me to decompensate but also that I've been teetering on the edges of that since I broke my foot in 2015. I've just had enough other supports that, say, the anemia didn't show up as a functional problem to anyone but me.

I'm lucky to have my mother right now because I could not cope with this on my own. The timing would never be good, but it's particularly bad right now with the start of the school year and cider season being in full swing.

Cordelia is having some difficulties with school related stress as she heads into her junior year. The school bus schedule changed so that she has to leave home twenty minutes earlier and gets home about twenty minutes later. (We may be looking at an even longer bus trip for spring because they're proposing resurfacing the road between her pick up/drop off point and M-14. The potential detours could turn a ten minute drive into a thirty to forty minute one.)

She's needing a lot of my time and attention most days, and that's an added barrier to my getting less critical things done. Using all my spoons before she gets home only to find out that she needs focused attention that night... I end up not doing hard things because I can't wait and do them after I know what Cordelia will need.

Scott is in the middle of his second cider season as scheduler. He's working 11 and 12 hour days, M-F, and isn't even having time to eat during that time. The scheduling is teetering under things like machines breaking, an insufficient number of experienced staff, new materials that need a lot of database set up before they can be sold, and customers who think "We're scheduling a week out" means "If you browbeat me, you can get your stuff tomorrow."

The University has granted me a 90 day extension on my LTD benefits (through early November) on the condition that I 'fully cooperate' in working with a vocational counselor (working for them) and applying for jobs. I'm almost certain that the guy I'm working with knows I can't work because he's not pushing too hard. The management company is trying to persuade me into micro-employment by claiming that the company that facilitates finding such jobs is an actual employer. They're not. They're a temp agency. It's decidedly not the same thing.

At any rate, the vocational counselor and I are currently going round and round on things like uniformity of punctuation and format on my resume. (He wrote it; I'm editing it. The problems are things like having periods at the end of half of the bullet point sentence fragments or changing the order of specifics that recur across three different jobs. If Job A is formatted one way and Job B another, then one of them needs to be reformatted.)

I'm trying to get an appointment for a physical functional capacity evaluation, but nobody in the University of Michigan Health System does them. It's considered too legally dangerous and too likely to lead to problems with insurance companies. There's a unit at St Joseph's Mercy Hospital that does them, but I haven't managed to get anyone to return my calls. The UHS managed care people are also trying to reach them.

Technically, I still have access to my primary care doctor, through the end of the 90 days, but I hesitate to try to schedule to see her because that access could vanish at any point if they decide I'm not trying hard enough. I need to look at my prescriptions and figure out which of them would normally go to her for renewal. Once my LTD benefits end, I won't be able to ask her for that. I'll need a different primary care doctor.

(UHS clinicians only treat patients who are connected to the University as students, staff, retired staff, or the spouses of any such. Service skews more toward student needs because they're less likely to have other local options, but the building is easy to access from anywhere on central campus, which in turn is easy to access from anywhere the city bus goes, so a lot of employees go to UHS, too. While I receive LTD from the University, I'm technically still an employee.)

I will still have access to most of the specialists I see in the wider UMHS system-- the oncology people, the gastroenterologist, orthopedics, physical therapy, etc. --I'm just losing (potentially) my primary care doctor and my gynecologist.

I ought to have scheduled an appointment with my primary care doctor this month for routine blood work and medication checks. I sent her a patient portal message to let her know what is going on. I've got a couple of things that are getting more pressing, though, so I should probably make the appointment and stay on top of canceling it if I get abruptly cut off. I've still got a gynecology appointment on my calendar on the 2nd of October and am just tracking that I might have to cancel it at the last minute.

I'm having Scott and Cordelia help me with more day to day personal stuff. I need help filling my c-pap reservoir, for example. I can't take it out and have trouble putting it back. Once it's out, I can empty it and pour water in.

There are certain food access and preparation tasks that I no longer attempt. Having a really good electric can opener doesn't help much with canned pineapple when carrying the can from the cupboard to the counter hurts my hands more than using a manual can opener would (although, a manual can opener would still have the part with carrying the can hurting). Pineapple cans are a particular problem because they're bigger around and heavier than most. Smaller plastic containers with peel off tops aren't a great option either because the peel off part hurts to deal with.

I really hate the part about not being able to serve myself ice cream, too. I mean, I could. It's just that doing it hurts enough that I will always choose not to.

Our BIL was a jerk at the family Labor Day gathering when Scott carried my plate on the buffet. I had to point out that the empty plate was heavy enough that dropping it was a risk. I definitely couldn't hold it and fill it and carry to the table, not safely.

I'm not sure how often I'll post here for a while. I'm giving getting my PT back on track slightly higher priority than journaling. The problem with PT is that it's a dozen different small tasks. Doing one doesn't lead to doing the next one. I've got two that are once a day, two that are twice a day, and three that are three times a day.

One of the twice a day requires lying flat on a firm surface. The only option for it is the floor, and that's daunting because it's very easy to hurt my hands getting down or getting up again. I know how to do it so as not to injure myself, but that care isn't reflex, so I'm apt to slip back into old habits that were once fine. I'm 52, and decades of physical habit is hard to change.

Please assume I haven't seen anything posted here since early August. I haven't even been opening the DreamWidth tab.