Drained

I was going to make a joke about how we’re all still here (you know, with The Rapture That Didn’t Happen) but I guess we’re all kind of over it now and to be truthfully honest, I’m not in much of a joking mood.

I’ve had a rough couple of days and I am physically and emotionally exhausted right now.  Work has been busy (which I guess is in direct contrast to what I had been complaining about last time — I always figured it would ebb and flow and I’d have slow times and crazy times).  We’re in the middle of renovating our department’s physical space, which is being done in phases and of course, as the local IT nerd, I get the pleasure and joy of moving all of the computer equipment each time we enter a new phase.  Yesterday and today were the biggest ones yet as I was emptying a storage closet, moving and reconnecting all of the computers in our reception area and moving NINE large systems for our treatment planning department.  That’s a lot of lugging and dust slinging and crawling under tables — I joked to my boss that he owed me a manicure because I’m pretty sure I ripped every nail off it’s nail bed.

PLUS, at this moment while we’re moving stuff around – the billing interface I’ve been working on actually picks up speed and starts making sense and starts working the way it should.  So this makes me happy and makes me feel like I bring, you know, value to the place.  But it also now means there’s a lot of data cleanup involved, which means writing some Crystal Reports and SQL queries and assessing that data to make sure it’s correct and then starting to delete the trash (follow the key rule of databases and reporting: trash in, trash out).

On the good side, yes, I’m busy.  Yes, I’m getting projects that I’m enjoying (I’m kind of a Crystal – SQL nerd.  I LOVE taking all of that data and making sense of it).  On the bad side, I am tired.  Tired tired.  I finally got a day off on Monday, which I enjoyed thoroughly by catching up on DVR’ed TV, having lunch with some girlfriends and booking a hotel in Myrtle Beach for a girls weekend in July.  But I slept very little and very fitfully on Monday night because we went to a BeachBBQ on Sunday where a bad mixture of drinking beer and being in the sun all day pretty much forced me to bed at 7pm on Sunday night after which I didn’t get up until 7:30am the next morning.  I guess sleeping twelve hours completely negates getting up at the buttcrack of dawn on my first day off in over six months because, if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll have seen the note I left to myself to PUT MY DAMN PHONE DOWN AND GO TO SLEEP!

And to top it off, I’ve been sleeping weird – like in cat naps, but hard cat naps.  Like, I feel like I’m awake numerous times during the night but every time I wake up, I’m sore and stiff and disoriented like I didn’t move at all, didn’t breathe, just hit the damn pillow and passed out.  And my body is just sore from all of the equipment moving the past few days, so I’m just all out of whack.

On top of all of that, we’ve been trying to do things to get the house ready for the summer, which meant I spent six hours power washing my driveway and front porch a few weekends ago (a LOT of work but overall, instant gratification) and Steve and I have been going back and forth about how to handle our rapidly deteriorating twenty year old original to the house deck (i.e. money pit!).  We’ve been trying to cram all of this in while planning for summer things (I have a trip to St. Louis coming up in a few weeks, we have people down for the 4th of July and want to have a  party and then girls weekend in July) and balancing our current social life and friends (of which we have some really, really awesome ones and I’m so happy we found them).

And the icing on the cake is my grandpa has been sick.  He’s getting up there in years and unfortunately, his age and years of health problems are taking it’s toll on him.  He’s been in and out of the hospital and doctors over the past few years, some small events and some large events that literally forced me to drop everything and drive up there (he’s four hours away).  And last week, my sisters had informed me that he had fallen and was taken to the hospital but was ok and being released.  Well, yesterday I found out he was back in the hospital with kidney stones that could not be crushed, thus requiring surgery, of which no one is sure if he is strong enough to handle.  They were working on getting his blood to a thicker level (he’s been on blood thinners for about thirty years because of his tendency to clot rather quickly) before they would decide to operate.  And my family was telling me that he was kind of out of mind, thinking he was on an airplane and getting agitated and ripping out his catheter and stuff like that.  But he was ok and stable.

Until today when I was work and literally right in the middle of this big equipment move, sweating and grunting – and my phone starts going off.  I couldn’t answer and it wasn’t until I was on my way home that I called my Aunt back and she basically told me that within the last few hours of the afternoon, he had developed pneumonia in both of his lungs and had a bad reaction to some meds that would calm him down (because it had mixed wrong with his Ambien, which he absolutely needs to sleep) so he was intubated and they hadn’t been able to wake him up.  And that the doctors weren’t giving any optimistic news but rather had told them we would take it hour by hour.  So all night I’ve been an emotional wreck, teetering on the edge of a breakdown. We’ve been going back and forth so many times with this though that it’s almost like going through the motions – not that I’m not upset but it’s just something you get used to handling.

The good news I just got off the phone with my Aunt and she has informed me that he is stable and the hospital seemed to think things were going to be ok enough for the family members to head home for the night.  Of course, this doesn’t negate the fact that he still has the pneumonia in both lungs, he’s still intubated and hasn’t woken up and he still needs to have the surgery once he gets over all of this.  So for her and I, it’s still take one day at a time.

Pretty much, emotionally and physically drained.

It’s time for bed because I’m going to get some sleep if it kills me.

Image found here.