'Roid Rage!

It had been a good two weeks since I'd returned to work, and I was still going into the onesie bathroom twice a day to lie on the floor in total exhaustion. At night I lay in bed, wondering how I could hear the whistling of a radiator when there was none in my room. And then realized it was me. Breathing.

I finally just went to the doctor. My regular doctor was, ironically, out with a lost voice, so I saw a sharp guy who diagnosed me with bronchitis, and since I'm asthmatic, put me on antibiotics and steroids for a week.

He said, "Now, some people on prednisone have some issues..."

"Is this the drug that's going to make me puffy and bitchy?" I asked.

"Yes. But you'll only be on it for a week, so you'll be fine."

"Trust me, nobody will notice the difference," I assured him.

I mentioned it to Sven.

"Now your testicles will shrink," he advised.

So each day I take antibiotics, steroids, an anti-anxiety drug, and vitamin D supplements. Oh, and glucosamine for inflammation.

Here's the thing about prednisone: Over the long term, it can do terrible things to you. But for this girl, to suddenly stop feeling like I have a bag of jelly where my lungs should be is worth it. I'm done with the antibiotics, and I'm starting to cough up all the bio-cement that has been coating my bronchial tubes.

This part is not so good. I have these coughing fits that are more like seizures, taking me over and forcing my head down and forward, and my whole body convulses. Then I have a dizzy spell. Or a bloody nose. Or both. My co-workers were amused. People who heard me came over, concerned, and I assured them I was not contagious and that it was part of the healing process. I reminded them that the Marines believe that pain is just weakness leaving the body.

So now when I cough/seize, someone calls out, "Pain leaving the body!"

"Wooo!" I crow, gripping my desk as things go gray.

I don't seem to be bringing much up. I'm taking an expectorant, but what I probably need is some good hot sauce to make everything run. I bought a pound of scotch bonnet peppers to make Demon Sauce; we'll see how that goes.

The other thing the pred seems to be doing is counteracting the compulsive speaking-inhibiting effect of the anxiety med. So I suddenly realize that my thoughts are audible because, well, I HEAR them, and people I'm walking behind turn their head as if to say, "You talking to me?" I do the very smooth "I don't know who that nut was that spoke, because I'm staring in fascination at that engrossing newspaper box."

The pred has also taken care of the stiffness in my joints from not running for a month, but alas, not the weight gain, which has my tights spontaneously rolling down my hips in protest.  I'm hoping to try running Saturday; to assuage my concern over getting out of training I've been downloading new songs from iTunes to run to. Oh, because I made it into the Chicago Marathon!!! Right now, as I sit here on my double ass, coughing and sounding like someone from a TB clinic, that seems kind of funny. But I'm determined, because I recently realized that everyone who finishes gets a medal.  A medal! I'm such the goodie whore.

Bath time!

Progression

Woke to find that my sinuses have mercifully been freed overnight and I no longer feel like I'm sucking in hot coals every time I breathe through my nose. There is some residual stuffiness, but what battlefield is tidy after the war has just turned?

Now I'm coughing. Great, wracking coughs that produce the kind of stuff that you'd expect cause great, wracking coughs.

But there's progress: I got up before noon. My voice is sounding more like mine and less like some special effect created with broken glass, sand, and wallpaper paste. Yes, I will still spend the day on the couch and yes,  I will still sleep for most of it, but perhaps today I shall wash dishes.

Or better yet, take a bath. Yes, definitely a bath.

4:40 am

Ibuprofen. Saline sinus rinse. I shut my bedroom door at night as part of an amicable agreement with the downstairs neighbor who can't sleep with carooming cats overhead. The cats miss me, and leave me offerings of bottle caps pushed under the door. I'm certain the rabbits are concerned about me, but also have nervous private conversations about who will let them out of their pen in the event I expire. And who will feed the cats to keep them from getting hungry and remembering who they really are.

As I flush out my face a paw reaches up to stroke the fingers of the hand bracing me against the sink. A wide-eyed face stares at me from its perch atop the litter box. I do not go unnoticed.

Day 6

Seriously, what happened to "three days coming, three days with you, three days to go?" This bug is overstaying its three days with me, and I want to know where I can register a complaint. No fever. No fever at all, just.. mucus upon mucus. And sleeping 15 out of 24 hours a day. This thing has moved in, put its toothbrush in my medicine chest, uses my good soap, leaves wet towels on the floor and dirty dishes in the sink.  Eats the last orange. Falls asleep with the TV on until I wake up to shut it off. It has nerve. It galls. It pisses me off.

5am

I'm up. I'm up because over the past three days there has been no Time To Get Up, Time To Go To Bed. I have a cold, people, a miserable, energy-sucking cold that has made the last three days a blur of unconsciousness broken by dragging my ass from the house to see shows I've been assigned to review, sitting quietly and trying not to disturb the show with the Redi-Whip sound of me bowing my nose.

This is the morning of Day Four, and the battle is being won; the antibodies are capturing that hill and celebrations are in preparation. The turning point in the battle came when my sinuses hurt so much that I had to take ibuprofen and put an ice pack on my face. The troops in the trenches took a lot of casualties for that one.

Now, my face has become a faucet.

I have a pile of my great-grandmother's fine, cotton hankies to blow my nose, as Kleenex (well, OK, toilet paper in my case)  just rips the crap out of skin. The cats love that I have spent the last three days on a couch with a comforter, and have sprawled luxuriously across me in an ecstasy of purring and finger-licking. For me, with chills and body aches, no hot water bottle could be better. Urban Symbiosis, baby; it's where it's at.

And part of me loves the permission sickness gives to just let it all go: duty (except for play assignments), hygiene, activity, consciousness. I don't like being sick at all, but I love the complete absence of guilt at abdicating most responsibility.

This evening at 7pm I am hosting a potluck for the theater-blog writers. I'm banking that 14 hours from now I'll be closer to human, farther from something from SciFi that overwhelms its prey with goo.

Don't let me sneeze all over the veggie shepherd's pie.

Bad Moon Rising

My boss is problematic. This is news to nobody who works for her or who has to deal with her in her professional capacity (she's a big noise in her profession, at least here, and her reputation as a difficult person is legendary).

For the most part, she and I don't interact, and when we do she's either sunshine and rainbows, or she's irrational and bullying. I've noticed the latter tends to happen right before large business trips, especially overseas, when her rampant paranoia and need for worship reaches well into the red zone, so anything, ANYTHING that she perceives as adversely affecting her impression on our overseas brokers is enough to make her fangs grow and the howling begin.  Several of us have decided that she missed her calling as a really angry, bitter nun. Sister Perpetual Degradation.

It used to unnerve me; now what unnerves me is that it doesn't unnerve me.

I won't go into too much detail, but after Hurricane Sandy, SPD decided it would be a great idea to create a spreadsheet of every single property within the hurricane zone for which we had some responsibility for property maintenance. Our company has no central database, so everything is gathered much like a scavenger hunt. I ended up with a sheet with more than 700 rows of data.

She assigned this at our bar-none busiest time of the year, when the Christmas holiday was approaching and people were on vacation. We had a miscommunication about disseminating it -- in a meeting we'd agreed she'd review the sheet before it went out for updating, so I'd sent it to her with an explanation of my methodology and a request for her to let me know it was OK to send. She never responded, and when she approached me later on my progress, I reminded her of her instructions to me, and that I was waiting for her approval. (There was a third party in that meeting who confirmed this with me when I double-checked with him.)

So with one thing and another, she decided to go off on me about it, first via email (using words like "disappointed" and "you told me").

I looked at that scolding, condescending email, thought of how hard I'd worked to help get over NINE books prepared for renewal, posted almost all of them online, fixed problems that co-workers couldn't (because I'm apparently the only one with problem-solving skills), all the while dealing with the endless stream of email that is my job, helping resolve property-claim payment issues (one property accountant told me point-blank she would not deal with the claims guy because he keeps screwing everything up, so I'm trying to clean things up there as well), arguing insurance evidence with mall owners, and tossed onto all of that, this monster of a spreadsheet that had been sent to over a dozen people for review, input, and follow-up.

"Bite me, you irrational, ungrateful, horrible human being," I thought.

Later at her desk, I handed her what I had, and she, literally wild-eyed and snarling, needed to vent some more, so she bit my head off every time I made a comment or suggestion.

"BLAH BLAH BLAH because YOU were supposed to have been updating this for weeks now, and it's not even DONE!"

Oh, hell fracking no.

I stood there, looked at her and said calmly, "No, we've discussed this. I was waiting for you to approve the list, as we agreed in the meeting, before sending it out. You thought I'd sent it; I was waiting for you. It was also assigned during an extremely busy time, so it's likely that even if I had gotten it out earlier it would still not be ready. This is a very large and time-consuming project."

Calmly. Looking her right in the eye. Because she knows I'm right; she absolutely does, and all the bullying in the world will not make me say I'm wrong. Not for nothing, but I'd bet good money she was going to take my sheet and present it as something she pretty much did. At least, she's going to take credit for its creation. So I know her BFD is that she didn't have it completed to wave over at the brokers in the UK before she whipped it out and had them measure it.

I expect some kind of meeting when she returns, which should be interesting. Bring it on, honey.

Anyway, the point is, there was a time in my life when this would have been unthinkable for me. I look at this and realize I have really come a long way from the sad girl withe the external locus of approval. I'm not afraid of losing my job; I'm afraid of becoming someone I don't like in order to appease bullies.

I can say no to people. I can set limits. I can do this comfortably, without feeling apologetic. It's a nice thing.

The Naked Lady

Life has been good. You know those periods when you step up to the plate and actually get done the things you set your mind to? My life's been like that for the past couple of weeks. I think a lot of it has to do with no longer being preoccupied with the approval of a friend who doesn't have the life experience or context to appreciate me. I like myself a lot more, mostly because I'm not trying to modify myself to accommodate someone else.

I've been back on the running, am getting in better shape, and have been making more trips to the studio. I feel a lightness and ease that I haven't for a long time. Also, the co-worker with whom I've signed up for a couple half-marathons is checking with her connections at an organization much closer to where I live. If I could get a job there, my work commute would be easily cut in half. How happy would I be to avoid downtown every day?

Today I went to a sketch gathering at the studio and spent some time getting used to sketching the human form again. Our model was great - imagine Patti Smith with boobs, and you've got it. She was great, and good to draw. I found out later that she had had a project called "The Naked Lady," where she walked around naked and noted the responses.

"When you aren't packaged as a sex symbol," she said, "when you have no agenda other than being naked, it just freaks men out. They don't know what to do."

Life is full of interesting people. I love meeting people who are curious, in both senses of the word.