STOP THE RIDE I WANNA GET OFF

It's days like today that make me very, very glad that I had a conversation with my doctor a little while back wherein we upped my anti-depressant dosage.

Yesterday I had to fire one of the the CNAs that has been taking care of my terminal aunt. She didn't show up at 8 when she was supposed to - never actually showed up at all. This is after several times of her being over an hour late, or not showing up - ooo, or there's the day the guy she's living with called to tell my aunt she'd been drinking, that was fun... This means I have nobody to cover Saturday & Sunday day shift, which means 9 times out of 10, I'll be doing it. If you know a CNA or caretaker with experience taking care of the elderly, I have a bed-bound elderly congestive heart failure morbidly obese woman for them to take care of. Hourly rate negotiable.

Tuesday I have a "monitoring" at work. I have a box of documentation that I have to put together - that incidentally took them a month to do last time, and I was given 2 weeks - and then somehow get that box to the monitoring people, who are not physically there. I believe I read somewhere that we should fax things. If that's the case, I will be sitting at the fax machine for hours. No exaggeration. So I'm trying to get an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier that I found in a back room working, so hopefully I can SCAN everything and send it to them. (It'll still take hours.) We're being monitored, and the outcome of this monitoring will affect whether or not we get our grant next year.

Day before yesterday, I think it was, Obama released the details of his budget. My mother called me at work, in the middle of a meeting with my team members about getting things together for this monitoring. She told me that the federal grant project that I work under has been completely eliminated, because the data says that it doesn't work. I'm not sure which is more depressing - looking at the possibility of no job in 2010, or knowing that the data shows that what we're doing is useless. (Granted, I'm sure that means overall, country-wide - who knows, maybe in our county we actually DO make a difference. I can hope.)

So all this stress, all this work, may be ultimately pointless. We have to write a brand new grant next year anyway, and evidently we're still going to do that, even though the project may cease to exist.

I hate doing pointless shit. It bothers me on a core level.

That's one of the main reasons that I never finished college, I think. I hate filling out paperwork. It gives me borderline anxiety attacks.

But, I finally got off my ass, filled out the FAFSA, the application for a Stafford loan, and I'm going back to school to finish my bachelors degree. Online, of course - there's no way schedule wise I could actually go sit in a class. School starts Tuesday. Yes, the same Tuesday as my work deadline. Sadly, my books have not yet arrived, and the pdf files of the first couple of chapters (that they kindly provide in case your books haven't arrived yet) for whatever reason will not open on my computer. I've not had a chance to ask tech support if the files are indeed damaged, which is what it says when I try to open them.

The other major paperwork that I filled out/have been filling out is all the stuff for my aunt's long term care insurance. I got the phone call yesterday from her (that I avoided, btw, it went to my voicemail) that they're sending the "4th and final" copy of a form that they evidently need filled out. I thought I already had. Who the fuck knows; I'm going to have to do it AGAIN and send it return receipt mail. Mom has already paid out more than a thousand dollars to these caretakers, and if she doesn't get reimbursed, life is going to suck.

I've ended up in the hospital with both my parents, on separate days, in the last month. Dad you already know about. That night ended with me unlocking the back door & letting them into their house, and also by showering dad & getting him into bed - something mom couldn't have done on her own, so I'm glad I was there.

One of the reasons mom couldn't have done it herself is because she has a hernia. A massive one. It goes at least halfway across her abdomen. This will be the {counts in my head} 4th? 5th? hernia. The first 3 she had surgery for. The fourth surgery was to take care of the grapefruit sized seroma that had formed. While the doctor was in taking care of that one, he discovered that all the mesh he had put in to hold her together in the first three surgeries hadn't adhered the way they were supposed to, and were basically just curled up and useless, so he had to get those out before they caused a problem. When mom developed this last one, he said to wait and watch - unless it caused a problem, we'd leave it alone.

Well, I ended up in the emergency room with her on Cinco de Mayo - up until then, when she felt stuff pushing out, she could push it back in. Except now she couldn't get it pushed back in. And it hurt. A lot. And she started throwing up. All signs point to: strangulated hernia. So she's lying on her bed, having just thrown up, and says she's really cold, so I pull the blanket over her (thinking to myself hrm, fever... not good) and ask her why she hadn't been getting dressed to go to the ER while I was on my way over. She wasn't sure she should go. I had to call her insurance's urgent care facility, to verify that they didn't have the equipment necessary to diagnose a strangulated hernia, before she'd agree to go to the hospital. So while we're in the waiting room, it pops back in. We got a doctor who was very surprised at our level of education and understanding (I didn't bother mentioning that I used to be a pre-med major) checked her out and said yeah, you're probably right, call your surgeon in the morning and talk to him about what to do next. We were in and out of the emergency room in - are you sitting down? - THREE HOURS. It's a fucking record.

While all this in my life is going on, my palm Centro (that I love to pieces) has had all it's data wiped (I was trying to do an OS update, it was acting squirrelly) and my iPod had started malfunctioning too. So I don't have any of my contacts with me anymore. Makes it hard to call caretakers to take care of my aunt, or anything else, really.

Two weeks ago I got the kids up to get them dressed & take them to school early, because I had a meeting at work at 8:30am (that _I_ had called), and my son (who is almost 5) is in almost screaming hysterics saying his penis hurts, and he won't let me look. He had said the day before that when his pee came out it felt REALLY hot, and I asked J about it when I got home that night (first thing in my mind was urinary tract infection) but he said sometimes it feels really hot coming out, it's not a big deal. Well, after that morning, it had become a big deal. So I take my daughter to school. I park and walk her in, and while I'm walking back to my car, my aunt calls - the caretaker who was supposed to be there at 8 hadn't shown up yet, and it was 8:30 or 8:45 already. So I called the caretaker, and she said that she'd had to talk to her son's teachers, and was running late, but was on her way. When I get back to my car, it won't start. I have to go back inside and ask if anybody can jump my car off - I have cables. Once I get it jumped, I head to the doctor's office. As I'm pulling into the driveway, the caretaker calls again. She says that there are problems with her son, and she won't be able to make it at all today. It's now about 9am. So I park the car, and go inside, trying to figure out how to get my aunt taken care of while I'm in the doctor's office with my son. I just walked in with no appointment, and they were amazingly kind and fit me in really quickly. The woman behind the desk saw my face and asked me if I needed a hug - I said at this point, I probably needed a tranquilizer. Sure enough, it was a UTI, and they gave me a prescription for antibiotics. Guess what happened when I went to leave? Yup, car wouldn't start. Had to walk back into the doctor's office again (about to completely lose it at this point) and ask if anybody there could jump my car off. At this point my memory is fuzzy - I think I went to go take care of my aunt, but I'm really not sure. I think I got to work around noon.

I still haven't gotten a new battery (or checked the water in mine, maybe I'll remember to go do that in ten minutes when I take a break from work) but fortunately I have a portable battery jumper thing. I think the most I've ever had to jump start the car is 3 times in one day.

I'm tired.

Today my son's behaviour was so atrocious (and his sister's only marginally better) that both J & I completely lost our temper. When they refused to clean up their room, J & I did it for them - anything that was on the floor went either into the trash, or into a box for goodwill. The hysterics THAT engendered was exhausting. More exhausting for me is knowing that a large part of the reason why they (especially he) is acting this way is because they're stressed out, because I'm stressed out, and haven't spent nearly as much time with them as I should have. And J's had a massive deadline at work too, and then last week it was like murphy's law decided to beat him up - all kinds of shit broke at his office. So he's been busy, and working god knows how many hours a week.

So I've been depressed anyway, feeling guilty, feeling tired, feeling ANGRY, because I'm tired of having to do all this. I'm tired of being an only child with older parents. I'm tired of being my aunt's only younger relative that is in any way responsible enough or sane enough to take care of her. (I have two cousins in California - one is in jail, and her two children are being raised by my uncle & his wife, and the other has gotten in and out of trouble for years, and I'm not even sure where she is now.) I love my kids to death, but I'm not a good mother, and they deserve better. J has to wake up every day, never knowing if I'm going to be a competent, helpful, loving partner, or a fucking basket case that drains all his energy and requires him to basically be a single parent. Worse than a single parent, because he has to deal with me, too. (Those times haven't been as frequent lately, thank god.)

So, like I said, it's a good thing that about a month or so ago I went to my doctor, concerned about my memory loss, and had my anti-depressant dose updated. Because I'd probably be at commit-me level of insanity right now otherwise.


*UPDATE*
That steak cheese & mushroom sub from hungry howie's that I just finished has been the best thing that's happened this weekend. My husband is awesome.