life

I guess when I post a rather emotional statement about grief and then disappear for over a week, it looks as if I’m stuck in that state, when in fact life doesn’t really let you just be sad. There is still shit to do.

I did really, really, really appreciate that I was able to take a week off work to be with Dad at the hospital, and the week after that to do some minor preparations for the memorial (in truth, I didn’t do much, but I wrote an obituary and biography for the booklet) and mostly zone out. Given previous jobs where I was denied vacation and always had to carry around a blackberry, I don’t think I would’ve been able to drop work like that had I not been where I am now. My coworkers were awesome, taking over my work to the point that I had no backlog when I came back. They deserve many hugs.

I did also get to visit my mom over the weekend, which helped so much too. My comment in the last post about my being most like my dad is quite apparent when I see Mom, because we aren’t much alike at all. Our voices are similar, but in looks and persona we differ to the point that people have shown surprise at hearing I’m her daughter. Though I think I have her ankles.

Due to my stepmother’s generosity I now own Dad’s car, and have paid off the remainder of my student loans. These sorts of things normally deserve a celebration but I would rather have Dad and debt and no car, to be honest. It feels as wrong to be happy about them as it does not to. But I named the car “The Pillock” because Heather and Kimli named their cars so I figured I’d have to, plus I grew up listening to Dad yelling at all the “bloody pillocks” on the road (I think I was a teenager before I learned that the word didn’t mean “bad driver”). And I guess this will mean less time spent with smelly, drunk and insane people on the Skytrain (I always picked the best times to travel).

But as I said, there is shit to do. My work won’t do itself (I’ve tested this in the past by ignoring it; nope), my cat won’t feed herself (though she stole my muffin this morning) and the condo won’t pay its mortgage. Life is dragging me forward, and I’m trying my best to let it.

I was speaking with a cousin last Friday (after Dad’s memorial service) and he asked if he’d offended me months ago by complaining in a comment that he wanted more Friday Cat Blogging, and if that was why I’d barely blogged for the last year.

Well, no, that’s not the reason, and I wasn’t offended, since I don’t remember it. The reason instead is everything that led up to Dad’s memorial service: the cancer diagnosis, Dad’s illness, and his request that I not tell anyone (which I took to mean, not blog about it; so I didn’t). Since sometime last summer I realized that I could hardly think of anything else, and attempts at blog posts would become streams of consciousness that would naturally head in the direction of Dad and my despair. So I posted little, except in the subject of my own health problems which were a nice selfish break from everything.

My father died on Friday, March 23, at age 68, of lung cancer. He was diagnosed with it, stage 4 even, in August or September, I don’t remember anymore. We knew sometime in the summer that things were really bad but it took doctors months to figure out the problem. I fretted for weeks before we got the definite news; friends and family told me to stop worrying, what’s the point of worrying when you have no control over the outcome, think positive, blah blah blah. And in the end it was worse than even I imagined, but “I told you so” or my preference of “fuck you” weren’t all that gratifying given what truth I’d won. The oncologist gave Dad a year and a half (with treatment) and instead he got a third of that (with treatment).

I feel I need to point out that he didn’t smoke, since the assumption with lung cancer is that it’s partially the person’s fault. Cancer doesn’t even run in the family, either. Dad just had to be a trailblazer.

Grief is a horrible thing. On Friday the 23rd I felt elation and relief that his suffering was over, and thought maybe I’d be fine from then on. That was quite stupid of me. Either I wake up feeling okay, but then the realization hits me; or I’m having a dream about Dad, where I know he’s gone, and when I wake up he’s still gone. I might see something funny and think, I should show this to Dad, and then I remember I can’t. I spend my days having the wind knocked out of me at random intervals.

I know I’ll get better eventually. But at this moment, the person I was most like in the world, and who loved me more than most, is gone, and I feel so very alone.

I’ve been asked by a few people what my hypothyroid symptoms were (or are) after my post last week. I’ve also had a few people speak to their wives on my behalf, since if anyone has Hashimoto’s or hypothyroidism it seems to be your wife, even if you’re not a married heterosexual man (or lesbian, I don’t judge). You might want to check you don’t have one (a wife, that is), but if you find her have her blood tested.

Today I discovered that there’s a connection between hypothyroidism and left-handedness. Between that and the fact I’m likely to die younger than non-southpaws, I really don’t see the point in being a lefty. It only seems to help your chances if you want to become the US president, but I really don’t, what with my being Canadian. But note this whole paragraph is an aside because being a lefty is not a symptom of hypothyroidism but an odd correlation that’s creeping me out.

Does my preference for cats mean I have a brain parasite? Most likely.

You can find lists of hypothyroid symptoms online. What possibly tipped me off that something was really wrong was that my hair was falling out. I have a lot of follicles, so it really didn’t make a difference, but it was bad enough that I cut half my hair length off just so it wouldn’t clog my shower drain and vacuum as much.

Another thing was the sense that I was suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder in the summertime. Which, granted, was achievable last summer in Vancouver, which only technically could be called a summer because of the date. But I was feeling generally tired and sad and wanted to sleep lots, despite the fact that it was summer (sort of) and I’d bought my dream condo downtown above a Tim Hortons and surely this meant my life was complete.

I also had a bit of weight gain but I think that could be attributed partly to living above a Tim Hortons and also to other meds my doc had me on. Once I went off them the weight came off, but I went off those and went on synthroid at the same time so it’s hard to say for sure.

That’s most of it. There was also some muscle weakness which went along with being tired. And the fact that I could get a full night’s sleep but when waking up in the morning I’d feel like ass and want to sleep in indefinitely. And that I can feel unnecessarily cold, though that wasn’t as noticeable in the unnecessarily mild summer months.

Of course, none of this couldn’t be written off as symptoms of stress, or getting older, or of being a lazy git. Which is probably why my doctor seemed to be humouring me when she let me take the blood test. But I was right, ha ha, I am hypothyroid, I’ve won.

It’s only since starting the synthroid treatment, and feeling much better for a while and then feeling worse again, that I’ve realized that I’ve probably been hypothyroid for longer than half a year, and it probably is Hashimoto’s, because I recognize the swing of a particular symptom coming and going: brain fog.

I hate you, brain fog. You are the shittiest symptom for someone in tech support. When I was a DBA I could usually kick a database until it started working properly without anyone noticing that I was guessing. But as a tech support engineer I have to understand another DBA’s database problems from only their answers, files and output and explain to them how to fix it all. And some of them want to know why the problem happened, or why they should do as I’ve suggested (“because I said so” hasn’t worked so far). And this sort of work requires a clear head, which I haven’t always had.

The last few weeks were the worst, though I also had a bad cold and then a bit of stomach flu for good measure. It would be past 2 pm and I thought it was 11, and wondered where the hours had gone and not because I’d been busy working. I would discover a customer issue I’d started answering 30 minutes before but had completely forgotten about in the meantime. And I would get confused about stuff I normally knew how to answer, sometimes needing to pass the work to a coworker with a functional mind. For someone like me, where work is so much of my life (there’s that and the cat, basically), it’s been horribly frustrating to be so dumb and confused yet at the same time entirely sober.

I’m starting to feel better since the weekend, so I guess the higher synthroid dosage is working. I worry that this yo-yoing of mental competency is going to continue for much longer until the right drugs and dosage are determined. It’s bad enough what it does to me, but if I’m not working at my best, my coworkers have to pick up the slack, and that’s hardly fair as they’re all in other countries and I can’t buy them beer in thanks. And they already think so poorly of Canadians, since their best example is a slow-witted chick who likes cats, donuts and hockey.

It’s December so it’s okay if I have decorations up. I had been storing my Christmas stuff at Dad’s as he doesn’t charge a fee for that but I picked it up last weekend and put up the fake tree yesterday.

7 years ago (holy shit) I had blogged about an interactive Christmas stocking Mom had made. I brought it out yesterday and put it up on my wall, and as you can see from this video the digital music box still works:

I believe this is what Christmas in hell sounds like. I played it for Mom over the phone and she was like, “what is that whining in the background?”

Speaking of Christmas, I’m going to be flying up to Kelowna that day to visit Mumsy. It turns out it’s pretty cheap to fly on Christmas Day itself, and all-in-all my flight is about half the price it was last year. Spending *all* of Christmas Day with Mom seems pointless as I’ve been a bad girl and Santa’s not going to be giving me much. Or the other explanation could be that the Maui vacation I didn’t pay for in October was my Christmas present.

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So I’ve been on a bit of a health kick lately, to the point of even buying kale today despite having no idea what one does with kale but it’s green and leafy so I get a gold star for participation. I’m seeing a personal trainer and a physiotherapist, who both have told me my body is completely fucked up so go do all these ridiculous looking exercises on your own time. I’ve been doing them in the gym downstairs because if I’m going to look like a moron in public, I might as well limit my exposure by keeping it to the gay Fitness World where nobody notices me anyways.

They tell me I have malfunctioning buttocks. This sounds like a personal failure on the level of failing Grade 1, and requiring the same lack of effort. So most of these exercises involve squeezing my ass even though I don’t really need to in order to do a rep of whatever it is.

I’m also getting intramuscular stimulation from my physio, which has her sticking acupuncture needles in me and then poking around with them for maximum torture before pulling them out. The point is to break down chronic scar tissue, or it’s just an outlet for her sadistic tendencies. Either/or. It’s not too bad, actually, but people had me so nervous about it on Facebook that I took a valium before my first session and then she couldn’t do any points near my armpit because I kept giggling from the tickles. It was better this week, I behaved myself. I’m not sure if it’s doing any good yet, but I haven’t had any muscle spasms in my shoulder since she started, which is a good sign. Yeah, I have several parts wrong with me.

December seems like a bad month to be attempting healthy lifestyle changes. Tim Hortons just brought out their candy cane donuts this week, and working from home means I’m only ever 3 floors away from one of those things. Perhaps I should just give up and start over in January.

So, stuff.

I went to Maui last month. It was good and I want to live there and eat pineapples and ahi poke all day and snorkel with turtles and never wear a sweater again. I came back after two weeks and took a whole week to stop feeling cold in the wet October weather of Vancouver.

That was my first vacation in 5 years. It turns out, surprisingly, that vacations are incredibly relaxing and a good way to mentally recharge your brain, because I found myself being much more efficient (though perhaps just as clueless) at my job after the trip, despite the extreme chill. The thing is, I didn’t actually know that vacations were good for that, since I had so rarely been allowed to take one by various former employers. I now recognize that I’ve really been deprived, though I should also blame myself for not standing up for my rights and/or threatening them with DROP DATABASE.

I have yet to go through my vacation photos, as things have been busy since I got back. I do have my snorkelling photos up (via one of those cheap disposable cameras you can use underwater), including this hentai-esque shot of an octopus on my thigh:

The lamest part of my trip was probably the sunrise at the Haleakala volcano, because it was full of tourists who were taking pictures of the sunrise WITH FLASH. Seriously, wtf people, learn to use your cameras already. Did they think they were going to make the sun come out faster by tempting it with light pellets?

In more recent news, I web-diagnosed myself with hypothyroidism and I turned out to be right. I find that hilarious, given I’ve web-diagnosed myself with pretty much everything but testicular cancer at one point or another. Plus people I’d spoken to about my recent weight gain (7 lbs or so in the last half year) were hinting that I was getting older and my metabolism was slowing down and I should just give up and start wearing mom jeans. I’d go up to them and say “nya nya” but I am too old for that sort of thing. Note it’s my 34th birthday in 29 days.

It snowed tonight. Does this mean I can start listening to Christmas music now?

I can’t be bothered to check if I’ve said this about my current job, but it’s remote. I have a cubicle all to myself in one of the Bentall towers, but my condo has better views and the commute is 20 minutes faster. Plus I don’t work with anyone at the Vancouver office. Heck, I don’t work with anybody in Canada.

Given my location, my work hours overlap with coworkers in the US, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. It is quite cool to get to know people of other cultures and learning wtf this means and why it’s funny. But one thing I realized once I’d been there a few months is how uber-Canadian I’d become. As the sole representative of Our Home and Native Land, I’ve spoken way more about poutine and hockey (and marijuana, though that’s more about Vancouver and how I can usually smell it wafting from a neighbour’s balcony) than I normally would.

They used to laugh at me when I ended sentences (in the work irc chatroom) with “eh”. It’s not funny, it’s how I talk! But it has been interesting and fun to get to talk about Canada and how we’re different from other countries and how we are the same. Though I think I may have accidentally convinced a good number of people that we’re all about beer and donuts and hockey riots.

Happy Canada Day, fellow citizens.