Well, long time no post! Basically, I discharged from the hospital, got COVID, and then got a job. I’m actually surprised by how well this last thing is going. The cat is having a really hard time adjusting to my being out, and I’m tired because I still am getting somatic flashbacks for an average of two hours most nights between when I lie down and when I fall asleep. Apparently the latest hospital was able to undo enough damage from HBM that the sleep disturbances are now the most troubling thing remaining. It got severely bad early in the week and I was just losing it because I wanted to sleep so bad. I’m also having food issues because I cooked a whole bunch of food before I started working and saved it in the freezer, only for my microwave to give up the ghost. I returned it to the store and bought a ton of canned soup that I can heat on the stove until I get paid on September 13. Which, yes, they don’t pay me until THREE WEEKS into the job. I’m dying š
Meanwhile, I changed my turtle’s water a week and a half ago and he decided to REJECT the water change outright. Usually he pouts for 24 hours but it had been over a week and he was still burrowed under the dirt. When he does this, it usually means one of three things:
- Something is bothering him about his environment
- He’s desperately sick and possibly dying
- He’s in a mood and/or going through a phase
Fortunately, he went back into the water this afternoon, after I spent several days trying to avoid thinking about what I would write in his eulogy, trying to convince my new employer to let me take a whole day off to bring my turtle to the herpetologist halfway across the state, and frantically trying to figure out how to come up with money to do so. Me and my little buddy are a package deal, and I can’t even think about losing him. My world would collapse.
Anyway, he says he’s fine. I did have to throw away his worm farm because when I recovered from COVID, I noticed that the thing smelled like a massive fart combined with a yeast infection. I salvaged the container but trashed the rest, including the unfortunate survivors. Who knows, maybe the landfill will be a great place for worms to recover from trauma.
So, you know, that’s us! I really, really, like really wish the HBM thing hadn’t happened because it reactivated a shitload of childhood trauma. I desperately need a therapist and have been trying to get one since last October. Most people don’t treat trauma (even if you filter search results for people who say they do), I got to the top of one waiting list and they said they couldn’t take me because of some policy that I don’t understand, the one last spring closed her private practice, and then the most recent person didn’t speak English. I’m trying to switch to someone else on the grounds that “It’s not a good fit,” but they said I have to tell that to her personally š So yeah, obviously that office is really concerned with actually helping people and would never try to force someone to stay with a therapist they didn’t like by making the switching process as maximally confrontational as possible š
Meanwhile, every day there’s a risk I’m going to get a court summons because my landlady refuses to follow the policy in my lease that she charges a third of my gross income. She is just evil. Probably not as evil as the NP at HBM, but definitely a horrible excuse for a human being, leaving a path of destruction and human pain behind her wherever she goes.
I would write more but I need to go to bed. I’m still planning on writing about the book I read recently, but it might not be for another day or two.
