Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff

[Testament]

Went to work for maybe two hours today.

Went home. The last 24 hours have been some if the worst. In a long time.

Im going to lay in my bed, hoping that I'll stop feeling. Anything.

Im ready to get off this ride now.

[Crawfish]

Three days into NTI the school district is changing the format a bit, due to security concerns. But that's been the only major hiccup so far. The kids have been utilizing the tools and times they've been given well.

I'm hopeful I can keep up with things. As it is, my kids are great kids, they're showing me what they're doing and how as quickly as the teachers are them, and the teachers are attentive and patient and adapting well. I think my nerves are as much for them as my kids as I saw how hard it was for them to keep it together last spring (my kids' teachers really love their job and in the case of my first grader, she struggled with not being with her students everyday). Maybe I sound a little too aggressively optimistic, but it hasn't let me down this week.

[silverfox]

So I have pretty good insurance through my employer, and access to an employee assistance program.

However, in these times the wait times for counselors is WEEKS if not MONTHS. I can't actually schedule anything with the woman I was seeing before because she is booked past the point they allow appointments to be made.

With everything though I knew I couldn't wait that long for counseling. So I had been hearing about Betterhelp from my podcasts and I decided to just try it. It is 4x as expensive as using my insurance but I can get in //now// and //often// and honestly it has helped so much. Just getting to talk to someone else NOT in my situation or feeling obligated to take my side is so nice.

I'm sure that phone or video conference counseling doesn't work for everyone, but in a crisis sometimes something is better than nothing.

So in short, a plug for therapy here.

[Macha]

Pain Pain Pain pain pain. Fuck this shit. Fuck you, Ankylosing spondylitits. Fuck you, body. Just... RAWR

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Macha said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Pain Pain Pain pain pain. Fuck this shit. Fuck you, Ankylosing spondylitits. Fuck you, body. Just... RAWR

With you on this today. Fuck fibromyalgia too. Sat up for four hours. Leg is on fire, body is screaming. Such crime, leaving sofa for four freaking hours.

[Macha]

@L-B-Heuschkel Yeah, I have Fibro too, and there's a couple small spots today (The palm of my hand, for chrissakes, making it a bitch to use my laptop and do my job), but that's being overshadowed by the screaming pain in my lower spine.

Irony: About 5 minutes after I made my post, my rheumatologist called me. And told me to stop being a dumbass and take the meds he ordered me, and I can take care of the blood work later in the week. He's seriously the best doc ever.

[Auspice]

My hip has gotten bad enough I can only sleep on my stomach and even then I wake up multiple times a night.

I've applied for a clinic here (filled out their eligibility stuff) but haven't heard back. I'm sure tons of people have been signing up. Getting a job might be my only hope.

[Auspice]

I am having existential crisis.

I had an evaluation appt today for a medical study (because study = $$ which I need) and part of it was weight/height and when tf did I gain an inch

[Ganymede]

@Auspice

Well, you could have been a dude and notice the opposite looking into your shorts.

[Cupcake]

Y'all remember from a few weeks ago, I planned to send away for the materiaI from my mother's trial? I've received the envelope of paperwork back, and gone through it.

Thank God I had a therapy session on the books for today already because I needed it. I am not going to go into the nitty gritty details, but.

Part of the packet was the transcript from the preliminary hearing. The testimony provided was from my stepfather and the arresting officer recounting the incident and arrest.

Those recountings paint a picture that without context makes my mother seem like a stone cold executioner.

Here's the thing: my mother was found not guilty, on account of self-defense. Which begs the question - how horrible would he have had to be to both of us to have to go that far?

I've started remembering things. It's pretty awful.

I'm not okay, but I will be.

[Sunny]

I am drowning at work. There is no solution, it's just the meetup of Covid, the end of our fiscal year, and my specific job. All that I ACTUALLY have to do is survive the next few weeks in one piece; balls will get dropped (they always are), there will be at least three fires, and I will forget 2 of the 50 things I have to do (and they inevitably will be 2 of the most important things). This is all a reasonable reaction / consequence of what is on my plate, and everyone involved understands this.

holy shit it still sucks though lol

[Tori]

@Sunny said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

I am drowning at work. There is no solution, it's just the meetup of Covid, the end of our fiscal year, and my specific job. All that I ACTUALLY have to do is survive the next few weeks in one piece; balls will get dropped (they always are), there will be at least three fires, and I will forget 2 of the 50 things I have to do (and they inevitably will be 2 of the most important things). This is all a reasonable reaction / consequence of what is on my plate, and everyone involved understands this.

holy shit it still sucks though lol

Uuugh. Though I am often grateful for a non-calendar year fiscal year end (ours is 4/30) because I can't imagine doing fiscal year end AND 1099s and W2s and all that other arm-flaily government crap at the saaaame time. I mean, I probably drop the same amount of balls, but it's not all in the same month I guess?

[Sunny]

@Tori

It is excite. It's not usually this bad, but I'm in IT and the acting bridge between finance's paper based systems and the digital world.

[Tori]

@Sunny Oooooh yeah - I'm a finance all-the-papers! person, though our auditors have been pushing for a "paperless" audit for a couple of years now. Which, with Covid, meant so, so much scanning.

[surreality]

Today is National Suicide Prevention Day.

We shouldn't need a day to remind us to check in on people, but if there are folks out there you care about that you know are struggling and you haven't heard from them in a while, it's as good an excuse as any to check in on them if you can.

[Kestrel]

Well my life recently fell apart and I am sad.

Also I've never felt more inspired, my creativity is through the roof and all I want to do all day every day now is write, write, write.

Happiness is the enemy of creativity. And that makes me confused, and sad.

[Macha]

@Kestrel I understand this altogether too well, unfortunately. I mean, it's good I got away from abuse, but then I ...stopped writing all the time.

[GangOfDolls]

My brother has several co-morbidities:

Bipolar Disorder II or Cyclothymic - the diagnosis has changed a couple times
Borderline Personality Disorder
Adult ADHD

He is, as you can imagine, a pretty tortured person and a generally unhappy person. For as much as people with Bipolar disorders have to be committed and regimented to staying on their medication and having people who can closely observe when things are 'off' and they need to be packed off for an evaluation and adjustment, my brother has never been able to do this for more than a year or two at most. Most of the time, it's impossible largely because his Borderline and ADHD problems are more supercharged at preventing him from maintaining structure on himself and not reacting destructively to people in his life that try to help.

As a result, my brother is in his late 30s. He has no friends (literally, I'm not even joking) because he burns down friendships pretty quickly, a string of girlfriends who often tend to be dealing with serious trauma-induced mental health issues of their own and/or drug problems and/or aneurotypical issues of their own so those relationships tend to be explosive and short-lived, a fractious relationship with his teenage son who is exhausted of his father and tired of being let down all the time, and has been dependent on family for housing and financial support more on than off in his adult life. My nephew's mother is unfortunately of no help here, as they met in a treatment facility because she has a severe Borderline Personality Disorder herself and has attempted suicide several times over. She's been better in the last few years, but her current husband is the one who seems to be holding her ability to parent my nephew together (he's a motherfucking saint, her husband).

Despite all this my brother is not sick enough to be placed under a conservatorship. We as a family have tried but the standard for that in the state he currently lives in basically holds that he has to be incapacitated or nearly so to have a court rule that way. The best we can do and have done is a series of medical and durable POAs, that my parents have managed until my brother inevitably contacts our family attorney and revokes the POAs. This is often out of spite, more than due to the episodic nature of his illness because he's often attempting to extract money out of my parents for bullshit reasons (a new surfboard, upgrading the stereo in his car, first class tickets to Thailand are some past reasons) and when they won't capitulate, he revokes. Then eventually he relents and all this starts again.

My mother is 74 and is at the end of her fucking rope with all of this and has asked me to take on holding his POAs for the forseeable future. It's in reality something I'm going to have to do when she dies, as my father disowned my brother about a decade ago when my brother accused my parents of sexual/physical abuse in order to leave a treatment center early. For the record: It's not true for a lot of reasons I won't articulate here and my brother recanted the whole tale, after he was confronted and realized it wasn't going to get him out of an involuntary mental health hold.

Anyway.

I'm in deep contemplation about whether or not I want to take this on. On the one hand, we live in different states and the distance makes this easier but also harder for conflicting, opposite reasons. Easier because I don't have to see him in person and I'm much better at telling him 'no fuck off' when he wants a check for something childish and manipulative. Harder because he can resind and then because I'm 1,200 miles away, there's not a lot I can do. But my likely response to that will be 'cool, sounds like you're doing a thing' when he goes for that.

Does anyone have any sort of experience of the practical aspects of POAs? The most I imagine I'll be doing is monitoring his finances. He doesn't overspend because he's bipolar; he does it because he has no financial literacy and impulse buys things due to his ADHD.

And also, I'm just venting because I hate this.

[Macha]

@GangOfDolls I can only send you virtual hugs, and spare a moment to wish that you can puzzle all of this out, in the way that's best for you.

[GangOfDolls]

@Macha Thanks I appreciate it. This adult stuff sucks sometimes.