Mini-Post: Still In Free Fall...

...but it's possible that my silly parachute might open after all.

For those of you who missed The Blog Post That Cannot Be Posted, let it be known that just in general, things sucked rocks.  And they still do, but there are cautious signs of improvement.  I still have a job, and we're still making the mortgage payments.  We still have a huge plumbing repair but we got the first half of it done for a lot less than we thought we'd have to pay.  Joan had to have surgery on her leg, but the tumor turned out to be benign.  So a whole lot of the end-of-the-world crises du jour seem to be working  out. As they almost always will if you let them alone for long enough.

Last night I called a doc I used to see a looooooooong time ago, when I lived in Arizona (what was that,the early 1990s?  Good Lord, I think it was.)  After I ran my assortment of symptoms by her, and detailed my cornucopia of pharmaceuticals, she said it sounded like at least two and maybe three of the drugs I'm taking aren't working,  She wants to remove this and add that, lower this and maybe not take that anymore. She wants me to go on FMLA for two weeks to accomplish this. (My firm's too small to be covered under FMLA, but especially if we wait until December, I can probably do it.  Basically nothing happens in the legal field between December 20 and January 3, anyway.)

So now I gotta get all this verified by my Main Doc, but if she is right, then all I've ever been is depressed. And I have been depressed before. One would think I would know the symptoms by now, but I don't.  Didn't, anyway, this time. I associate depression with feeling mopey and sad.  Feeling hopeless and devoid of all life is a different thing entirely. The manager kept telling me I seemed like a whole different person, though.  Aha, perhaps now we know why.  Does depression affect one's competence at work?  I guess it might.

And so, as I sit here at Afrah with a tablet and a keyboard, an akkawi pie and a milkshake that escapes being a milkshake because technically it's an "iced cappuccino", I am reminded once again that I have a frick'n serious medical condition.  One that requires constant monitoring, maintenance, meditation and medication. And fewer afternoons sitting in a cold living room watching plumber guys move back and forth with their hands full of PVC pipe and stranger things. Yeah, I know.  I'm just sayin'.