Here I am again!

And I promise, I won't be harping on my surgeries. Enough of that.

I think I need a bit more purpose in my life. Maybe some volunteering outside of therapy would be good. I'm happy with what I'm doing so far, but I could do more. I need to do more. really.

I've been thinking I'll try to get my house in order first. That's got to happen, because it's getting to the "fraught with danger stage, again. We just have too much stuff. So, I talked to my Speech Therapist about it, and we came up with a plan: I decided to ask my mother in law and two friends. I've heard back from my mother in law, and she's all for helping me out. So that's a good step. 

Now I have to figure out what I need to get rid of. There's rather a lot of accumulated crap from the past 10 or so years; furniture, dishes, papers, some useless objects we "might be able to fix," but never will. Just...stuff.

It's not easy to figure out people to ask for help when there's a big job to be done, particularly when you were pretty fiercely independent in the almost recent past. Not saying I would have been able to tackle my whole house before, but I would at least have been able to formulate a plan. Not anymore, though. Planning the decluttering spree for this is not unlike trying to figure out how to scale a perfectly smooth wall. I don't know how or where to start.

I looked up people who help organize people's houses, and quickly realized we can't afford that. After that I was just stuck. I couldn't figure out anything at all. I knew some of the things I wanted to do, but couldn't figure out what order to do them in, or even what the steps were to start them.

This is what it's like to have executive function issues. You know something needs to be done, you know what the end goal is, but the actual doing of the thing is lost to you. It can seem to be too much, insurmountable. Too many steps, too many details. Too much stuff to do. So then, instead of figuring out the small bits of each task to make it easier, you freeze. Then nothing gets done.

Sure, I know that people get things done all the time. Tough things, gross things, huge seemingly insurmountable tasks, but I personally can't get my head together enough to do that. I can't seem to look at the little pictures in the big picture. I can't figure out the steps to get to the end result.

It's honestly infuriating. I can do this with cooking, with crafting things, even with driving places. Why can't I do it for this one task? Am I lazy? stupid? Both? 

No. I'm never functioning at full capacity. I never have all of the where-with-all. The transmission fluid levels in my brain is never full, so things don’t run smoothly.

It's not a good feeling. I want to be productive. I want to do the whole housewife/stay-at-home mom thing right, like pretty much everyone else I know. I just can't seem to do it on my own.

I'm not the only person stuck in this sticky tar of indecision. There are a bunch of us, some diagnosed with something that explains it, but, I think, not anywhere near enough of us. We just founder in this hell of not getting things done.

I hope some people read this and get more of an idea of why some of us are the way we are. Why sometimes we can get everything finished in one place and freeze solid in another. Why we can't just do the damn things we need to do. We want to. We don't want all the work to fall on those we love. It just doesn't work. Like a car with no oil,though, we can get started, but we can't go very far without help. If we don't get help, the engine will seize. Then, no one is getting anywhere.

It's limited! My patience is so...limited!

Please hear the title as that song from Wicked. A lot more people know it now that there's a movie. If not, I'll wait while you go look it up.

All set? OK! 

So! My patience is not what it was. I used to be able to wait forever for things, no problem. I could listen to the winding anecdotes of toddlers. I could wait until my clients woke up before doing their (sometimes literally) endless laundry list of tasks. I could absolutely ruin a pie crust by overworking it, achieving a baked texture not unlike shoe leather.

I was super patient.

Now, not so much. I do not like waiting. I get irritated in grocery store lines. I interrupt when someone's story goes too long, to make sure we get to the point. My pie crust is now superb. Honestly, it's flaky, buttery perfection. The change in my life is marked, I tell you. For the better? Likely not, for everything but my pie crust. Honestly, though? Not the worst trade off.

So what does this story have to do with my post today? You may ask this with a little impatience, yourself.

Well, a lot.

I'm currently waiting for an appointment in late January so I can find out when the first of my two upcoming surgeries is. I think I may have mentioned getting my date for the surgery last update, but I didn't. I just misunderstood what I was told. My pre-op appointment is on the day and time I now have scheduled, and that's where I'll find out when my parathyroid surgery is. Hopefully not too far out, as I would really like to get this wrist issue fixed. It hurts to do pretty much everything from read, to type, to drive. I've been wearing either a brace or kinesiology theraputic tape for most of the last 6 months. It's tiresome.

However, the calcium leeching out of my bones needs to be taken care of first, understandably. Waiting is hard, though. It's tedious and goes so slowly. If life had a fast forward button like a VCR (where my 70s and 80s kids at?), things would be so much easier.

Well, as my mom said when I was a kid, "if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride." Outdated and definitely not politically correct aphorism, but it's not false.

I have no idea how much damage this calcium issue is doing me at this point. I know that, eventually, it will likely weaken my bones, and I've had this thing going on for at least the last 10 years, quite possibly 15. It's been a while.

Seriously, folks, check your own test results periodically. Sometimes doctors miss things that may be important. They have a lot going on, and sometimes, things slip past.

So, here I sit, waiting a little less than two weeks to find out what my next hurdle is. I'm hoping it's not much of a much; maybe like getting one's tonsils out. I've never done that either. So really no basis of comparison.

I know what hand surgery entails. I've done that a couple of times before. No big deal, really. Keep the area immobile for as long as they say, do your PT exercises, and you'll come out fine. 

This, though, throat surgery...I mean, I know I should leave the stitches alone, but do I talk? Not talk? solid foods? Soft foods? Liquid foods? I mean, I imagine not the last one, at least not after the first day or so. Still so many variables, though. Also, when will I be able to sing after? It's so nerve-wracking.

I know I'll find out, soon. I know how fast time goes by, even when it seems like it's snail-crawling along. I learned that with my cancer surgery. That wasn't easy for me to wait for either.

Like I said, I'm impatient, now. Not all that much I can do to change that fact besides live my life in the meantime.

Miniature Disasters

 (credit to KT Tunstall for the title)

Well, you’ve heard a lot about my brain exploding, so maybe I’ll take it down a notch and talk about less deadly things for a while. I mean, I don't actually talk about my brain injury much in real life, outside of some complaints about how my brain now works (or sometimes doesn't), so this has been a good outlet for that. However, to be completely honest, the rest of my health-life is not unlike some fantastic cascade of slow motion fender-benders. Each time someone else winds up in the mess that's happening, it looks bad, then ends up being minor damage, or even no real damage at all. 

So, there's this surgery thing this year (wow, so weird, I’m getting surgery in February for the second year in a row! Universe, don't make this a running gag, please), and through an apparent communications snafu, it's my hand surgery. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm very much looking forward to not feeling like a hunk of sort-of-sharp glass is occasionally stabbing into my wrist, or like I have a white hot bracelet on suddenly. I just really thought my parathyroid surgery would come first. Since the appointment for the hand surgery is already made, I’ll need to wait probably six weeks after it for the other surgery. That means another few months of a low calcium diet. I’m doing pretty well with that, though, usually getting about 500mg of calcium per day. 

On that, actually, it's really hard to avoid calcium. Everything is supplemented with it. I never realized how many things have added calcium. There’s the things you expect to be high in calcium; milk, cheese, yogurt, cottage cheese, bone broth. Then there’s cereal (added calcium), almond milk (added calcium and vitamin D), and more vegetables than you’d think (most leafy greens, soy beans, and broccoli to name just a few). 

In short, and if I mentioned this before, I apologize: I'm on almost as strict a diet as I was when I was trying not to get migraines. It's kind of intense. 

But, I'm doing it. No sense in calcifying cartilage if I can avoid it by dietary changes (yes, this has happened to a close family member). All that calcium apparently has to do something. Well, something aside from damaging my kidneys anyway. Overachieving minerals, I swear. 

The hand surgery though, that should make things easier. It's fixing something that causes pain, so that's good. Plus, I have someone who can work with me on recovery. 

So, you see? A cascade of minor fender-benders. No giant accident you can't look away from, no squealing of brakes and broken glass. Just all these small dings. Can even totally be fixed for less than you’d think in a body shop. 

But holy hell, it all looked like it was going to be a disaster