All I Want Is A Normal Life

As long as I’m home sick watching Survivorman (I love Survivorman!), I might as well catch up on the bloggage.

I worked super late last night, despite getting sicker and sicker. Now, I’m all achy and my tonsils are impassable boulders. I’m going to go to sleep after this episode, even though “Twilight” (book, not movie) is getting interesting.

So, last night, when I got off work, I figured I should call my mom, since she called a few days ago. She called to talk about Grandma, who is sick and probably not going to be around much longer. A little bit of background on G’ma: she’s pretty much been my favorite relative, at least until she started getting more confused and my own direct parents started getting more like friends and less like parents. I have had years to get used to her aging. None of this is a surprise. But still, hearing the details of what seems to be kind of a confused depression (loss of interest in thing that used to interest her, general lethargy, refusal to eat) was really hard. I love her and I don’t want her life to be sitting around in a bed waiting to die. And she’s not aware enough to be depressed about the futility of her situation, which is kind of good and kind of bad. For her, it’s good. She’s not aware of this plight, even if she’s kind of deep-level depressed about it. For me, it’s sad. I’m sad on her behalf, and I’m sad because I miss the friend I used to have in G’ma.

My mom and I talked about it for a while, and then I talked with David about it for a long time, since he’s had a lot of experience with death.

And really, the thing is, I don’t know how to deal with this. First, she’s not dead. No matter how not there she is, she’s still with us and some part of her is in her head. She’s still mentally aware enough to be concerned with politeness and kindness, which is something that’s in her most basic make-up. She sometimes remembered me when I visited last time, and the rest of the time, she pretended to. Because, hey, that’s the way she is. Second, it’s not certain how close to dying she is. My mom thinks she’s really close, but the hospice people don’t think she is, and David said that even in this state, people can continue on for years and years. And part of me wants her to stop suffering, but part of me also feels guilty for feeling like she should die. And also, there’s some desperate part of me that wants more than nothing in the world for her to live forever, even if she’s a shell of her old self. But she’s not herself. It’s a little like pet cemetery… it’s just not right to wish for someone to be alive for so long that you’re willing to sacrifice who they are to achieve it.

But basically, I just don’t know how to react. I’m dealing. In many ways, I’ve had to deal with this for years.

And then, at 4:00 in the fucking MORNING, I woke up in my footy pajamas in a pool of URINE. No, I’m not kidding. Diva has been getting older (seems to be a common theme around me) and in the past year or so, she occasionally (really occasionally) has incontinence. If it wasn’t infrequent, I wouldn’t let her sleep with me, obviously. But this morning, I woke up in my fleece footy pajamas (which wick moisture, both conveniently and inconveniently) and I was soaking wet.

So I had to get out and change, take a shower, change the sheets, and check the blankets (it wasn’t actually that much when I turned the light on, but it’s sure enough to make me spring up and shower). And it’s not that easy to get back to sleep at 4:30 in the morning after a freezing shower (my shower heats up verrrry slowly) and a lot of jumping around (if you’ve ever been soaked in urine that isn’t your own, you know the kind of jumping around I’m talking about).

And keep in mind that I’m still super sick and all I want to do is sleep for days.

After about an hour of laying in dry pajamas and fresh sheets, thinking about G’ma and how depressed she must be, I finally got to sleep.

And then at 6:00, Diva woke me up and wanted me to go feed her and let her out to pee… and you better believe that I jumped up to let her out to pee.

Ok, this entry is getting long and probably tedious, but there was one super-awesome cherry on the shitty sundae of that 12 hour span: the hydrogen peroxide gargle. My doctor advised that I mix 50% water and 50% hydrogen peroxide and gargle with it to fight the infection in my tonsils. I hesitantly tried to gargle with the mixture this morning, holding the foul-tasting stuff in my throat for as long as I could, and then spitting it out. But anyone who knows anything about hydrogen peroxide knows what it does when it hits infection: it foams. And when your whole mouth is a cesspool of infection, it foams A LOT. And it doesn’t just foam forward, it foams backward, down your throat, which causes a gag reflex, which causes whatever you ate to fly forward with great velocity, which leaves you puking in your own sink and foaming at the mouth like a sick, rabid animal.

And then I went to work.

And then I realized I was too sick to be at work, so I came home. And now here I am. So, yeah, that’s how my day went.

I had to send a YouTube sample to my boss today and this happened to be in my Firefox history when I typed in YouTube. It’s so cute that I had to post it here. Awwww. Puppies!

I was megalomaniacally checking my stats and happened across the terms that people have used to find my blog today. Among the top searches:
presidental debate knob
audience in political debates turn knob
under 16 fuking blood

Granted, only one person got to my blog on each of those search terms (no one is really looking for my blog), but the last one is pretty disturbing. Who is looking for this? Why are they coming to my blog? What are the other search results for this? (no, I’m not going to look) It occurs to me that I may want to start optimizing my blog for searches on things like puppies and kittens. And knobs.