| 13 hours |
[19 Aug 2009|11:17pm] |
While I have now learned the UPenn ER is amazing and their doctors rock, I found out in a way I'd prefer not to.
Starts out, Monday I had jury duty. I'd been eating and sleeping very little, stressed about school coming up, still sorting through things here at the apartment, Harris's birthday approaching, and also the one year anniversary of mom's death. Lots of stuff piling up in the Kiko-brain, but I was actually kind of excited about jury duty since I'd never done it before.
It was one of those harrowing experiences that further affirms your adulthood, and makes you sort of hate it at the same time. I have a lot of respect for due process, especially after the courts proved my innocence when the cops were douchebags last year, but the jury duty system sucks balls. We were bounced around a lot from room to room, and between the blistering August-in-Philadelphia heat and the blue-fingered cold of the air-conditioned courtrooms.
I was on edge, but I was back in the cycle of sleeping 2-3 hours a night again, so I expected that. I'd gotten picked for a civil case that everyone said would last maybe a day if the folks didn't just settle instead. Okay day.
Then I came home, got a little nap, and we started on dinner. Well, we meant to. It degenerated into arguing to the tune of all of us storming out of each other's presence. None of us really slept, none of us really could. By 5AM we were all sitting in the same room together.
Thus occurred my total and complete snap.
The last year, life has been a madhouse. No matter how we all felt about mom, losing her was like losing a limb. And the guys, Gods bless them, want to go back to "normal." Except, we're never going to have that normal again. There's going to have to be a new normal. They've also kept to themselves a lot, and bickered with each other a lot. I've been up and down on the "intolerable" list every other week myself.
Problem is, they cope by putting things back together. They cope by letting their feelings out, raw, unabridged, and taking them 100% for what they are. I cope by tearing down the broken thing and building it new and different. I cope by carefully keeping my feelings to myself until I'm sure they're not going to hurt me or put me in an undesirable position, and sometimes outright countering what I feel because it's so damn easy for me to drown in it and feel sorry for myself.
The guys read this as me not wanting to grieve or mourn at all, and trying not to overwhelm me because of that. In a way, we've all been 'protecting' each other, or trying to, which is a fool's errand. This has been a vicious cycle for nearly a year that we didn't realize until Monday night.
Finally climbed into bed for the few hours I'd have before court. Except I didn't sleep. My mind buzzed and I tossed and turned and apparently mumbled incoherent things. When the alarm went off at 8AM, I was seeing things and even more incoherent. I vaguely remember Paul taking my pulse, and the guys helping me get dressed to get to the hospital. I remember watching TV with Joe in the waiting room, and some lady in Pepto Bismol pink asking us to hold her station-alarm they give you while she went to go have a cigarette. Joe went to go call court for me, and when my buzzer went off for triage, Pink Lady's buzzer was gone and so was she, and there was a different show on the TV then had been there when I was watching it a moment ago. Most of the day went in blips of consciousness like this.
( Medical Nightmare )
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