A Long Silence & My Explaination For It

I used this because it's Leighton
(& because it's Blair Waldorf & everyone loves Queen B).

Let me start out with the sincerest form of "I am sorry" you will ever hear. I'm not saying I'm sorry to you of course. If you are still around, if you're still reading this then I doubt you care really. I'm saying that I am sorry to myself and to my blog. Mostly my blog.

Let me just say that since the 4th of July (which was my last post, before yesterday's of course) it has been a weird kind of thing for me. I have been struggling, there have been a lot of health issues and to top it off I've just been outright lazy.

Let's start out with struggling. I've never been unemployed for this length of time. I've been working since I was 15. In ten years I've been unemployed for maybe a cumulative total of a month. I've never been so dependent on anyone. I don't like it. It has made me depressed. When I started this blog, with it's two weekly columns I had a steady job with a steady income. I was secure. But I moved and California is less forgiving than anywhere else except maybe New York City. The jobs are few and far between and expectations are higher than they should be really. I had a job for a few months and the company went under and I was let go.

The anatomy chapter kicked everyone's ass.
This was the online test for studying.
Luckily, it ended up being open book in real life.

So then I went to Cosmetology school. I've always wanted to do it, I have a vested interest in hair and make up (obviously) and it was a good move. But its kept me busy and way too busy to get even a part time job apparently. I applied but because my hours are so limited they wouldn't take me for even seasonal work. That angered me.

The other reason I couldn't get a job was in July my mom had a heart attack. I'd never been so scared in my life. We thought it was anxiety. She'd been having some problems with the bottle. My mom was addicted to cocaine in the early years of my life. She went to jail, learned the error of her ways and has been clean ever since but alcohol is legal. She can't go to jail for drinking but it can kill her. She got into a fight with my Grams and we thought she was having an anxiety attack. She takes meds for it but it doesn't always help. After we got home and just before bed when she was still feeling sharp pains she decided she needed to go to the Hospital. When the doctor said heart attack my whole world tipped on its axis and spun backwards. The wind was knocked from my lungs and if I wasn't already sitting I would have fallen over. It sounds dramatic but until you're knocked off your feet by news that you never expected you don't really see things as they are. It's like going to the doctor one day for a full body check up, they do a bunch of tests and declare you healthy and the next day you feel a sharp pain, go to the doctor and they tell you its cancer that wasn't there yesterday. You feel safe and secure and then you're not. When they took my mom for tests I lost it. The nurses had to ask me if I was ok, if I needed anything. You know what I asked for? A hug. It was weird for me to request it. Not just because I hate hugs but because they meant water or a box of tissues. I just wanted to be held. But I couldn't ask me mom because she was gone and really she was dealing with enough she couldn't know that I was reeling from this.



It was my worst fear realized. First my dad and then my mom. Before I even had the opportunity to do anything. I was instantly reminded that all the things my dad was missing out on would soon be things my mom would miss getting to have with me. It wasn't fair. So once she recovered I made a doubled effort to be with her.

Then just after my birthday the stomach pains I'd been having became severe enough to keep me from school. In fact they almost killed me. You see I'd developed gallstones. I went to an Urgent Care center, spent $80 for them to tell me I needed an ultrasound. The ultrasound was $200 cash. So I'd spent $280 for them to tell me I had gallstones but couldn't do anything because my gallbladder wasn't infected and they only removed them if they were infected. They gave me a prescription for meds that were supposed to minimize or dissolve the gallstones. 12 hours later my urine was brown and I was calling the urgent care center I went to and asked if this was a side effect of the medication. They never called me back.  At 3 am, I wake up and I am puking black and yellow like a Wiz Kalifa song and I wake my mom up and tell her it's time to go to the ER. She wanted me to go when we were picking up my Rx at Walgreens and I was doubled over, crying because of the stones.

This was my BFF in the hospital

I get admitted quickly, they try to take blood and by try I mean they stuck me 9 times because they couldn't find my veins and blew out the few they could find. They discovered I had pancreatitis and my liver was shutting down because a gallstone got out of my gallbladder and lodged itself into the duct of my pancreas. My liver and pancreas were secreting bile to dissolve the stone but really it was just poisoning me. They said if I had waited much longer I would have died. I wasn't allowed to eat at all until the surgery because they needed my pancreas to stop being so inflamed so they could operate. That was awful. I love food and they were keeping me from it. I was on my period and craving chocolate. So I went into the hospital on a monday, they scheduled surgery for that Thursday.
The surgery was a fuckstorm if ever there was one. First, they came and got me early and NO ONE was there. I called my mom frantic because I didn't want her to show up to my room and me not be there, especially after having a heart attack. We waited for 3 hours for them to take me when the surgeon comes in and goes "they won't give me a time and I have other things to do so I am rescheduling your surgery for Saturday at 6am."

I freaked out. I read into "I have other things to do" as in "I have BETTER things to do" and I flipped out. They had to sedate me. I was literally screaming for them to get it out of me, use a butter knife and a table from the cafeteria and cut it out. I told them I didn't even care if they knocked me out for it because anything had to be better than what I was going through. Not eating, not sleeping and for a week. I'd done that before and I knew what would happen. I hadn't eaten or kept anything down for an entire week. I hadn't showered because I couldn't get my IV wet. My hair was gross, I felt gross and I slept only when drug induced. I also don't have health insurance so that was two more days, plus a day of recovery. I didn't want that at all.

gruesome tummy staples

They ended up doing it the next day and I was out by that Saturday but I was forced to take a leave of absence from school and though I didn't need 3 weeks off, for the first week after I was winded simply by going from my bed to the toilet. I couldn't shop even though I wanted to because I couldn't walk around so going to get groceries was out. I still can't eat certain things because otherwise I spend the whole day shitting my brains out. I walk around with not just Midol and Excedrine Migraine but Imodium A.D now. Ridiculous.

So while I'm recovering from that and back in school some other family has health issues and it seems that between October and November there is a health reprieve. Until Christmas. That's when my Grams has a heart attack.  She thought she was having an asthma attack. She couldn't breathe. Get to the hospital and they do the same thing to my mom as was done to me. They pull the rug right out from underneath us and say the words "heart attack." Though this time we know the drill. We know what questions to ask.What are her heart enzymes at. 1.9 (the ideal is 0.0 obviously). So though not as major as my mom's was (her was 5.8), it was still life threatening. You see my mom's was from stress. There was no blockage. Her heart expanded and almost exploded and the muscles have been weakened as a result. My Grams had 3 veins blocked in her left atrium and they were 95% blocked. They couldn't put in stints because they were at a crossroads so putting a stint in any one of them would have blocked the others. How annoying right? She's much better now but that ruined our Christmas and our New Years. For us it is just another day but those days mean something to my Grams who is extremely religious and never misses Christmas Mass. She had surprise plans for my mom and her boyfriend and my uncle who came to stay to go see this play and have dinner, ect. So she was upset about that. Now she's worried about being a burden.

But you see, this is why I need this blog. Why I need to be writing. Writing is who I am. It has been since I was a girl and first discovered the beauty in the written word. The beauty in getting lost in my own head and then coming out of it long enough to write it all down and revisit it. I need to be writing whether its my novels or this blog. I have been so lost these last 6 months. I've been lost without you. I don't want to get that lost again. So don't let me. Don't let me leave you guys ever again.