Ever had one of those days where the level of shit that you give is so far below zero that it should be comical, but because of said level, it isn't? That would be me today. The kid I work with doesn't do any of the things that I try to get him to do so I spend 4 hours just trying to get him to be a human being, which sooooo isn't going to happen, which just gets me all upset and frustrated because I bust my ass doing my job and it hurts that I put so much time and effort into what I do and it never matters. Then stupid asshole bosses have to show me that indeed the level of their assholeness can in fact go far above the maximum level even allowable. At least asshole boss actually admitted that he has no basis on any of the things that he is saying other than hearing things from people 3rd, 5th, and 10th hand....yeah way to do your fact checking. Asshole. I just hate dealing with all of this crap. I just want to crawl into either a bubble bath or a bottle of vodka and right now I just don't think bubbles are going to do it for me.

Inspired by a homework assignment...

Adaptation is also  known as healing or recovery and it is most simply put as the process of changing your life, emotions, or thoughts in order to handle the loss that the person experiences. This takes many different forms depending on the person and the situation. For myself personally, I will use the most recent occurrence of loss and that was when my grandmother died. She had been declining steadily in her health for a long time so it was not sudden and though I had years to come to terms with it, it seems as if it just came out of nowhere.

In the years previous to her death, she developed and suffered greatly from advanced stages of Alzheimers. It was heartbreaking for me to go see her knowing that she did not recognize me, but the hardest part was trying to remind her of who I was because you could see the war that raged on within her as she tried to remember what everyone told her she already knew. I cannot imagine how difficult that must have been for her. To see her first granddaughter grown up and married with children of her own when all she could remember was the 5 year old that followed her every movement and wanted to be just like her. I guess my grieving really began when she stopped recognizing me. It felt like I had lost a part of my childhood. Sure my grandma drove me nuts sometimes, okay a good deal of the time, but I loved her and being with her was like being a little girl again. It hurt deeply when I could no longer share those memories with her without seeing a look of frustration and pain when she realized she did not remember. I slowly stopped visiting my grandmother because it was just too hard. I look back now and regret doing that to her. It was not her fault and I feel as though I was punishing her for things that were beyond her control. I see now that I was adapting to the situation by trying to lessen my pain, but I never thought about the pain it caused her.

When I got the call that she was very sick and may die, it felt like I was stabbed in the chest. Here I was this little girl all over again scared and afraid of the world outside. Though at the time I was very sick, I went to the hospital to await some news. It’s funny, or not, but almost everything bad that has happened to one of my family members takes place at that hospital. I hate that place. Well, maybe not the entire hospital, but certainly the second floor. It is where people go to die. That is another adaption I have made in my life. If something happens to myself or one of my children that would result in one of us going to the second floor, I will drive out of my way to go to a different hospital. I cannot take the pain of seeing another family member admitted to the second floor. They almost never come back from that place. But on that day, I sat with my family on the second floor and waited. Discussions on what the family wanted took place all around me and medicines were given and then stopped and then given again. The air was thick with hurt and anger and I felt as though I couldn’t breathe. It was a crappy way to spend a birthday that was for sure.

I didn’t think of it until just this second, but that was the second year in a row I spent my birthday in a hospital. The year after that was spent there too. Maybe I will be skipping birthdays from now on as another method of adaptation….The next 2 days were a blur of hospitals and driving back and forth between it and my home. I rarely saw my husband or my children. The stress of the situation made my illness worse and I decided to go home for a couple of hours and rest as my grandmother’s was on the mend. It was a 30 minute drive home. When I walked into my house, my phone was ringing, but I ignored it and went straight into the bedroom and flopped down on the bed. My husband knocked and brought me the phone and said “It’s Jessica….and she’s crying…hard”. I knew what she would say before I even touched the phone. In the 30 minutes I had been gone, grandma took a turn for the worse and died. I immediately grabbed my keys and flew back to the hospital. In no time I was outside of her room with my family. I was angry at myself for leaving and made a change that day that no matter what happened in the future, I would never leave another hospital while a family member was fighting to live. No matter how well they appeared to be doing, I would never leave again.

I have adapted my life in many ways to deal with the pain that event caused me and the grief that came with it. I believe most of these changes will be permanent and deeply rooted inside of me to help protect myself from the same kind of pain again. We cannot change our past, but we can make changes to make our future different and that is exactly what I have done.

I have decided that the Internet is a terrifying place whenever you try to get helpful information from it. I want to know as much as I can sight I feel prepared for my surgery and may have some sort of sense of what to expect in the coming weeks. Maybe being prepare will help to ease this cripple apprehension I seen to be suffering from. Of course, all the research I am doing is making me more nervous. Leave the ovaries and still e hormonal an crazy or take them and go into menopause and have a greater risk of having a heart attack? Leave the cervix and risk still having pain and. Lessing every month or take it and risk losing pleasure from sex. Most people tell me there is no right or wrong answer to these question a each person and case is unique, but I really wish there was some sort of concrete answer so that I did not have to agonize over making the right choice. I sure hope this all gets easier to figure out because the stress of making this choice may very well make me crazy. White padded room, here I come.

Eviction notice served, now get the hell out.

I have had a week to wrap my head around this and now I feel I am okay enough to share with the world. I am having a hysterectomy in 18 days. Kind of blunt, I know, but I just had to throw that out there that way any whiny babies who get freaked out about this kind of thing could just leave. I am not sure how I feel about this. When I was younger, I thought the whole idea of a hysterectomy sounded awesome, but now I think it feels terrifying. There are times like now that I am in so much pain I want to count the seconds down, but even hidden in there, I am scared that I am making the wrong choice. I have tried lots of other options and it seems like my symptoms are not only not getting better, but that they are deteriorating faster. I wake up every night since the decision was made in a panic about the surgery and I lay in bed for hours questioning whether my reasons are good enough. I knew I was apprehensive, but I didn't understand how scared I was until my doctor called to book my appointment. I thought maybe she was calling with more test results. As soon as she said she was calling to book my surgery, I began bawling.

Crying? I was actually crying over booking my surgery? I was scared and at the same time I was angry. Angry at myself for crying over something so stupid. Did I not just have surgery 6 months ago and come out perfectly fine? Am I not aware of how severely anemic I am because I cannot control the bleeding that comes with my periods? Do I not hurt so bad that I have to take narcotic pain medication-which I loathe-just to make it through my day? Why on Earth was I crying? I felt like I was one of those silly cartoon characters with the angel and devil debating on her shoulders with the warring that was going on in my head. I have not rectified the two sides, but I am trying to comes to terms with this surgery and as I get closer, you can bet the emotions will get stronger and even more confusing, For now, I just sit here and worry endlessly about what it will be like before, during, and after and I turn to my new amazing friends over at Hystersisters. I honestly do not know if I would be able to breathe in and out without their amazing support and advice.

Accident Prone doesn't even begin to cover it...

I don’t think in any of the posts that I made about myself that I shared the most fundamental aspects of who I am. I am a magnet for accidents. You know when they make new products they have people who test them to see if they can be hurt on them and they pass and then a few months later some schumck gets hurt on it and there is some mass recall? You can bet that 9 out of 10 times, that schmuck was me. If it is even remotely possible to be hurt on something, I can do it.

There are products that are made to help keep people safe. Take for example those rubber texturized mats that are made to go on the bottom of bath tubs and showers.

Those are there to help prevent people from slipping and falling. I used to slip and slid all of the time in my bath tub so I invested in a huge bath mat that covered the entire bottom. There was no way I was going to slip in the tub anymore. WRONG. Not a week after purchasing the mat I was taking a shower and went to turn around and then all of the sudden I was on my back on the floor of the tub and my left elbow felt like it had EXPLODED. I knew as soon as I hit the tub that I had broken my arm. I fell on a no slip shower mat and broke my arm. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? The pain was at least a 11 on the pain scale. 

Unfortunately for me, it was a Sunday night. Not only a Sunday night, but a Sunday night on a holiday weekend and I just happened to work for a company that had a policy that you had to work a full 8 hours before the holiday and a full 8 hour after the holiday weekend in order to receive the holiday pay. Doubly unfortunate was that it was the Thanksgiving holiday and I would have lost pay for Thanksgiving day and the day after as the company was going to pay us for both days. If I went to the doctor, they would have made me miss the following day and even if they didn’t, the cast would have made my boss send me packing. Not to mention that my boss would have been pissed if I called in for a broken arm. She did not like it when someone was gone from work regardless of the reason. So, I made the decision to just suck it up and go to work. 

Let me just tell you that if you work a job that uses your hands and your arms exclusively and the job CANNOT be performed in any way without the full use and range of your arms, do not try to suck it up and go to work. The pain was unbelievable. As soon as I finished my 8 hour shift, I drove myself to the doctor and got my arm put in a cast. To add insult to injury in the most literal sense, my doctor did not believe me when I told him that I slipped and fell on a no slip shower pad and he brought his female nurse in to confront me in a domestic violence intervention. The humiliation was priceless, but that was nothing compared to the orange beam incident. Perhaps I will share that story tomorrow.  

I can be right too

It does not happen often that I am able to say that I am right about something and that my husband was wrong. When it does happen, I relish in it. It is those rare moments that make me feel like I may actually be a little bit smart because I know something that Mr. I Know Everything does not know. Mr. I Know Everything was born and raised in the south. He has not been around snow very much and he thinks his driving skills are amazing and when you add the two together, you just know there is going to be a problem.

So, knowing that there was a storm on the way, I tell Mr. I Know Everything that he needs to not go to work today because it is an hour away in this really crappy weather, but he knows everything (remember the name) and says that he is going to go. So I tell him to at least take my car as it has full coverage and will cover everything in the event of an accident. Mr. I Know Everything says no because he wasn’t going to get in an accident. Uh huh. Can you imagine the surprise when the phone rings not long after he heads out to work and he tells me he has been in an accident? Actually, there was no surprise. I knew it would happen because I saw his reckless abandon driving in the snow only 2 days prior. Flying down the freeway doing 75 in a 60 mile an hour zone when they snow was just falling out of the sky. Yeah, I was not a little bit surprised.

I am glad that my husband is okay and that his vehicle is not too badly damaged, but I can’t help feeling that if he had only listened to me, this would not have happened. The accident is not what bugs me, it is the fact that he felt my suggestions were meaningless when it turns out that sometimes, I am not as dumb as people believe. 

Live like you are dying

It is interesting how much a person changes their perceptions of people and life in general as hey grow up. When I was a kid I never had a second’s hesitation about riding my bike from one end of Yakima to the other. As an adult I look back and think that it was a miracle I was not taken by some sicko. I believed in Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy whole heartedly when I was younger. Now I play those roles for my children. I used to see family as a value that had more worth than gold. Now I see the hypocrisy and the barely hidden animosity that family brings.

I used to love staying with various extended family members when I was younger. I loved watching my dad’s family get together and drink themselves silly while us kids played poker for Ritz crackers and tried to steal sips of alcohol when the adults were not looking. We used to go swimming in the Willamette River (YUCK), riding on my uncle’s boat, and playing on the wave runners. I loved hanging out with my dad’s family because they were so much FUN! I still love hanging out with them I just don’t quite fit in because I cannot hold my liquor at all. That is an unforgivable sin to the Sanchez’! 

My mom’s side of the family was never the "fun" side with the exception of just one of my aunts. Whenever the rest of the family got into a room with one another they always came off as fake. No one really seemed to like each other and no one valued anyone else. I never really liked going to see my mom’s side of the family except to see my cousins and the one “fun” aunt. This aunt was always loving and generous and I enjoyed spending time with her and her kids. She had a house by a lake that was surrounded by woods which everyone knows is the greatest place ever for Washington brats like me. We kids would spend hours at the lake swimming to the dock and diving off, digging our way through the Lilly pads to go fishing, and trying to catch dragonflies. We would lose ourselves in the woods surrounding her house. We searched every bush and plant for edible items such as blackberries and huckleberries and tried not to eat too many of them so that there was enough for my Aunt to make them into a pie.  She would take us to the local rivers and show us how to look for agate stones, coprolite, and craw dads. She was the first person who tried to teach me to cook and she always listened to anything I had to say.

I remember trying to make her dinner once when I was 11 or 12. My sister Melissa, and my Aunt’s future step-daughter got the idea in our heads that we were going to cook for my aunt and her boyfriend so that they could share a romantic dinner. None of us had any idea how to cook, but I thought I could work my way through making spaghetti since I had seen my mom make it a million times. You just add tomato sauce to a pan with a packet of spaghetti seasoning and then boil noodles. How hard could it be?  I don’t know what it tasted like, but I do know that my aunt did not have the special seasoning packet that my mom had so I just opened up spices at random and threw them in with the tomato sauce. I bet it was the worst meal they had ever had, but they ate it up like it was created by a 5 star chef. That was just how my aunt was and I think it is why I was always so drawn to her.

As I got older, I learned that she was no different from the other members of my mom’s family, she was just better at hiding it from the kids. My cousin once told me that she had overheard my aunt telling my uncle that I was such a horrible child for my parents because I had a drug problem and I was an unbelievable slut. When my cousin told me this, I cried. How could she have said these things about me? I had never done drugs and I had never done anything with a boy other than kiss one. Why would she say that about me?  That conversation changed the way I viewed my aunt and it colored every single happy memory I had of her. It was like my mother had said it about me. She was the one person outside of my mom and dad whose opinion I truly valued and that was what she thought of me. So I did what I have always done when I get hurt and I put up walls and pushed her away.

I have never really spoken to my aunt in the 13 years since I was told her true opinion of me. I see her very rarely at family functions when I am forced to go by my mother and I try to pretend to be nice to her though I am sure she can see right through it. That is how our relationship is now. We are fake to one another and ask questions about the other’s life so we can put up this pretense of being civil to one another so that we can pretend that we are a loving and close family. Actually I don’t pretend for those reasons. I pretend to keep my mom happy. I could care less about her or anyone else in that family and I only put up the façade for the sake of my grandmother when she was alive. Now that she has passed I have no trouble letting them know what I truly think of them and the way they treat one another.

It wouldn’t bother me in the slightest to never see or speak to any of them again so imagine my surprise when my mom called 2 days ago to tell me that my aunt has cancer and that it is very advanced and she will be lucky to see Christmas. Initially, I tried to be supportive for my mom who’s last year has been so rough on her I am amazed she gets out of bed every day, but the longer I talked to her the more I found that I was upset. I figured it must because my mom was upset and I have always been WAY TOO empathetic for my own good. The more I thought about it the more I realized I was not upset because my mother was; I was upset because I felt like a piece of my childhood was being taken away from me. I have not hardly spoken to this aunt in more than a decade yet I hear she is dying and I feel like that 15 year old girl whose cousin told her that her aunt cannot stand her and thinks she is a drug addicted slut. I felt all of the pain of that come back like it was happening again. I may not care about the person she is now, but I still care about the person I thought she was back then and it taught me that life is too short to hold on to grudges and anger. I let one of the best relationships I had turn to hate because of her gossip. I should have confronted her about it and set the record straight. I should have forgiven her long ago instead of waiting to hear that she was dying to do so because now it seems empty and fake just like we have been to one another.

From this day one I will try to live my life like I was dying. I want to love more, hate less, anger slower, forgive quickly and live my life every single day like it may be my last because you never know when it will be. I don’t want to find myself in this situation again where someone is dying and it takes the reality of that fact to shine light on my hardheaded stubbornness and to see that it was nothing but a waste. I do not do many things well or for long periods of time with the exception of holding a grudge. I think it is time to change that from a grudge to forgiveness.

The power of positive thinking

Growing up my mom always told me to have a positive outlook about things. Whenever I was sick she would tell me to tell myself I was not sick and that I would get better soon. To be honest, she irritated me every time she said things like that because no one could get better simply because they believed they would. It was a complete waste of time to even try, but I indulged her. Kinda. I never felt any better after my foo-foo I feel great sessions so I never put any stock into the idea, but then again I never really tried to believe in it. I had my mind made up before I even started. I was recently introduced to a new way of thinking that if you think good and happy things, good and happy things will happen to you. I am going to put myself into this idea and give it a go and see if it makes a difference in my life. The first thing I intend to do is remember the things I have in my life rather than what I don’t have. I have an amazing husband who loves me. 4 kids who are beautiful, healthy, and full of life, a beautiful car that I absolutely love that my wonderful husband bought me, and I am about to move in to a gorgeous house that is going to be my first home. When I take a look back at things I do not understand why I am negative about so many things because my life is pretty darn great when I think about it. 

It's all about me

I have given small bits of insight into my world through the blogs I have shared, but there are a few things that I have been told “define” the real me and I thought I would share them with everyone.

I love drinking Pepsi. I don’t care for any other pop with the very occasional Coke-a-Cola thrown in. I probably drink 2, sometimes 3 cans of Pepsi every single day.

I have a very freaky obsession with numbers and I always look for patterns in them. I do it with every single number I come across and I cannot move on to anything else until I have found a pattern or have been able to reduce the number to a single digit by adding each number up until there is only one. 8789=32=5. If for some reason I cannot do it, it literally can ruin my entire day.

I am an absolute slob. If it was not for my husband, I could very possibly see myself being one of those people on Hoarders.

I LOVE strawberry Skittles. I like all the rest of them (except grape, BLEH), but I love the red ones. I wish they made bags of only red. When I eat my Skittles they can under no circumstances (JESSICA!!!!) be mixed with other colors and they can only be eaten in reverse rainbow order. Purple, green, yellow, orange, and then red.

I love reduced fat original Pringles. I currently have 5 jars in my cabinet and that is only because I finished off a jar yesterday or there would have been 6.

Almost every single day, I eat a burned Totinos Combination flavor pizza. Yes the burning is intentional. I like it burned and yes it is unbelievably disgusting that I eat one almost every day. Well more like half of one. Trouble always eats about 1/4 – 1/2 and Pooka eats what is left of the half Trouble didn’t finish.

I never complete anything I start.

I have about a million trains of thought in my head and the damn trains always jump track and very rarely ever find their way back to their original track.  

I LOVE socks. LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE them. I currently have 73 pairs of socks and that is only because I threw out about 25 pairs a month or two ago.

My nose is chronically cold, as are my fingers, toes, and behind. I have circulation problems. (THANKS DAD!)

I love Grey’s Anatomy and other than the complete whoring around she did, I identify with the lead character more than any other character on any TV show ever.  

And…

Whenever I listen to music or the TV, the volume must be set to an even number unless the even number is immediately before or after a number ending in 5 an then it can only be set to the 5. For example, radio volume can only be set to 2 5 8 10 12 15 18 20 22 25. Above 25, however, volume numbers can only be divisible by 5. 25, 30, 35, 40…. I would rather turn the radio off than lesten to the volume set to a number that is not one listed above.  

Get over it!

I am neurotic. There is no need to sugar coat it or pretend otherwise. I am not trying to get people to jump on here and pump up my confidence by saying I am not neurotic or anything like that I am just making a blunt statement so that I can make people see what it is like to be me. I have been cover to cover on the DSM IV (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) and I cannot find any that fit me exactly. There are several of them that come close, but none that I meet all of the diagnostic criteria on. Well I take that back, I do meet the criteria for ADHD, but that has nothing to do with the crazy that I feel I live with. I wish there was a definable diagnosis so that when people say to me that I need to let things go or stop stressing all of the time, I could just tell them that I have blah blah blah and it makes it very hard to just stop worrying or obsessing.

Trust me; I do not want to do the things I do. I would love to get upsetting news and be plagued by it for an hour and then move on. It would be a gift to handle stress the way normal people do, but I am not normal. I can take normal levels of stress and be okay for the most part depending on what the stressful situation is. If I feel I have the slightest sense of control over the issue, I do not take it into me like a poison. If, however, I cannot control the outcome of whatever I am stressed about, the stress fills me with a dread so crippling, it takes all of my energy to function.

When the stress gets bad there is a process that I go through. The very first thing is that my heart speeds up and my heart is not the strongest. Then the worrying sets in. I obsess over every single tiny detail of something until I am entirely consumed with it. I have no control over this and it is the one aspect of dealing with stress that I hate the most. From there, the nerves kick in and every little thing sets me on edge. After that the nausea takes over and I get so worked up and so sick that I am unable to eat or drink. If the stress is severe enough I can go for days with only a few teaspoons of something to drink and I can go for days and weeks with only eating a bite of food a day. It usually isn’t until the dehydration has gotten so bad that I am disoriented that I usually realize that it has been 2-3 days without more than a sip or two of water. It is about that point I realize that I am so tense; I am in danger of snapping.

As I said earlier, I am not saying these things for sympathy. I am saying them in hopes that people may understand just a tiny bit what it is like to be me. When I get stressed out it is okay to tell me to take a deep breath and try to relax, but telling me to get over it, let it go, move on, forget about it, stop obsessing, etc. does not help me, it makes it worse. I know people are just trying to help, but you can help me more by saying you support me and are here for me. Telling me I am overreacting only makes me feel bad which starts the cycle all over again.