Two Years...

(For ease of reference, "mom" and "dad" referred to in this posting are Lona's biological parents.)

Today is the two year anniversary of dad's death.

I read back over all the posts I made over the last two years about mourning and his illness and everything. One line stuck out at me. I wrote in an earlier post, "A year from now, this house won't even be recognizable." It took two years, but that's happened. With this latest rearranging of the house, the conversion of the former living/dining room into a full time office with five desks, the den (dad's former office, and after that Kata's for awhile) into the living room, and me and Lona taking the bed that used to belong to mom and dad and moving into the front bedroom - what was formerly Lona and Claudia's office while the rest of us already were in the living room.

If dad were to walk around this house physically today, it would drive him nuts. He wouldn't know where anything is, and there are a couple of places were egress (one of his big things) is severely limited.  My thoughts have been drifting to him more and more as we've come up on this anniversary, and earlier today the only way I could stop reliving that day two years ago was to allow one of my bonds to be in control while I was out with Lona. But that only stopped the grief from weighing down my body - my mind is still swimming.

In this new configuration, physically, I'm actually the closest to dad. His urn is in the breakfront directly behind me, with the urns of Squeak, Flake, and AJ, our kitties that have likewise passed on. But one thing that hasn't changed over the two years is that my feeling of safety and that he's still somewhere in the house hasn't gone away.

A couple of weeks ago, Lona put a kleenex down on an empty part of her desk. She left her desk. She came back. She moved the kleenex - and underneath it was a pen with the Marriot hotels logo on it. It hadn't been there before. In fact, we hadn't SEEN any of the Marriot pens for a long time before this happened. Dad used to work at a Marriot, years before I met him, you see...and he brought home quite a few of their pens in the years his band played there. It's little things like that, that let us know that dad's still around and wants us to KNOW he still is. It's odd things like that, that make me feel safe still.

It is true, I suppose, that time heals all wounds. This year has been thankfully free of "a year ago, dad....", which haunted me for the first year after he died. Knowing we've now been through two years without him and we're all still here, and we're all still ok, does make things a bit easier. But I still laid awake last night at 2am, remembering dad saying he couldn't breathe...Mom knocking on our bedroom door and saying she was calling an ambulance...The ride to the hospital, the interminable waiting...Dad's shallow snoring....and the presence of Death, which still makes my heart constrict and my blood chill when I think of it.

The days and weeks following are a blur now. Reading over my past journals I was surprised how much I'd written about then that I didn't remember now. I'd forgotten that when dad's urn first came home, he sat on the dining table for three days, and I did my homework and ate with him. I remembered that I'd been the one to put him into the breakfront, though. Still, that night keeps coming back in horrible clarity today...and I just can't shake the sadness.

I cried this morning over something stupid. And it wasn't the tears stinging my eyes feeling that I get sometimes and shrug off...I had trouble fighting this off without sobbing aloud. And I realized as I was doing it that it wasn't just about what had happened - it was a grief release as well. Two years later, and while I can identify and tell you about how I've gone through all the stages of mourning, I can also tell you that just because you've reached acceptance doesn't mean you won't still cry.

I miss you, dad. I'll probably always miss you. Thanks for sticking around.

I am Annoyed - at my own Eye...

But let me explain.

A few years ago, I had an eye infection in my right eye. It was, to say the least, disturbing. It resulted in that eye being closed a lot of the time, and me having to put drops in it (I don't like eye drops at the BEST of times), and I came out of it with what my optometrist says is permenant scarring on my cornea.

The result of this is that sometimes my eye works just fine, but other times...like when it's hot, or when I slept oddly the night before, or when venus and mars decide they don't like me, or whatever...I'll wake up and put my glasses on only to notice that I feel...lopsided.

The first time I noticed the lopsidedness, I thought I'd somehow lost the lense out of the right side of my glasses. The difference in my vision is that stark. There's almost no difference between how I see the world through my right eye without my glasses, and how it looks with my glasses on when I'm having what I've come to think of as a "blur attack." A quick tap of my finger proved that the glass was still there and hadn't somehow leaped from my frames (inside their glasses case) in the middle of the night. So the next thing I did was go in the bathroom and wash out my eye (another thing I strongly dislike doing - the pattern here is that I don't like things touching my eyes, thank you very much), which would usually fix this for awhile when I was in the worst part of the eye infection.

Washed my eye out, put my glasses back on...nope, still looked as if I didn't have a lense on the right side. I took the glasses off and leaned in close to the mirror to try and see if there was something in my eye....Nope, nothing. No visible evidence of why it was blurry.

I thought it might clear up, so I worked around it for a day or so. The down sides of this quickly became apparent. It started with a dull throbbing centered behind my right eye that eventually evolved into the feeling like my eye socket was rocking out to some rave I couldn't hear. I needed to be able to keep working, so I did what most people in my situation would do - I closed the eye, kept it closed, and continued working with just my left eye.

The headache eventually faded to a dull throb, then left entirely with the addition of some pain medication. However, every time I opened my eye, it was still blurry. So I closed it again. This was the beginning of several months in which I would keep my eye open as long as I could stand it every day, and then close it. Some days were worse than others. Then, one morning, just as suddenly as I'd woken up with the blurriness in the first place, it was just gone. I still have no idea what happened. But I could see normally, and there was no more headache. I was thrilled.

Until I noticed that my right eye seemed to have developed a mind of it's own in all that time it was closed.

All that time when I wasn't using my eye, it got lazy. Literally. I'd be working, both eyes open, and suddenly notice that everything in my vision had gone weird - my right eye was crossed, my left eye was still focused on what I was doing. Or sometimes I'd become aware that my eye had drifted off to the right somewhere, and it took a lot of work for me to focus the right eye back where it was supposed to be.

Genetically, I'm prone to lazy eye. My dad had to have surgery for it before I was born - and as I mentioned earlier, I hate the idea of anything going in my eye. I sure was NOT going to be happy if I had to have SURGERY on my EYE. So I began the painful process of forcing my eye to focus properly again. I had to monitor it very closely. And for quite a few weeks, I would keep getting eyestrain headaches after I'd been up for about five or six hours. Dull ache behind my eye as I worked muscles that had been allowed to atrophy over the previous months - nothing like the pounding rave that the blurriness had caused. I delt with it, though - like you do when retraining any muscle that's lost functionality for whatever reason. Eventually, the headaches stopped, and my eyes behaved normally and worked together like they were supposed to.

A few months later, I woke up with a blurry right eye again. This time it was gone in a few days. The next time it came back, it didn't even last a whole day - the next time it took a week or so to return to normal. It became clear that this blurriness thing was an intermittent problem that I would probably be dealing with for the rest of my life - a result of the scars on my cornea from the infection, perhaps. Annoying, but I'd learned how to deal with it, right? Just close my eye until it goes away.

The first time the blurriness lasted more than a couple of days, though, I started to recognize the subtle tug of my closed eye - it was trying to drift again. I forced it to move with my other eye - but without the eye open to be sure I was focusing on the same place as my left eye, I couldn't be sure I was keeping it trained properly. So, once again, I started keeping the eye open and trying to work through the blurriness. This resulted in my old friend, the pounding rave, having a return engagement in my eye socket by the third day. Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow...

But then, eventually, I would wake up and the blurriness would be gone again. It was a constant cycle. Recently, I've gone the longest I've GONE since this started happening without a blur attack. Several months, actually most of this year. The last attack I remember was in late January, so it's been almost six months.

Which brings me to the reason for my annoyance and this post today. See, I woke up this morning to a blur attack - one of the worst since the actual eye infection. I tried closing my eye, but it's been so long since I've schooled my eye muscles that I felt my eye start drifting almost immediately. So I snapped it back open again. I need my depth perception. I need my eyes. I can't work on art, I'm having a lot of trouble reading and writing (primary focuses of my JOB), and even looking at my computer screen for something like WoW on my lunch break gets painful quickly.

I can already feel the beginnings of the rave starting up around my eye, and this is only the first day of the attack. I hope it's the last, but for right now I'm stuck in the absurd position of being very annoyed and angry at my own eye. Yes, I understand, you had an infection. Yes, I know you carry scars - I have scars all over my body from various things. You are part of me, eye. Deal with it. Deal with it without having a freaking "oontz-oontz-oontz" RAVE in my EYE SOCKET.

I feel like an old guy telling annoying kids to get off my lawn, except that I'm talking to a piece of my own anatomy. That's all. Just needed to vent about that...Now I have to go take some pain medication and try to get through the rest of the work day without banging into walls from lack of depth perception and/or snapping at people because my head feels like there's a frat party going on in my eye.

Quiet down in there!

In Recovery

Sorry I've been essentially silent the last few weeks. We did a serious reorganization of the entire house, moving all desks into a central office area, making the former den into an actual living room that means that people don't have to watch TV in the middle of what amounts to two other people's office space, and there are actual doors that can be closed off to separate the living area of the house from the working area of the house.

Now this does put us at a bit of a disadvantage of that when any of us are on the phone for business or whatever, anyone can hear it. Also that all of us have tendency to talk to ourselves and our computers and, in some cases, our characters, while working. This can result in literally five different conversations going on in the same room at the same time at various volume levels, on top of calling out across the room to each other. So it can get kind of noisy. I have my own window now, though, with a lovely view of the woody part of our front yard, and I get to watch squirrels when I don't have anything else to do.

Which, admittedly, is not often.

Lona and I have the front bedroom now, filled with our bookcases, a big overstuffed chair, and our california king sized bed (oh so very comfy), Nyx has her own room now - the one the 3 of us used to share. So now there is a definite line of demarkation and everyone has their own little territories, which I admit that the wolf in me appreciates very much.

But, the reason that the title of this post is "in recovery," is that in the midst of all this moving, I started getting sick. But this was not a normal cold. This was not a "push through what we're doing and then sleep for the next few days and be fine" cold like I've had many other times....This was a chest cold, and a real pain of one, too. For the first few days after the move I couldn't sleep lying down....or sitting up. I had to prop myself on the edge of the recliner in the living room, rocked forward, legs crossed indian style under me, because it was the one position in which I could breathe for a few minutes in between chest-wracking coughs.

My nose never got stuffed up, but I got what had to have been a fever of over 100 that came and went over several days while I coughed and my chest rattled with every breath. Nyx sat up with me one night and we watched Avatar in the middle of the night - it was on. :P So we watched it. I appreciated the company, but I wasn't doing all that well. I only vaguely remember that night now, and it was less than a week ago.

I dosed constantly on naturopathics, as well as Nyquil and Dayquil and Mucinex, trying to rid myself of the stuff that was filling my chest. I fought to breathe, and ended up having to use my asthma inhaler when the coughing and choking would set off an exertion asthma attack on top of my already fighting to breathe. There were several times over the week or so that I was this sick that I considered asking to be driven to the emergency room...but my fear of hospitals and my dislike of the crap they put people through won out, and I worked through it.

Even now, I'm still coughing and my chest still rattles a bit when I breathe. I wake up in the middle of the night and have to sit up very quickly and cough in order to breathe, and for some reason I can't lie on my right side or my stomach without coughing, but I'm fairly ok on my left side.  However, the fever is long gone and my body is back to working mostly the way it's supposed to. I lost several pounds over the week I was sick just by virtue of not eating regularly. Or...at all, really. I was kind of living off pills and water.

I'm hoping I can keep the weight off - every little bit helps. If I wasn't so heavy I wouldn't have so many other health problems, so my focus is currently on my health. I want to get up to riding my bike regularly, and get myself in a  better physical place. If nothing else, this chest cold nightmare just epitomized all the reasons I need to be healthy. So here I go, once again, trying to take care of myself. Go me. :P

But yes, for now, I'm still technically in recovery from the chest cold, and I'm dealing with exhaustion as I recover from what I'm starting to think was mild pneumonia rather than a simple chest cold - I got it much worse than Lona did, and we got sick at the same time. She's barely coughing now, and I'm still coughing regularly enough that movies have to be paused to wait for me to recover.   ( - . - )  It's frustrating, and annoying, and makes me feel rather useless...add to this that my car has died and I don't have the funds to fix it at the moment, and I start feeling very trapped. By my body, by my lack of car and therefore ability to help the house....It hasn't really been an easy couple of weeks.

However, I refuse to lose my positive. Things will get better - I KNOW they will. I just have to let it happen. And with that, I leave you until my next update...or until I have the time and focus to actually write out something meaningful. :P