Shreds of focus and a revolutionary thought
Originally published at magependragon.co.za .
Friday - 1 February 2013
Short hot night for me. Not long after I'd finally drifted off in the combined heat of an overly warm night and an unwanted fever, the alarm rang waking me for my morning treatment pills. It rings at 06h00 and there are some nights/mornings when I wonder if I have reached that insomniacs threshold where it would actually better to continue to not sleep than it would be to actually fall asleep. Nevertheless, my sleeping patterns are falling more and even more out of whack with the heat, the meds, the side-effects and my own stubborn nature. I took the pills and this time fell straight back asleep.
The next alarm is 08h00. More pills and up to feed the cat. Dearest TamTams, sweet sweet TamTams has actually been known to let me sleep as late as 09h30 before beginning her yowls of "Feed me!" This was not one of those mornings. I drank my pills and rolled over trying for a few more moments slumber. Perhaps she'd come back to bed. It wasn't happening, so like a good little dutiful slave, I headed for the kitchen to feed Madam TamTams, who promptly turned her nose up at the food offered and disappeared back to bed to sleep. Go figure!
After scrambling around for some food for myself so I could take my morning ration of pain pills (the CataflamD demands eating), last night's ration already wearing off as my joints flexed and curled, each time a little more painfully, I headed for my home office and the mountain of disability claim forms there to be completed. I've finally received all the various doctors' reports, life assurance cover policies and other required info. Today I would conquer this mountain, get what needs to be certified certified and drop the whole lot off with HR at the office.
While all the emailed medical reports were printing, I sat completing the forms. The same thing is asked in four different ways on three different forms and none of the forms want the information in the same order. The guys who put these together must get a good chuckle any time some poor fool needs to complete and submit them. I wasn't laughing. I typed up the list of my hospital admissions (3 in 3 months - how is that even real?) Next was the list of doctors (or 'gists' as I'm now calling my growing collection) with as much of their details as I have. While typing all this up, I did the list of my current medications. Not required for the claim documents but good to have done anyway.
Mom had come in just as I was getting started with all this. We were meant to go across to the bank at 9-ish to get the docs signed by a commissioner of oaths. I was far from ready but did scramble to put some clothes on in case I finished before she came again later as she was also running late. She just left me working when she came through the next time, knowing that disturbing me might break what little focus I had managed to patch together to get this task done and that would the end of things for today.
I sat back from the paperwork and feeling dizzy. Tummy grumbling, I stumbled through to make some sandwiches and take another pain pill. Just a single Tramacet this time, just to keep the edge off without zoning me out. It's a fine line and I have often nudged over it and lost half a day to the fuzz on the other side.
Using Bobby-pins for paper-clips I bundled up all the paperwork, still needing to copy a stack of reports we already had and that weren't sent through again. I was nearly finished - both the paperwork and the few strands of focus I'd been able to cling to the whole morning. I finished getting dressed and went nex tdoor to get mom moving and make the final copies needed.
She drove us through to the police station where a polite Warrant Officer stamped and signed the copy of my ID and the Statement of Existence (basically that I'm an alive person, not a dead/undead/living-dead/immortal one. Yip, lawsuit ready to happen there should anyone decide to come out of their coffin/crypt and want to claim disability! *grin*)
I got mom to drop me at work and come fetch me when she was finished at the nursery. I didn't want to hang around much today, just in and out and over with this whole claims paperwork nonsense. I dropped the bundle off with Alicia, the HR chic, and chatted briefly, before heading off to chat to people while she scanned and checked the pile of paper. As always, everyone was glad to see me alive and kicking. I wish there were more of them to see though. It might just have been me but the office looked very tumble-weedy today, even for a sunny Friday afternoon. Did half the staff simply not come back from lunch? Alicia brought the original docs through to me just as mom pinged saying that she was waiting downstairs. The claim paperwork task complete, I departed.
Back home, I spent a long time on the phone with my dear friend Jem, the medical biology guy. He's very glad to hear that the mole removed was benign although he could also understand why it might have been difficult to say so at first. He's even happier about the news that my tumour has shrunk so considerably. I still feel so flat when I describe it though. I'm happy about it but somehow I'm also not happy. He understands. He's also thinking of adopting a cat or two. I suggested a tabby girl cat. We laughed.
The end of our call was interrupted by my mother, standing at the door to my flat with an enormous ginger and white cat in her arms, saying something about it being a stray and needing to keep it in my flat for a bit. Turns out the stray cat is a lost cat and I would only be storing him (yes, an non-neutered tomcat, when will people learn?) until T&H got back from the beach. I gave her the "O'rly?" look but she was already half into the flat with him so I grabbed TamTams, then my washing and shoved them into my bedroom so this strange cat could be locked into my spare room. All this huge cat wanted to do was hide. He has ninja skills when it comes to hiding too because despite the size of him, it had taken T and my mom nearly half an hour to find him in mom's garage in the first place. Anyway, he was carted off as promised and mom checked to make sure he hadn't sprayed.
TamTams was equally as unimpressed with dinner as she had been with breakfast. She looked up at me with such pretty eyes, yet all I could think was "Eat it or starve, cat!" I took my evening treatment pills and tried to ignore her pained looks until dad arrived home with Nandos for supper.
While we were eating, I made a comment about how the new Nandos looks a lot more like the UK ones do. He corrected me saying its the same one from near the MacDonalds, just moved here. I agreed with him and tried again to explain that it looked different. Apparently the old one had inside seating with the whole restaurant feeling too. Trying to get keep my comment from being "translated" incorrectly, I compare the old one to the KFC next to the new one. "But it's not a KFC, it's a Nandos" was the reply so I gave up. Mom tried to help, things continued to go wrong and I put an end to it. I just didn't have the energy left to reword my comment fifteen different ways simply to be told that I'm wrong and have no idea what I'm talking about.
When the UV film was fitted to the window of my home office, I could move my writing stuff back in and do more in there without the issue of the late afternoon sun, instead of writing from the couch in the lounge. The problem though was the desk. I love my desk but I'm a little iffy about things like straight edges and objects lining up. Desk has a glass top and a metal frame. At some point something got twisted some where and the front of the desk was no longer square. This gave me the zig and added to the couch-based writing.
Requesting parental assistance, dad came and did his thing: measuring, re-measuring, twisting the frame back into where it was meant to be and finally the desk was straight across the front. It's no longer parallel to the wall which gives me a different kind of zig but that can be fixed tomorrow when we will also fit thin foam to the glass tops for nice wrist cushions and an extended mouse pad. Dad has volunteered to assist with this project.
After all this I managed to write 2 blog posts off the backlog and this one. Most blog posts here are often written a month after the events took place. This becomes worse when I don't manage to write for a few days due to side-effects taking over my life. I came to the amazing conclusion tonight though that if I write the blog post for today (or yesterday) and save it, then went on to chipping away at the backlog by the time I reached this day in the backlog, the words would already be written and I could just post them along with all the other saved posts. Voila! The blog would suddenly be completely up to date. This makes me happy, a little angry at myself for not thinking of this sooner but mostly happy because it means that at some point I will actually catch up and wont constantly be chasing my tail. This might result in longer entries though as it's easier to remember what happened the day or the day after it happened, than to remember it 4 weeks down the line again.