Positive! I promised positive thinking!

How many pizza bagels should I plan to eat? Last time I had them I ate five. I’d planned for four, and then laughed at myself when they were gone, and admitted I wanted another one. By which I mean, I asked G to make me another one. Heh.

“You’ll get your body back,” a friend reminded me the other day, when I was howling about my helplessness and about how I’m never going to be able to do anything, ever. My body back? What do you mean? What body? Oh, this? This bloated, painful, lumbering thing that occasionally twitches and jumps so as to remind me that something is growing in there?

“No offense to God or anything,” I’ve been known to say, “but this is a very poorly designed system.” In my opinion, of course.

Know what else my friend told me (this is a friend I don’t speak to often enough, but who always knows everything)? That I shouldn’t berate myself for my inability to be a bulldog with the DOE (speaking of bloated, painful, poorly designed systems…) when it comes to advocating for R. That being a bulldog doesn’t come naturally to me, and I shouldn’t feel like it should suddenly be easy when the party in question is an unhelpful stranger who is part of a horrible huge bureaucracy whose inefficiency borders on surreal, and who happens to hold my daughter’s future/happiness/whatever in its hands.

YEAH! THAT’S RIGHT! I DON’T HAVE TO MAGICALLY TURN INTO A BULLDOG, GOSHDARN IT! AND I CAN USE EMAIL IF I WANT TO! THERE’S NO LAW THAT SAYS I HAVE TO USE THE PHONE!

It sort of makes me giggle when I resend an email that I just sent the day before. I usually give the maniacs around 24 hours to respond, and then I resend it, with an edited subject line (”second email”), and a little intro that says politely “I am resending the email I sent yesterday, below. Looking forward to your response.” Pain in the bloated, lumbering hindquarters, I am, but so far, I don’t care. I’ll probably care the first time I get snapped at, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Of course, I sent an email Thursday, and resent it today (Monday), and the jerk still hasn’t responded. I’m going to have to bulldog it eventually, I suppose. You answer this email, or I’ll… send it again! Be gone, or I shall taunt you a second time! Which comedian was it who mocked the Scotland Yard for not carrying guns? Stop! Or I’ll… say stop again!

How many times have I announced on this blog that denial is a bad idea and that it doesn’t work? Has the message sunk in with you yet? Because it hasn’t sunk in with me. There I am, in denial, not even realizing I’m in denial — because it’s denial, see — when suddenly I find myself sitting in my parked car outside Trader Joe’s, crying myself into unconsciousness while the clock ticks happily by. Um, Miriam? You need to get home. Babysitter Allison has to leave, G has to make a bunch of stops and the girls have to be picked up. But I can’t go home; I’m busy crying. Also swearing, out loud, at God.

Have you hit a low point when you start swearing at God? I mean super-swearing. Yes, use your imagination; that is what I mean by swearing. And when I say “at” God, I mean at God. I do not mean to God. I mean swearing at God, spitting out bile as if God was the umpire who made the Cardinals lose the ‘87 World Series. (Some might say He was, but those people are usually Twins fans.) I might have thought the swearing at God was the low point — when rather un-Orthodox (never mind un-rabbi’s wife) phrases were coursing through my head at God during last month’s TIA — but I found a lower point, I think, which is when I suddenly discovered I was threatening God.

???

Hey God! Stop, or I’ll… say stop again!

Um, hello? How exactly does a human being threaten God? This isn’t ancient Greece, you know. It’s not like I can say I’m going to withhold the hecatombs (I learned the word “hecatombs” back when I used to be in graduate school). But there I was nevertheless, looking at some drawings R had made, and suddenly I heard myself muttering something at God that started with the words “You’d better…”

??? Color me perplexed. What exactly is that supposed to mean, when directed towards… um… the Lord, Creator of heaven and earth? And creator of my daughter, and of strep pneumococcal strain number whatever-the-heck-it-was? You know they vaccinate for that strain now? Of course, we don’t know for sure which one it was, since the culture got lost between the stupid moron hospital and the other stupid moron hospital mailroom (I do not call the second hospital “stupid moron”), but our pediatrician buddies say there’s a “most likely candidate.” So, yippee. They vaccinate for it, now. Thanks. That’s swell. So my currently gestating child will not get that particular type of Psycho Evil Pneumonia From Hell, nor will it have that kind of stroke. Excellent.

Of course, it could die from something else. Or almost die, rather. Twice, three times, four times… depends how you measure. Bleeping stuff was out of R’s body for eight months, and it still managed to give her a stroke. Did I ever explain that? Did I ever blog about what Dr. SuperStroke thinks happened? Well, she thinks that when R had the Psycho Evil Pneumonia From Hell, it might also have given her meningitis, which was not tested for at the time, and the meningitis is what kicked her internal carotid artery (psst: that particular artery is located inside one’s brain) into starting to narrow. Or, since we do know that the Big Bad Pneumococcal entered her bloodstream, and she did have pericarditis, perhaps a clot formed in her heart and traveled to her brain (you know, her brain), and that is what caused the inflammation and the narrowing. We’ll never know for sure, but it doesn’t much matter, does it. The point is, something whacked her arteries, and then she had a stroke. Or three. TIAs are like little itty bitty strokes, and she had two of those. So far. She could be having another one, or another stroke, right now, of course. Hey God, you’d better….

Heh.

The really funny thing was, I swore in the same sentence. As in, my threat to God not only seemed to think it was threatening God, but it also contained a very, very, very bad word. So, I swore, and threatened God at the same time. Kiddush!

What happened, exactly? It’s not like I wasn’t angry before the most recent TIA. But I wasn’t just waxing fluffy, either, when I said all those times that I was so overwhelmingly grateful to God. I was. It was real. There was anger and horrible pain, etc., too, but my primary God-related reaction was “Thank you.” Because there was, and is, so much to be grateful for. I know how easily it could have been much, much worse, every time. But last month, it somehow all flipped, and suddenly all I can do is seethe and swear. Maybe it’s the confluence of pregnancy symptoms, and TIA — again, when she hadn’t had anything in so long — plus major DOE jackdonkeys making our lives absurdly more difficult than necessary. Maybe it’s all the excruciating ways in which she’s different, and how pronounced it’s been. Maybe it’s the stroke anniversary passing. G and I were both sorta basket cases that week. Heh. Maybe it’s all of the above. But dang, I’ve been mad. And I’ve been crying in parking lots, and I’ve been swearing and threatening God.

Sigh.

Speaking of emails that don’t get answered, I’m taking my MA exam this week (ha), and I emailed my professor to ask how he recommends I spend the next few days. Should I reread this, or this? Anything in particular he suggests I focus on? He hasn’t responded yet. Feh. Having spent many years dealing with irritating students, I try very hard not to be one myself, but I don’t think this email puts me in that category. I’d say it’s just shy of irritating student. And yet he does not respond. In the meantime, I have three books here with me on the couch, and you mark my words, I’m going to open at least one of them. Don’t try to stop me. Or I’ll say stop again.

Tags: Dept of Ed, Pregnancy, Stroke