Lousy, lousy day

Well. Today sucked. Recording for posterity:

I had an ultrasound and a barium swallow test, both booked back in November. So I had to miss the huge all-hands meeting where they said they would talk about the launch of my site. Always lovely when (yesterday) you have to send your regrets to the head dude.

The tests were at East General, which is where Emily died. I keep saying I will avoid that hospital, but it’s where my doctor and her specialist network mostly work out of. Noah had his hip ultrasound there and I went there for my MRI. So maybe I thought I would be okay this time.

I was very not okay. The staff were really good. The U/S tech found every sore spot in my throat by looking (which means, obviously, it is not in my head, if he can see them on the screen) and asked good questions. Unfortunately, the ultrasound test positioned me so that I was mostly staring at some emergency buttons on the wall.

Code blue buttons. Like the one the nurse pressed when Emily came out – well, blue.

Waiting for the barium swallow I was in a corridor directly under obstetrics, so the view I had when I was in labour, except down a bit. That was not pleasant. And then I got to go for a ride on the reclining table, which set Lynn off.

[I think I will never really get over the trauma around Emily's birth. But to add old abuse trauma is coals on the fire.]

Anyways, I sort of shook that off. Got home, turned on the computer. I had not checked my site because I had checked it (as best one can with my current CMS) the day before. So what greets me on the homepage, at 10:30 am?

A huge, massive broken image. During the all-hands meeting during which everyone would presumably be looking at my website. Like, the entire company here in this city.

I freaked. I do have an assistant who should have been looking, but ultimately it’s my responsibility. After some investigating we found she had made one minor change yesterday which had screwed the thing up (this is a very unforgiving sort of system that way). So I waited to hear whether I was going to have a job, pretty much.

They didn’t present on my site at the meeting. I am hoping this is not because someone checked the site before, but I haven’t heard anything yet so – we’ll see. My assistant also swore up and down that it was working when she came in and checked at the start of the day, but I suspect that (even though I was not yelling at her) she actually hadn’t checked. I hadn’t either, so. I was just focused on getting through the medical tests.

I’m hoping I got off easy.

By the way, the number of times the homepage has displayed incorrectly since July 16? Twice, including today. Sigh.

The thing is, though, that I lost it. I really lost it; I was so upset and anxious during that hour waiting for the meeting to end so I could find out what happened (I was working from home) that I felt like I was imploding. And that is not good. At the end of the day, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. (Ha there’s a bad combination of clichees.) It might have been career-killing, but career is just one part of one’s life.

But no. This is what I felt. All through the stuff with Emily, even when she was dying; even during the funeral, I never really felt picked on. I mean that’s a funny way to word it, but I never felt it was the punishment of an angry god. I might have thought God sucked ass and the universe was terrible, but I never felt like I, personally, was getting shit. Maybe because Carl was too.

But today, that feeling came up in a great, wide ocean of drowning despair and anxiety. I literally could not move anything but my fingers. I thought I would honestly die just from the terror and sort of self-hatred or whatever.

I guess it makes sense how that happens but at the time I just thought that this missing image on the screen was going to end everything. It was horrible. If every day were like that, I would have to get on meds to sort it out. Fortunately, it got better.

I should be a bit better with the Emily cycle (sliding into March) but this year it burns. Probably because I have been sick, work is stressful, and I do think there is something to my doctor’s thought that Noah is at an age where things happened to us. Also, my trust level in the medical system: 0. When I get negative test results I basically assume they are wrong and that I’ll end up dying and then they’ll figure it out. Which is silly. I am not dying.

I might need therapy to sort this out, which is a pretty huge thought right now.