Tag Archives: personal

November 23, 2018 · 1:26 pm

Help for my family…

This is Bailey.

Bailey is approximately 5 years old, and lately she has barely been eating or grooming herself and we don’t know why.

She has moderately severe mats in her fur around her belly where she doesn’t let us pet or groom her. She has lost a little weight, she is hungry enough to beg (very uncharacteristically, because she’s never been the sort of cat who does that) when we’re eating something fragrant, but she ignores the dry food we give her.

We’ve had to start giving her canned food instead, and still she barely eats any of that. She hasn’t vomiting back up what she attempts to eat; she just. isn’t. eating. The other night she vomited up some white foam, which suggests that her stomach was completely empty. Not even bile.

We suspect it’s a dental issue, possibly a tooth abscess. We do know she has a tartar issue we’ve been procrastinating on addressing for financial reasons. We need to get her teeth cleaned and get dental x-rays. That will cost us about $400-$500. We took her in for an exam and bloodwork today. That was another $300. Hopefully that $700-$800 in vet expenses will be the end of this issue and no further treatment will be needed.

Christmas is coming up and it was already going to be a very lean holiday for us. My sister was recently diagnosed with a brain tumor; she’s going to be meeting with her neurosurgeon this week, and depending on how much support she needs during her treatment and recovery, I may be required to travel back home and help take care of her, which will be another expense we just can’t afford.

I don’t like doing this. I’ve never asked for money before, but I don’t see how we’re going to get through the next couple months with all of this going on, unless we let Bailey’s care go unaddressed.

I know it’s the holidays, and things are tight for everyone. But please, if you can, maybe contribute a little to my Ko-Fi account to help us get Bailey the care she needs?

Thank you.

UPDATE:

I scanned in the receipt for the exam and bloodwork on Friday, and the estimate for the dental work and x-rays.

Bailey 11-24 cropped

The Pet Health Club membership made the exam free and saved us 10% on the bloodwork (so an $85 savings) and will also give us a discount on the dental work that isn’t reflected in the estimate. So ultimately the total will be less with the membership than without.

Bailey Estimate

This is the estimate for the dental work and x-rays. The handwritten $22.52 is for brushing out the mats in Bailey’s fur that formed because she hasn’t been grooming herself, which they figure they may as well do while she’s under anesthesia.

Her bloodwork came back Friday evening with an elevated white blood cell count, which is indicative of an infection. That, coupled with the slight inflammation at her gumline, reaffirms the working theory that there is a tooth abscess, but we won’t know until we get the dental x-rays. I did go back and pay $35 for some antibiotics which will hopefully reduce the swelling and make it more comfortable for her to eat, but it’s a just stop-gap measure.

Thanks to contributions at the link above, I’ve raised $270 of the ~$800 needed. Thank you to everyone who has helped.

The futility and frustration of waiting

(Disclaimer: I’m going to be talking about specific frustrating situations in this post. I won’t be naming names, but the people involved or in the know will know what I’m talking about. This is not any attempt to passive-aggressively call anyone out; there are extenuating circumstances often involved and I’m aware of this, and I love the people involved and I try to be understanding. I’m just trying to lay everything out chronologically to get a picture of what has led me to the place where I now find myself, to encompass the entire pattern of events. This is for me, not to find fault with anyone, so please bear that in mind before feeling like I’m picking on you.)

I don’t think it will come as any great surprise to people who know me to find out that I’m not a terribly patient person. Actually, that’s not true. I don’t mind waiting for something if I know when I can expect it to happen, and when I trust the people or situation I am waiting for. That last is a bit difficult because I’m a bit of a control freak and find trust difficult to maintain. Once it’s gone, that is when I get impatient.

For anyone who has been reading my emails and tweets the past six months regularly, it’s probably apparent that I have been slipping gradually into depression, and that it has gotten to the point where I can’t write. I’m working with my doctor to try to find meds to stabilize the slide, but so far it’s not going all that well.

The thing is, a lot of the depression is, I think, about writing. Specifically, it’s about a “why do I bother?” mindset that has crept in about my writing, and a large part of that goes back to issues to waiting and patience.

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Tagged as personal, pity party, self-indulgence, whining, writing

June 26, 2013 · 12:39 pm

Personal ramblings: Mercury retrograde? Or just enough is enough?

The last six months-well, nine, really-have been challenging for me on the interpersonal front.

First things first. I’m a Libra. I like harmony. I go to great lengths to keep from making waves. But then, I also like balance, and when things become intolerably imbalanced, I will make BIG FUCKING WAVES. And hate every minute of it and alienate people in the process. It’s not pretty.

The pattern of my life for the last nine months largely revolves around people not keeping commitments to me. They will offer to do something and then just appear to forget, or disappear entirely for weeks or months at a time.

People have offered to beta read for me, then never responded after I sent them my story. People have offered to help me brainstorm, then never responded when I detailed my plot for them and pointed out where I am having issues. People have offered to answer questions I need for research for a story and then never responded. People have agreed to have discussions we need to have and then never brought the subject up again when the next chance arose to discuss it. People have told me they would have things done by a certain time and then they don’t.

I did a headcount of situations off the top of my head where I have been left hanging and I estimate that the number of people who haven’t kept their commitments to me in the last nine months outnumber the ones who have by a margin of about 6-to-1.

Six to fucking one. For every six people who tell me they’re going to do something, only one carries through in a remotely timely manner (and that is if I’m being generous with the definition of “timely.”)

Now, I am conscientious to a fault. When I agree to do something for someone, I am ALL OVER THAT SHIT. I drop everything, I get it done, because I hate to leave people hanging. And why do I hate to leave people hanging? Golden rule, baby. Because I don’t want to be left hanging. Because being left hanging sucks. And it feels awful. It makes me feel unimportant and unappreciated and taken advantage of and like I’m a frickin’ doormat.

Inevitably, my choices are to either nudge the person in question or let it go.

If I let it go, not only do I not get what I was promised, but I feel resentful. Then I feel guilty because I wonder if I’m being unreasonable to expect people to carry through when they say they will. I mean, people are busy, right? Shit comes up. I must be an ungrateful brat if I expect them to drop everything and deal with my issue because I’m not that important and they have better things to worry about and really I just need to get over myself. Right? If I feel resentful, I’m an awful, selfish, ungrateful person who had no business expecting someone to keep their freely-given, often unsolicited, commitment to begin with.

The other option is to nudge the person and try to remind them of their commitment. Which I admit I don’t do often because I wonder what right I have to ask anything of anyone else when they have their own lives and own shit and see the latter 3/4 of the last paragraph. Nudging makes me feel just as guilty as being quietly resentful does. But sometimes it gets things done. Sometimes. Sometimes I just have to deal with them APOLOGIZING and knowing that I made them feel bad about it, so I hasten to reassure that it’s not their fault and I understand and recognize that they’re doing me a favor and that I’m not really all that important in the great scheme of things because I don’t want to be an awful person and I don’t want them to feel bad about themselves.

At any rate, I feel like I’m on the verge of a major social meltdown where I just explode all over everyone about this stuff and that isn’t good. At all. The other option is just to give up and withdraw from people altogether and that isn’t good, either.

Ugh. Imbalance everywhere. What’s a beleaguered Libra to do? It would be one thing if it were just one or two people, but it’s on nearly every single front in my life.

So tired of it. So tired.

One of those moments in life

Boychild - Six days old (June 2007)

Tomorrow will be the six-year anniversary of the day my five-and-a-half-day labor ordeal ended and this little guy entered my life.

Just a few minutes ago, I went out to the living room to see him wearing a new outfit. He’s had the shirt for some time, but the long cargo shorts are new. And he’s never worn that baseball cap before, much less turned it around backward like that.

Suddenly he wasn’t a little boy anymore. Suddenly he looked like a big boy.

Which I suppose he is.

Today he looks like this: