My schedule

So, at several readers' suggestion, here's a very rough approximation of my daily schedule for the next couple of weeks. (Two weeks from now I'll be at Conflikt, and somebody will have to fill in for me on some of these.)

• 6:15 try to wake up; take meds; water nose; start coffee
• 6:30ish weekdays: start trying to wake up the Y.D. for school. Catch up on email and LJ.
• 7:15ish weekdays: take the Y.D. to school.
• 7:30ish make breakfast. Continue LJ. Paying bills ought to happen in here, but usually doesn't. Bad. Calls to cell phone welcome -- don't call the house phone, because Colleen sleeps in.
• 9:00ish Tu, We, Th, Fr: close the office door; start working from home unless there's a talk or meeting I need to get to. Mondays I have meetings all day, but it's the home nurse's day to visit so I'm covered.
• 11:30 break for lunch and a walk. If at work, lunch is a snack at my desk; if at home, the walk comes first because otherwise I'll forget it. The walk is what I persistently fail at these days; it gets squeezed out if Colleen has a morning appointment. Calls to cell phone welcome.
• 12:30ish (except Mondays) take Colleen off TPN; wound care.
• Afternoon: weekdays: work; weekends: go somewhere with Colleen.
• 18:00ish Get home from work; take meds; water nose. Go through paper mail - this one often gets spaced, which is bad.
• 18:00ish take Colleen's TPN bag out of the fridge. One of the kids can handle this one.
• Evening: Dinner and "social time" in the living room. Catch up on email and LJ; try to do some music because that counts as quality time. Music's another item that usually gets spaced, especially right now with my voice in sorry shape from a cold or something. Calls to the either my cell phone or the house phone are welcome.
• 20:30ish set up Colleen's TPN and get her hooked up.
• Night: reading, writing, music practice, social time, bath maybe, brush teeth, snuggle, fall over.

This frequently gets blown all to hell by meetings, doctor's appointments, family emergencies, and the like. Things like de-cluttering the office also mostly don't happen. Shopping trips are difficult, but somebody else can take Colleen out in the afternoon.

Getting better?

We both seem to be doing better today. Hard to say whether it's a lot better or only a little, but better nevertheless.

Worked from home all morning -- I can get through most of the email before breakfast and do a little writing -- and went out for a walk around 11:15. Called cflute and had a pleasant chat, made even more like a walk with a friend because I had my phone on loudspeaker. (I have to do that because otherwise it thinks there's a headset attached to it. But it works nicely in this case.)

Calie gave me a good suggestion: take an extra breath or two before saying anything when I'm interrupted or broken out of concentrating on something. Should help control my tone of voice and prevent the snapdragon effect.

Everything went smoothly with the disconnect; I had lunch and went in to work and actually got a little bit more done besides catching up with people. Came home to find the Cat in good humor after a successful shopping expedition (with Joyce driving) and good news from the lab and her nutritionist. She has a GI appointment Thursday, and it may actually be possible to schedule her surgery at that point.

In the afternoon I finally took the unfamiliar and scary step of requesting a psych appointment. (The person who makes appointments wasn't there, of course, but I left my info for a callback.)

Just got done "fixing her dinner", which has gotten to be a pretty smooth routine. Only thing I forgot this time was clamping the secondary port before removing the flush syringe; doing it in the wrong order apparently allows a little bit of blood to flow back into the line and clot. We had to go in last night and get them unclotted. :(

But it looks as though there's a little light at the end of the tunnel. (Do not cue old Vietnam-era joke. That's not funny.)