The Mandelbear's Musings

I'm going to try to keep this post pretty close to the surface; the next one downstream may cut a little deeper. You've been warned.

If you're my friend, and I do something wrong, or stupid, or hurtful, I really hope you'll be a good enough friend to tell me about it. If I make excuses, or try to feed you a line of bullshit, I hope you'll call me on it. I need you to call me on it -- that's how I learn.

I'm not all that good at being human. I make a lot of mistakes; and miss a lot of cues that might be obvious to someone more sensitive, and sometimes I hurt people without intending to. If you ignore it, or let me brush it off with an offhand apology, I'm likely to do it again.

My parents always told me that "just apologizing isn't enough."

Sure, I'll apologize, and try to repair the damage I caused. Sometimes it's not repairable, which makes me sad. I'll probably offer either an excuse, or an explanation. Don't let me get away with excuses.

I realize this is a difficult concept for some people, maybe even most people, but there's a big difference between an excuse and an explanation. An excuse involves putting the blame on somebody or something else. "The dog ate my homework." "He just came out of nowhere and rear-ended me." "I didn't mean to, I just sort of blew up."

An explanation is an attempt to identify something that I can do differently next time. "I put my homework where the dog could reach it." "I wasn't paying attention to the side streets; I must have been thinking about something else." "I seem to lose control when I get angry, and say things I don't really mean." See the difference?

My Dad was a scientist, and I'm a computer programmer. I know it deep in my bones -- I can't bullshit nature. I can't sweet-talk a computer. There's always an explanation, even if I don't know how to find it. People are more difficult, and I'm more difficult still. It's really easy for me to lie to myself. Or rather not lie, exactly, but to gloss over what really happened because knowing the truth, the reality, would make me uncomfortable.

A friend is, often, someone who's willing to point out uncomfortable truths. Someone who's willing to stand behind me and push me to own up to my mistakes, to stand beside me and hold my hand when I do.

If you see me doing something wrong, call me on it.

I decided to go out walking early, in part because I didn't trust the weather to stay clear until after noon, and in part because I thought it might warm me up a little. Set a good, brisk pace but had to drop it down to an amble after half an hour when my shins started to tighten up. Last thing I need is shin splints; I'll probably regret it anyway.

There were quite a few walkers and joggers out by the Rose Garden; one can't talk to them, of course. Nobody even said hello, and most of them had looks ranging from something like boredom to outright agony. A couple might have been hopped up on endorphins; they looked a bit glazed over. I wonder what I look like.

I was thinking about a scrap of conversation from a day or two ago about the difference between New Yorkers and Californians -- I don't recall anything about the wording, but it involved the fact that NY has 11M people, and New Yorkers have to keep strangers at a distance or they'd be overwhelmed. OK, I grew up 50 miles from NYC, and went to school in the Midwest as well as California. I should know this.

I realized that, once again, I never noticed the difference. I still can't see it, and it seems as though the difficulty I'm having recalling the words of that conversation is that I didn't really understand them at the time. It seems as though my own shyness, anxiety, depression, and emotional blindness are enough to completely swamp any perception of the other person's (I don't have the right word here, either: style? distance preference?). I can get closer to some people than to others, it seems, but I don't have a sense of how that relates to anything else at all about them. I can't tell how close they want to get, or how close they get to other people.

It seems that there's a long list of things I just can't seem to understand; can't seem to see. This thing about closeness, whatever it's called. Joy. Love. Flirting. Implied messages. Maybe some of the books I ordered this morning will help a little. Maybe not. I'm not feeling very hopeful right now, just overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem.

Yeah, I'm depressed. I'm working on that, though with no results so far. But the decades of depression seem to have let some essential sense or perceptual ability atrophy or fail to develop altogether. I don't know whether I'll ever get it back, and that hurts even more than the depression does, sometimes.

Writing about it doesn't seem to have helped much this time. It clarified the problem, but that clarity is painful and seems to get me no closer to a solution.

Spent almost the entire day with Colleen -- it wasn't my original plan, but I went in around 10am intending to get some training on the IV pump. Which didn't happen until she got hooked at about 1:30. Unlike what we'd been told yesterday, she's now on a 16-hour cycle (which is what she was on last time, and what we'd been told Friday). I got angry at a few people.

The "patient care coordinator" for the weekend is a large guy named Joe, with an insincere, lopsided grin pasted onto his face and apparently very little in his head. He's the one who had the gall to say "this usually runs smoothly" after royally screwing things up to the point where Colleen will have to come home Tuesday and not tomorrow, due to massive failure to coordinate who's doing what, when.

I did, however, get a good lesson in flushing the PICC line and changing the cap -- it's different from the last one. The lessons came from an RN from the oncology department, where they have experience sending people home with IV pumps. We also established in the process that the pump she had was damaged, and got a new one ordered.

I also made certain that somebody would be there tonight at 8:30 to train me in setup. That took a certain amount of being firm with people, but I got a call a little while ago and it'll happen. (She was supposed to train me last night, too, but neither Colleen nor I ever heard from her.)

Colleen became distraught at a couple of points, mainly when not getting a firm schedule for her surgery, and when finding out that she wouldn't be going home until Tuesday. She fell apart yesterday on hearing that she would be on a 20-hour schedule (which turned out not to be the case, but the staff were very insistent that they were right and what we'd been told by the doctor on Friday was wrong).

We've been jerked around a lot, obviously. It's also clear that this disease is a long-term, life-wrecking Big Fat Fscking Nuisance -- it might not be as life-threatening as cancer, but it's certainly life-changing and I think the BFFN tag is justified.

I've also asked to see a psychiatrist tomorrow. Not for Colleen -- she won't have anything to do with them, after some exceedingly bad experiences in childhood. For me, to learn how to cope with this whole "being human" thing, and in particular how to calm Colleen down to the point where she can listen and think rationally again, and how to restructure our mental lives to cope with sudden disappointments. I'm not convinced psychiatry is the answer -- in fact, I'm reasonably convinced it isn't. But it's what they came up with at the hospital.

We're also going to talk with her surgeon and GI doctor, and a dietician (she's been told that she can have liquids, including tea and supplements like Ensure -- loud cheers). She has a visit to our personal physician scheduled for Friday (rescheduled from Tuesday; I'd been hoping to just steal her appointment for myself, but...).

Note: stress, anxiety, hunger, dehydration, and sleep deprivation are a hypergolic mixture. Handle with extreme caution.

Note: There are comparatively few things that can cause a full-scale Mandelbear melt-down, complete with gibbering apologies, silent, dry-eyed sobbing and a deep desire to simultaneously curl up in a ball, storm out of the room, and drop through the floor. Being told by an angry Colleen that I have hurt her without even knowing it -- totally failed at this "being human" thing -- is one of them.

Note for next time: take a big drink of something cold and wet, have a very quick dinner, put any unexpected guests in the care of the kids, and retire to the bedroom with Colleen and two glasses of something alcoholic for an hour of snuggle and catching up.

OK; I'll unpack that.

On the way home from the airport we had some silly argument over caller ID and our cell phones. I should know better than to try to explain something like that to somebody who clearly doesn't care about the technical details, but I was tired enough for it to have seemed important at the time.

The anxiety and stress part was mostly over Colleen's not having heard back about her ultrasound. We were both hungry; I was sleep-dep'd from the con and stressed from travel.

I thought we'd talked enough about the con, at least for a while; there were unexpected guests in the house -- at least, I hadn't been expecting them -- and Colleen didn't want to embarass me in front of them by telling me to stop paying attention to my LJ and pay some attention to her.

Public Service Announcement: It may conceivably embarass me a little to be reminded to pay attention to my wife, but I'm a bear of very little brain, and an occasional whack from a cluebat doesn't hurt. Something along the lines of "stop hanging out with your silicon mistress and talk to me" would work fine. Or, "kiss me now, you idiot!"

As I've said several times, I don't do subtle.