forward and back

I’ve had a rather rough few days.  I made a relatively minor mistake at work (one of those, everyone else is doing it moments) but since I’m already in trouble from before it’s a more major issue.  I don’t know what will happen until this week, but I’m not in a good situation.  While it’s a bad situation, I realize my part in getting into it and try not to focus on the parts other people played.  On the plus side, I made some big changes real fast because I had so much motivation to do so.  I just hope it’ll be enough to buy the time I need to find another job if necessary.

I’ve spent more time thinking about careers.  I’m still not in a position to transition to music with Carrie, so I need a job that is satisfying and supports us as we transition over the next few years to a new joint career.  I may not need to change jobs, but with layoffs always being considered at work, I have to be prepared.  In my last real semester of grad school I took geophysics, which was a pretty cool class.  I have always enjoyed geology but chose physics in undergrad.  I wonder if that was a bad decision, but it wasn’t really.  I walked the path I needed to.  Now I live in one of the main oil centers of the world so I’m looking at these exploration companies that need people to do geophysics work.  Quite a few will hire people with no experience and train them, which is cool.  However, so many of the jobs are in other countries, or they make you do months of training in a foreign country.  This wouldn’t be so bad if Carrie were healthy, with friends and family around to help her out.  But she’s still healing, doesn’t drive, and doesn’t know anyone around here.  To top it off, the cats wouldn’t want to be away from her so that makes things really complicated.

Overall I’ve been thinking about how I could leave Carrie alone for months (not that I have to worry about it right now), as well as why I’m self sabotaging at work.  Maybe I’m just overwhelmed and not able to make good decisions unless the consequences are really high?  Hopefully I gain some insight soon.  If nothing else, I’m going to do my best at work.  Lots of studying to do, and little else honestly which is hard for me.  Too little structure means I have enough rope to hang myself…

So, I’ve learned things about myself, for better or worse.  I’m not sure how to fix everything, but at the least Carrie is improving in many ways.  We’ve been told she’ll start to really improve once her mom leaves and she has her house to herself again while I’m at work.  It’ll be interesting!

I’m going to hope for non-anxiety filled dreams and good sleep so I can start the week on the right foot.

Carrie’s mom’s visit

Carrie’s mom arrived Friday night.  We were able to get a good deal on Southwest (as long as she flew out of Louisville) and she didn’t have to change planes so it was a straight forward process for her.  She’s here to help Carrie do things when I’m not here, plus Carrie likes having her around for short bursts of time at least.  I mean, at some point everyone gets sick of family, but it’s different when you’re sick.

Right now, Carrie and her mom are at the emergency room.  We’re still trying to make sense of her medication requirements and right now it’s not going well.  It’s improving in some ways, but the medications don’t play well with each other so it’ll take a little while to get right.  As they say, it sometimes gets worse before it gets better.  I do know she’s make incredible progress dealing with the abuse she suffered so many years ago and that will pay off.  Hopefully she’ll feel better this weekend and we can all go to the balloon festival at JSC which is only $10 for a carload of people and should be interesting.  It’s kinda funny that the big balloon boy story/hoax happened this week and now we’re having the balloon fest.  The following weekend is Wings over Houston so it should be a fun month for flight enthusiasts.  Hopefully we can enjoy it as well.

She’s home!

Blas came home tonight, literally in the 3 minutes I had before work while I dropped off a movie for Carrie.  I’m so glad she has a distinctive and loud meow.  I still don’t know how she snuck out since I never got far from the door while putting trash out but she must have been determined.  She seemed fine, real thirsty, but I didn’t have time to wait and find out about her adventure.  Monkey was so mad at her, he was hissing and yelling and growling because she smelled like other cats.  Poor Carrie had to deal with that so I wouldn’t be late for work.   She’s in trouble, but I’m still just so relieved to have her back that I can’t be too mad yet.  I was literally shaking with relief.  I cried so much thinking she was dead.  I mean, she’s 18, so she’s been with me since I was 13, more than half of my life.  When she does pass it’ll be a damn big deal for me, as I discovered yesterday.  I’m just so grateful tonight…

Blas is gone

We can’t find Blas.  Monkey last saw her during their middle of the night snack when she said she was going to take a nap.  It’s been almost 24 hours now without her coming out for water or food.  It’s not necessarily abnormal for her to miss food, but not water or treats.  I’ve been looking for her most of the night without much luck.  I’ve gone through the spare bedroom in more detail than I thought would be necessary.  I’ve looked in all the cabinets, in boxes, behind things, under things… Not only am I scared she’s dead, I’m scared I can’t find her body which is even worse.  I don’t think she could have gotten out, so I’m really at a loss.  I didn’t expect her to die suddenly, I expected she would give us a clue which means she either didn’t know or she isn’t dead.

I’m worried for Monkey.  The mice died last week, one of old age and one of a broken heart.  They were his friends and he was very sad when they died.  And now Blas.  And for Carrie, her dad had a small stroke this weekend, then she found out her cousin has stage 4 pancreatic cancer – on top of her mice dying.  And all this is coming after losing one of my best friends this summer.  Starting to run low on friends and family here…

All this on top of last night getting a promise from Kendra, Carrie’s higher guide, promised us that she will be significantly better in the next 30 days.  That’s wonderful news of course, but it’s tainted by loss.  And last night I had an unpleasant dream where I was on a bus or something with Carrie (in a separate seat and row though) and just crying and grieving over Ellen.  It makes me think Blas passed last night and I was really grieving for her.  But I don’t know, and I can’t know until a body is found.  I’ve run out of places to look so I’m completely at a loss.  *sigh*

Soul healing

Last weekend we drove to Dallas to meet with my friend Andrea and her reiki master to do a soul retrieval for Carrie.  For background, souls are ‘lost’ during traumatic events.  Part of our core being, our soul, breaks away when it can’t cope with whatever happens.  This happens more often when something very traumatic happens but it can be from anything.  When we lose part of our self we are impacted the rest of our life because we’re less than what we should be.  It can be a source of fear or illness in our life.  Since we know Carrie has had some significant traumas and struggled mentally in some areas, we needed to push for this soul retrieval.

It’s Carrie’s personal stuff, but it went well overall.  Wiped her out physically, but it took care of the pseudoseizures.  With the intense healing her body/mind is able to handle more stress.  Unfortunately her straight up epileptic seizures are still hitting her hard.  We see the neurologist wednesday when we’ll push to have her admitted.  This medicine regimen is definitely not working so she’s sick and still having seizures.  They’re impacting her brain and body more than before, so the left side of her body is often numb or limp.

I don’t know what to do to fix this. The valium is already losing effectiveness so she only gets 4 good hours out of 20 mg, which is a lot and should last 8 hours.  We’ve stayed out of the ER for a week, but really that’s not that long in normal people time.  And now she’s fighting another virus or something which makes everything worse.  Hopefully it passes quickly.

Anyway…the process of soul retrieval is one that occurs over time, with the person remembering things as days go on.  We spent a few days working on traumas that have haunted her dreams and build her trust again.  I’m pretty sure she hasn’t had those nightmares since we were able to do that.  She’s still not sleeping well though, so I’m not sure how to make that better.  We hoped to get a second round of healing this weekend but the scheduling didn’t work out.  Carrie’s mom arrives this upcoming Friday and will be here through the 28th so it’ll be a while before we get back to this healing.  At least she’ll have support when I’m at work.

On another note, we took the cats with us since we didn’t want Monkey to miss his insulin injections.  We got a hotel room up there and they stayed in the hotel.  Unfortunately it was a little too long of a trip and Monkey peed in his carrier.  His diabetes isn’t controlled completely yet so he couldn’t hold it that long.  Then the next day he got stuck in the box spring which caused some major drama.  However, we still need to do this when we drive home for Christmas so it’s a learning process.  We figure staying in hotels until we’re at my parents will be cheaper than boarding the cats.  It’ll be a complicated process but hopefully we can make it work.  Actually, I wonder if we can just keep them in the car while at Carrie’s mom’s place… good thing we have 2 months to think about it.

It’s been a long week, hopefully it doesn’t go too badly.