I met with my therapist yesterday morning. As it always used to be, it was a relief to be able to tell someone my concerns in simple, blunt terms and get advice in response.
For now, that advice is:
- Move more every day
- Stay in the present
- Look around me for clues to what I need to learn now
Pretty simple homework, eh? And also good advice.
This therapist (I hesitate to use her name) is a very comforting presence in my life. Her office is still in the same place it was in the first time I saw her ten or twelve years ago. The furniture in her office is the same. She still has the same comforting, reassuring spirit about her she’s always had.
So: step one in my to-do list accomplished (with a follow-up appointment already set for next week). Step two will, of course, be tomorrow morning’s mammogram. I’ll be glad to have that out of the way. Step three will be my appointment with my psychiatrist on the 10th, which I am dreading because I’m afraid we’ll need to change my medications because of side-effects – but maybe we won’t; after all, every medication has side effects.
I’ve added a fourth to-do item to my list: my teeth. I am going to make the appointment to finally get started on them. Step one will be a thorough cleaning which, for me, means two separate root planing and scaling sessions (and yes, that means ouch), followed by a tooth extraction or two and a root canal or two, followed by two or three fillings, followed by getting my wisdom teeth removed, followed by one or two dental implants, and somewhere in all of that we’re also looking at gum surgery. The bundled fourth to-do item will add hugely, and I do mean HUGELY, to my quality of life. I’ve been putting it off for nearly twenty years, which is one reason the bundle keeps getting bigger. How I wish they could just knock me out under general anesthesia and do it all at once! It will be quite difficult to schedule all this dental work because I have to be able to speak clearly for my job. I haven’t overcome the mental block I have about all of this yet, so still no appointment (plus, I have to find the name of the dentist I consulted with earlier this year).
I also have new cat rescue news. Since my husband and I have lived here we have acted as the inadvertent cat care team for several cats. This neighborhood has a large feral cat population – in fact, after we bought our house and tore out the deck in our back yard we found several cat skeletons. We found the first live rescue in the street in front of our house, where it had been hit by a car. It had a broken pelvis and feline leukemia and no owner. The emergency vet had to put it to sleep. The next cat was also hit by a car but was already dead (though still warm) when we found it in the street around the corner. We buried it in our back yard. We rescued the next cat from the top of a privacy fence, where it’s back leg has fallen between two slats. It turned out to have an actual owner, and its leg was eventually amputated. The next cat was also found dead in the street around the corner. I found the latest cat in the middle of the same street around the corner – a black kitten with what appeared to be a broken leg. My husband took the morning off work, yesterday, to take it to our vet. This poor kitty does not have a broken leg, she simply has a completely paralyzed leg (the vet couldn’t find a reason for it). She also has an enlarged heart, and she is so emaciated that I’m not sure how she’s even still alive. She was so dehydrated that the vet had to give her IV fluids just to increase her blood volume enough to be able to run some tests on her. No parasites or diseases, just that enlarged heart and paralyzed back leg. At approximately six months old she weighs less than three pounds. She’s in a comfy bed in a corner of my office, right now, having eaten a good dinner last night. She’s very skittish, but I have high hopes for her. The truth is she probably won’t make it for long. The paralyzed leg combined with the enlarged heart means she probably had an aortic embolism travel to the artery that feeds that leg, and most cats with that symptom don’t live more than a couple of months. But I’d like to make sure she is warm and loved in the time she has left.
That’s it for today, I think.
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