Hawaii Dreaming...or anywhere but here
Entry posted by Guest
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i am very confused.
being in the position of both survivor (moi) and primary physical caregiver (John) and secondary executive caregiver (my dad) leaves me feeling like the poster girl for multiple stroke/TBI personality disorder.
because i don't have any obvious physical/psychological disabilities, and am a working professional and gifted in many of my endeavors (including shaking money from trees, extracting information from unnamed sources, knowing when to hit which authorities with what letter, juggling/kiting money to obtain a loan with negligable interest, etc), many folks, including my two survivors and my mother, feel that i am perfectly OK and are more than willing to dump more of their needs onto me.
therefore, strange things keep on happening to me. some examples include:
1) my mom knows that i was aphasic after i stroked but did not let go of the belief that i had told her not to visit me in the hospital and to 'take care of daddy' when i called them from the ER less than six hours after i stroked until 2004. this was after my dad stroked twice and had been aphasisc for 18 months. my mom went on to forget what aphasia meant or even that it was a word, and blamed it on being 80 years old;
2) John does not believe that i have any sort of residual physical/psychological trauma from our car accident in 9/04. he thinks that i was just along for the ride;
3) now that my dad knows that he is probably never going to walk again, he wants to learn rug hooking as a way of strengthening his hands and arms and because he is an artist and wants to do something creative. my mom has a rug hook and some patterns and yarn in the basement. she told me to go to a knitting store (where would i know from a knitting store? it's not on my top ten list of interests) and buy him a rug hooking set because she's 'too busy' to go down to the basement and look for her rug stuff;
4) John thinks that since he has a TBI and all the symptoms that come with it (cognitive deficits, memory lapses and loss, visuospacial problems, etc), it is his problem and that i should not be bothered when i have to clean up after him, take him to work because he forgets to set the alarm clock, take care of all of his litigation/accident correspondence because he can't handle it, come and fix it whenever he attempts a repair/action which he used to do before but can't now, etc. i should not complain about it, either.
meanwhile, i get tired easily, i get sick easily (i catch a lot of viral syndromes from the combination of having a profession that has to deal with the public plus a compromised immune system), i have to go to labs frequently and adjust my Coumadin almost as frequently, i get wierd parasthesias/burning sensations for various reasons, i'm in pain a lot from my autoimmune arthritis,and i am unable to function without my antidepressants.
let us not forget what i do for a living. if i get one more emergency cellphone call from my XXXXXX patient who wants to try to talk me out of sending her to an inpatient detox, i'll scream
so, at the present time i don't feel like having sex with John, i don't feel like seeing John and my parents, i don't feel like working, and a yearlong all-expense paid vacation in Hawaii sounds like what i need.
21. just because i look competent doesn't mean i want to take you on as a project
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