Summer

Summer. To be honest, this has been a difficult summer for me. I have cried an awful lot.

We have renovated the house in just about every space. Talk about turning my life upside down. Some days I have felt ready to crack from the stress of it. Having everything in different places, dust, dirt, men coming and going-sometimes staying for nearly twelve hours, chemicals from paint and carpeting, my dad having the television down in the waiting area of my studio, me having to sleep IN my studio for four nights due to the carpeting and painting in my room...

For several weeks, I was unable to hold meetings for potential students. That stressed me. A Lot.

My body hasn't really liked summer either. It held up okay during our trip to the maritime provinces, although I was sometimes a bit more tired than I would have liked. Coming back home though, there have been a number of weird occurrences. For an entire week straight, I had decently severe levels of my breathing issues starting early in the day, every day. I would have maybe one or two hours in the morning before my body would start hating me. Another week, my GI tract, which normally moves on the slow side, decided to move quickly, and reject food even more than usual. The worst was one of the nights when I was sleeping in my studio, and I fell asleep utterly freezing, and in some stomach pain, woke up a couple of hours later, and had to camp out in the bathroom where I was SO SO SO tired because of the seroquel but with such a twisted stomach that I didn't dare leave...one of those times when you just wish your body would DO something and get it over with, but it just decided to hang in limbo.

The strangest of all though had to be last saturday. I woke up feeling even more tired than normal, but shrugged it off as one of those days. My close friend B was having a come-and-go celebration of being five years off treatment for lymphoma, and I baked some brownies and bussed over to celebrate. While on the bus I began to feel that things weren't quite right...my eyes were a little bit sore, and my head felt a bit tight-ish and I couldn't quite get comfortable. I passed it off on being tired, and maybe some allergies, although I had a feeling that things weren't just allergies or being tired. I stayed a couple of hours, and by the time I left I knew that I was definitely running a fever without even having to check a thermometer. When I got back home, it was 100.6, within a couple of hours, it had gone up to 101.7 where it stayed for several hours. Besides feeling like you do when you have a fever (kind of achy bones, sore eyes, and that slight slight headache, along with alternating warm and cool) I had no other symptoms. It was the STRANGEST thing. One, that's the highest fever I have recorded since I was 13, almost ten years ago when I had a full-blown double ear infection, and two, NO other symptoms. Add to that that I have basically been a recluse in my house, and you get one confused girl in her twenties. I woke up in the morning with a normal temperature. All together, it was probably about 12 or 14 hours of fever. A night's sleep has generally sent away fevers in the past for me, not to return. Same happened here. So far, it's been a one-time occurrence. A very weird one time occurrence. I'm not really a fever running person, the last time was back three summers ago when I caught a VERY nasty cold from one of the kids. And it certainly wasn't as high as this one. If it had gone as high as 102, or had lasted past the night, I would have gone and gotten checked out because things were just too strange. And if it happens again, I'm getting checked out.

The good thing right now is that the end is in sight for this construction/renovation hullabaloo.

The bad thing is that I am overly stressed about some other aspects of my life: Getting students for the fall, and graduating. I got an email from my adviser today asking about the progress on my paper. So yeah, stress there. Sometimes I have spent 8-10 full hours a day just cleaning and organizing, or moving things around. 99% of the work of putting things back to rights in this house has been done by me, not my dad. So there has been a bit of tension there too.

Just wanting my life back to some closer level of normal.