Masking Machine
Took Dog in today to and oncologist. They confirmed a 10-month median lifespan, with palliative radiation treatment. Maybe 7 months without. They did a CT scan to plan for radiation, but we haven’t decided yet if it’s a good plan. It would require a month of weekly radiation treatments and sedated xrays afterwards, is likely to cause some amount of lung complications due to its location, etc. We’ll see what the report says. In the mean time Dog got even more shaved patches – he already had one on 2 different legs (IVs) l, plus some on his chest from the MRI, and now he has a little shaved spot on the back of his skull, with a blue paint dot in it (and one more leg shave spot). It’s cute, if perhaps a lot of reminders about how often we’ve been to the vet.
Shanda is not doing great. The last couple of weeks have been sort of jumping between silent, seperate stress and transient escapist release. Today there was much yelling about how I shouldn’t notice stress or care about it and it didn’t matter and only the physical symptoms counted and they don’t indicate or cause emotional stress. So it’s a lot. It’s extra today, but it’s been happening to a greater or lesser extent for a couple of weeks. It would be nice to have a plan to make it different but that’s not yet a priority for you, so I guess we’re stuck at trying to survive while things remain terrible. It’s not a great place to be, but at least for now it’s where we are.
School has been out for a while and I’m hoping M can find a minute to come back to their own feels before too long. I don’t get to be a part of your life while you’re pushing though stress and deferring feels, but maybe there’s space in the summer to try something different. Or at least to talk again for a minute, to help me imagine that ever increasing distance is not what you want from me.
I’ve got some genuinely old SRs at the day job. I’m hoping I can knock out another 1 or 2 tomorrow so I can feel like progress is possible again. I have an early meeting tomorrow, and some deadline work due for Wednesday, but that’s it other than SRs, so it’s plausible I’ll get to them before the day expires. I’m also hoping to be less tired tomorrow, as I actually start moving to a new medication. It’s a week until I’m totally off the old one but the new one is supposed to directly counter some of the tiredness, so hopefully it will balances out sooner.
Talked with @BPS today about disgust and hair and arts. Showed them ThreadStories, which is full of hair feels and often cultivates distress: https://instagram.com/threadstories. We’re still on the anger as motivation thread too. I like helping people find their anger. I know where mine is and I wield it to great effect sometimes, but it’s easy for me to let it burn down whatever I point it at so I am not always ready to do it for arts or for day job or for other things I need to keep. I imagine the direction can be modulated but I’m told the practice is tricky and the stakes are not trivial, so I’m taking it slow. Perhaps another CASA story later this week, to get moving on something that was close but I now have significant space from.
Drove today, for the first time in a while. It’s still the worst, in case anyone didn’t know. Traffic is okay during the global death but it’s still such a danger to get around, and we had 6 different errands to accomplish. The bus is sort of a crap shoot these days too, still not full like normal but too full to feel like it’s easy to stay away from people, and many of them don’t have masks (despite mandatory use here in public buildings and transit). It’s been years since I got rid of my car, and that’s still a good choice, but global death and dying dog make and argument for its utility, even given then dangers.
Had another blood draw today, since the last one didn’t get all the tests they needed. Luckily didn’t get the newbie phlebotomist today, which made things go much better for me. It’s not the procedure at all, it’s the fearful person working themselves up to hurt me, and me preparing to be hurt. There’s maybe some LI to do about that, to come up with a story that lets me feel different about it. Though honestly avoiding people who are fearful about hurting me is probably a generally good plan, even if I didn’t have trauma about it.
I’m going to have to talk to my therapist this week about the way they mask emotions and how that doesn’t work for me. In general therapists are expected to not let their emotions impact the session. Which is maybe a good idea in general but not terribly plausible against me. I can smell your emotional masking from 3 paces off, and I probably already know the emotion you eventually decided to mask. In fact I’ve got a trigger about it, because it’s what professionals did when they decided not to help me when I was a child – they had an emotional reaction, tried to hide it, and then announced that they were walking back all their promises and would not help (and might start hurting). Therapists typically do not like it when I train them, at least not if I tell them it’s happening, and this one in particular has objected in the past. But they can fucking suck it, because I’ve been waiting for someone smarter and more prepared than me for decades and I’m no longer on that plan. Therapist can be willing to learn from and with me or they can fuck off. I’m done waiting. This is maybe a less safe experiment with anger, but it’s one I can no longer put off.
And then some TikToks, I guess, because that’s what I’m doing today to cope:
https://vm.tiktok.com/TspXxV/
https://vm.tiktok.com/TGsmHU/
https://vm.tiktok.com/TGgmwC/
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
