[Content warning: under the cut is doctor fuckery, mentions of fat shaming/diet talk, and chronic illness. Anyone who hasn't been following along with my medical drama of the last three almost four! years can safely skip this garbage update. Otherwise, come enjoy a rant, I guess?]

So because of various scheduling-related shenanigans, I had a follow-up appointment with my rheumatologist yesterday which was actually conducted by the nurse practitioner who deals with his other office*. Which is to say, she's never met me before and can't remember what she read in my chart as compared to what's in the charts of an unknown number of other patients she was seeing that day. And hey, I get it: being the substitute teacher is hard, yo.

But goddamn, she earned my ire all on her own.

( snip-snerp )

This post is just chaos. I hate seeing doctors. Still have bronchitis, btw. Fuck.

*She is covering for the doctor in part because he is Older Than Dirt and wants to retire. Which is why, after this, my appointments with him are going to become exponentially more inconvenient as he cuts back on his office hours.

**Autoimmune disorders are a messy, incestuous bunch, so I understand the need to take that evidence with a grain of salt. I might be responding to treatment for lupus just because whatever I really have overlaps with lupus enough to get caught in the net of that medication. That's fine. Whatever.

Well, it's official: I made it through to my last official days at my current job, and now I am free. Huzzah!

I mean, I am therefore unemployed (or will be soon, allowing for processing and whatnot) and on a ticking clock for what meager insurance I do have. So it's not like it's a great situation, but hey! I officially didn't die due to any of the chronic bullshit at that job!

Now I just need my mum to survive the pacemaker installation tomorrow, and then I will feel like I have some hope in hell of coping with life, the universe, and everything.

So my boss is finally back from vacation, and I've just told them that I'm quitting. I'll stay through the end of March, mostly because we just lost a third of the staff in one week and the store is the most on-fire it has ever been in the three years I've been there. I'm not cruel, okay?

But I am done.

Mostly because boss's New Boss has proven in two months to be a petty tyrant of the worst sort. I mean, openly contemptuous of everyone under their leadership, demanding the literally impossible, threatening. An absolute piece of work.

And as far as I can tell, entirely representative of the direction in which the company is moving. It would be bad enough if this was one person being an ass on their own, going rogue. But no, I think this is what the company stands for now.

And it turns out, I have certain philosophical standards I'm not willing to sacrifice. Hills upon which I will die. Apparently, even when it's just a shitty day job with relatively limited power to shape the world, I'm not willing to implicitly condone their garbage behavior by working for them. We have started to verge into moral injury territory for me, which was not something I would have expected possible under the circumstances.

Also, they made life difficult for kids I like, and I am nothing if not viciously protective of my people. They're finding new jobs as it is, so I need only to register my protest by quitting as well.

So! Life continues to be unacceptably exciting!

I happened to look over at a printout I have hanging in my office today, and I noticed that I printed it on this date in 2016. This would not be interesting in and of itself. But I printed this out because it is the best comment I have ever gotten on anything I have ever made in any format. I keep it on my wall to remind me of why making things and putting them out into the world is worthwhile.

It's just that it took me a minute to calculate that it is, indeed, now 2019. Which means that printed comment is three years old. That is, not coincidentally, just about how long I have been at my (disastrous) day job.

It's not that I haven't gotten other comments in those three years. It's not that I haven't made things and put them into the world in those three years. It's just that it feels like three years was a lifetime ago, and I have no sense of where all that time went. What I did with it. What it was good for.

Time is always a difficult subject for me. Sometimes, like this, it comes up and punches me square in the nose with a lot of emotions. Today, they are not good emotions.

I've just had such a nice day??? And in the most mundane ways possible:

From the moment I woke up, I knew what I wanted to get done today and the order in which I would do it. I had plenty of flexibility, so that sudden plans by my family could involve me without derailing what I was doing; I knew there was time to spare. I got writing done, including on long-term projects that always get shuffled to the bottom of the list because they aren't emergencies.

I read books! I played video games! I spent time with the ducks, the dog, and the cat! Things I genuinely enjoyed, which left me feeling happy and restored. I spent time with Mum that didn't revolve around crisis management. My pain didn't suck any worse than usual, and my fatigue was manageable.

I felt like a real human being who does things in the world. After a week or so of depression issues that involved a lot of anhedonia, actually feeling pleasure in anything was a shock and marvel. It was the most basic of functional adult days, and it was just

so nice.

So nice to feel like life isn't just something unpleasant that happens to me.

Well, it's finally caught up with me--being surrounded for several weeks by both parents and at least two coworkers who have colds--and now I am laid low. Mostly by the brick someone managed to lodge up my left sinus passage and which now represents 90% of my head mass.

I have three days off from work, barring any further catastrophes that would force me to pick up a shift. That means three days for my overactive, glitchy immune system to stop chewing on my internal organs and start fucking up some cold germs for a change.

I shall console myself with podcasts:

Unauthorized Absence, episode 04 with Andrea Chandler, aka @NeolithicSheep. I'm coming to the podcast as a fan of Shep, not the other way round, but I quite liked the host as well. It's one of those "other people's lives are very different from mine" type podcasts, what with my lack of military background, so I'm keen to check out the rest of the episodes.

Shep, meanwhile, never fails to fascinate and delight and rouse to fury. She's changed my mind over the last few years about food politics and animal husbandry. Not in the sense of changing what I, personally, would do, but showing me that there are more ways, even better ways, of ethically raising and, yes, eating animals. It's a complicated subject for me, and Shep challenges me to do better. I like that. Also, she gets properly bent out of shape about Nazis, which is a plus.