Spitfire and I have been having long talks. Really long talks. There’s two main issues: Miss Jealousy and I interacting, and the giant elephant in the room.
I have been told in no uncertain terms to not have anything to do with Miss Jealousy and her drama inducing antics. So, other than maybe saying hi, if she says hi to me, I’m not to interact with her. I don’t want to be caught in her drama and “look what I did!” that she loves to do. I’ll stick to staying in the background, advising drones who ask for my opinion and advice, and making sure that the events are listed and squared away. I don’t need the attention of “see what I did.” I would like some cuddles, or at least time at mum’s side where there’s no expectations from me other than to simply be there. I don’t need for the entire world to see how truly awesome I am like she does.
The only one who needs to know how well I’m doing, and guide me to do better where I fail, is Spitfire.
I will keep on dusting, but I’ve had to temporarily disconnect from YMO because of circularly impelled airborne feces that have been aimed straight at me. Only a few people have any inkling of what the impeller lobbed at me, and I’m still trying to sort it all out, parsing it through my understandings.
Spitfire took me into some very needed bubblehead time today. It doesn’t really work when the kids bounce off of me, but I did have an IQ drop for a bit, and that let me relax and simply be with her.
Fecal matter no 1: Having to deal with landlords. For the last year, the complex we live in has undergone a “refit.” Except it was all trainees and apprentices and far too much damage was done. So we have less than a week to get everything spotless and put away after being in boxes and away from windows and more because the landlords required that the workmen had access and we had to move everything around to make things easy for access by the workmen.
For the better part of 8 months, my computer was in the MIDDLE of the living room instead of where I love it – up against a window so I can look out if I want.
We have 4 days to make this place clean enough to hopefully get a carpet cleaner in here to give the carpets a wash.
4 days – and 2 teens and a preteen that don’t want to do anything to help cause kid reasons.
4 days.
I’m a little grumpy.
Okay, a lot grumpy.
Penalt is on a “throw out everything we don’t need/aren’t actively using. His style of cleaning is either throw everything in a box and forget about it, or throw everything out. So, yes, fight time. We will not discuss all the craft magazines of mine he threw out because he wanted room in the closet. “You didn’t even notice.” He told me afterwards.
Yah, I did notice. Including the magazines that had a major project that I needed all 5 issues for. I was going to go through them all and give the ones I didn’t want to the local high school for their crafting club. Nope. All into the recycling bin one day when I was busy djing. GONE.
I know he’s going to do that again.
The second fecal strike has to do with health issues. Penalt and I have similar general issues – swelling in lower limbs, chest pressure and pain, rising blood pressure. I also have heart palpitations and just below tachycardia – just below, cause it rarely goes over 100, but still, when it does the thing it does, it HURTS and I end up passed out. Most of the time, I recover after some down time.
Doctors have been patting my head for years. See, I don’t have the family heart history Penalt does. I’m an orphan in all but name, and I don’t know much from either side of my biological family’s medical history. His, however, the history is strong. I get my head patted. He’s getting tested for congested heart failure.
I’m still trying to parse that bit of information.
Thirteen years ago, Penalt was recovering from a cardioversion for atrial fibrillation. For four months, while I had a newborn, he was unable to do anything because his heart was beating irregularily at best. For four horrid months, I worried and fretted about loosing my not-quite-husband every moment I breathed. I woke up relieved when he woke up with me. He was so weak, holding the newborn was the extend of what he could do. For four months, I was scared I’d become a widow before I was a wife. Our toddler was becoming a preschooler, and child services where we lived were making extra demands on us, yet not giving us any actual aid, because that would make sense for child services to actually help a family in need, right?
A friend talked to me and told me that the piece of paper meant nothing. I was his wife and had given him two delightful children.
He survived that. Two years later, a third child joined us. Now, at 15, 13, and 11, they give us both joy and days we want to Homer them.
I can’t parse this information. We have the same symptoms. I have two extra markers too, that say that something bad is going on. The only thing I can come up with is that I’m female, have “no” clear family signs of heart problems (orphan in name – remember?), and females don’t have standard heart attacks that males do. He does have the family, and self, history. I’m pretty certain that because I am female, they are not taking my health issues as seriously as they should. I think there’s a bunch of small things wrong with me, that when you look at individually, they aren’t much, but as part of something bigger, it could be dangerous.
Penalt is being tested for congested heart failure, and my mind is spinning like crazy. I can’t parse it. I can’t cope. Try as I might, it doesn’t compute. He’s too strong, too big of a man to be dealing with heart failue.
Then there’s the elephant in the room.
Spitfire’s father is terminal. Whether that means today, tomorrow, next month, or next year, we don’t know. It must be sheer stubborness on his part that he’s still around. I don’t blame him for that – life worth living can be full of pain, but that proves you are living.
I have believed in Euthanasia even before I saw the documentary on Sue Rodriquez. She was a brave woman who had ALS and wanted to end her life before she wasted away to nothing. Yes, I know Stephen Hawking lived till a few days ago after his diagnosis as a young man, but this was a woman with a progressive disease that was going to kill her quickly, and painfully, and she did not want to suffer, nor watch her family suffer as they watched her die.
We allow our animals to be euthanized instead of allowing them to suffer, why must we, as humans, force our sick to suffer when their quality of life is so limited? Pain medications are restricted because of the arguments against prescribing and addiction. Most countries still do not allow assisted suicide, or worse, make patients go through multiple levels of beurocracy in order to even possibly arrange an assisted suicide.
All I can think about when I think of Spitfire is how she’s watching her father struggle to take another breath. How she’s sitting there, listening to the tiniest sounds her father is making, to make sure she has one more moment with her father. How her father must be suffering.
I wish I could be in the UK to give Spitfire some mindquiet, to silence the thoughts going through her head. I’m pretty certain she’s feeling guilt for wanting one more moment with her father, one more interaction, one more smile from him. More guilt for not being able to do anything to relieve his pain, and more.
I’m also certain that her mother is suffering just as much.
I’ve been where Spitfire is. Maybe not in the moment to moment she is going through, but I’ve been there. My father-in-law… My mother-in-law… even my birth-giver when she had a stroke, and then later on, pneumonia. My birth-giver recovered and is still living, and no I don’t want contact with her.
My in-laws….
She went quick. Four months after I was told she was dying – after she told my then boyfriend/now husband, she died of complications to chemotherapy. They say she died from the BIG C, but it was the chemo. I was barely able to compute everything that was happening, but I watch Penalt suffer with the waiting and more. He got to her just as she took her last breaths. His youngest brother missed her by minutes.
My father-in-law suffered for years. We were certain he was finally getting stronger, and then had a massive heart attack, and his defibrillating pacemaker kept on going off. This was the same day he had travelled for 8 hrs to a specialst and back, only to be told the appointment had been cancelled. The stress of that cancelled appointment where he was not told about I’m certain caused his massive heart attack. He lived two blocks from the ambulance.
Within a week, he was talking to my husband, then I got handed the phone, and got a last request from him – that he would love to see another Missus Smith in the family. He had told us as well that he had turned off the defibrilator part of his pacemaker. His next heart attack would be his last. He had a DNR.
Penalt and I were married on leap day that year.
April, the kids saw him. Our youngest has no memory. Nor, do I think, we have pictures of him with his youngest grandchildren. We lived just far enough away that the journey to see him was difficult at best.
December, he called up Penalt to say goodbye.
January….
His second wife woke up to her husband dead in her bed.
We were told, and it was as if we could all inhale again. Remembering it, and inhaled deep. I can remember the feeling of relief us, and all of Penalt’s siblings and our in-laws, even the ex-inlaw, felt knowing that their patriarch was no longer suffering. He was no longer in pain. He was no longer diabetic, or had to take diuretics, or or or or… He was gone, and we could breathe again. We would never have to wait for that call to happen, ever again.
Of course, like all sorts of families after a death, feces hit the circular impellar and went orbital and nuclear. We lost out on getting the family home, which is what my father-in-law wanted, because the second wife pulled a stunt and more, it was taken from us. She had preyed on the mind of a very sick man and he ripped up his original will, not the copy he thought he had, and that meant he died intestate, and we lost everything we should have received. It would have cost us more to get less that what we did get.
But I remember the feeling of relief. Of knowing that this man who had accepted me as his new daughter, and mother of his grandchildren, especially granddaughters (girls were rare for his family – 3 girls in 3 generations until I had two), who laughed, and giggled, and loved his grandkids, and loved automobiles and metalwork and more….
He was gone.
I’d never hear him giggle again.
The kids would grow up not knowing their grandfather except from some pictures we had.
Spitfire is in the middle of all that right now. Every day she has left with her father is a gift. I feel guilty wanting the poor man to be out of pain and free from suffering, but that would mean he was gone.
It will happen, sooner rather than later.
I gave Spitfire a bit of a push this week too. I got her to talk to her mother about getting hospice care and more in to help them care for her father. Anything to make the family’s life easier. This is one of the hardest things they have to do.
I’ve told her that when it does happen, for two weeks, I’ll be doing all her sets. It’s the least I can do, because I can’t be there for her. I can’t be the hold she breaks down to. I can’t be the one who’s shoulder she soaks. I can’t be the one she’s weak in front of, because she has to be strong, oh so very strong, for her mother.
All I can do is try to be there at the other end of discord, and skype, and all the other social media connections we share. Be there, and tell her it’s perfectly alright to be angry, to be sad, to be depressed, to be even glad that her father’s free.
When that horrid day comes, I will loose my dominant. It won’t be a permanent loss, but it will be some time before she can be my dominant again. She may need the consistency of the things we have been doing for months, in order to keep going. To know and see that life does go on.
It may take a week, a month, or a year, but I will have her back. Until then, I hope I will be able to be strong enough to cope with everything thrown at me until she’s ready to claim me again, until she’s ready to say to me “it’s time to be a very special girl again, and be mine.”
I do have a verbal DNR with Penalt. He believes in that if there’s a chance of hope, to keep trying. I would prefer not to suffer. I don’t want to be hooked up to tubes and more. He asked what I wanted to do with my body if I did die. “I’m dead. What happens afterwards, is meh.”
Except Elon Musk has, maybe, just possibly, made it possible to send cremated remains into space. I would love to be made into an actual Stardancer, and join my dust with the stardust.
I had a bit of a tantrum the other night because of Miss Jealousy.
Alright, I went into full cisgendered snarl at Spitfire, when I was spouting off. I know better. I was never truly cisgendered growing up, and being forced into a fully female role through battery by my birth-giver, and more… I still have lots of deprogramming to do.
My emotional arse still smarts from the dressing down Spitfire gave me over what I said, and I deserved it.
Yes, I was mad. I had reasons to be mad. Spitfire did not deserve to be the target of that anger, even indirectly. I think she understood my frustration, anger, and explosion. That doesn’t mean she deserved the brunt of it.
My life is a work of He.art 