What a Week!

This week started out with a bit of a bang. I’m not sure how things will progress with my nephew. I talked to him again last night, and I’m trying to get him to understand that while I fully support him, I also want what’s best for him. It’s all very complicated, and I’ll be on his side, but he also needs to understand that he needs to try to work through this with his family. There are options for him, whether it’s his aunt or his great aunt (my aunt), while I don’t think she will fully understand, my aunt won’t let him be put out in the cold. She has a good heart. If she knows my nephew’s parents are mistreating him, she’ll step in where she’s needed. I’m pretty sure I need to do some research on how to best handle the situation myself. I’ll be honest, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by all of it, and I want to do the right thing. He does not need to have to go through what I went through when I was his age. At least he understands what his feelings are. I didn’t until much later, or at least I didn’t acknowledge my feelings until much later.

Besides dealing and trying to help my nephew, I am also very busy at work. I have a public program today in which I’ll be moderating a panel of experts. I have to decide first thing this morning what I will wear. I always take time to be very thoughtful about what I wear to things like this. However, I’m running out of clothes. The dryer at my apartment building is broken and can’t be fixed until the twentieth, so I’m running low on clean clothes. Thank goodness I’m a clothes whore, and I have plenty of clothes to choose from, but let’s just say, they better fix it on the twentieth because it’s going to come down to the wire, and I despise going to the laundromat. Also, some of my clothes are now too big because of the weight I’ve lost.

This afternoon, we will interview the first of six candidates for our open curator position. Apparently, I’m leading off with the first question. For the rest of the week we will be conducting interviews, and I believe the last one is Monday. We’ll meet on Tuesday to decide who we’ll invite on campus for final interviews. I find this hiring process very stressful. I have a huge fear that we’ll pick the wrong person. I just have to have faith that through the interviews and the judgement of the hiring committee, we’ll find the right person.

In addition to all of that, I also have to prepare for the next public program set for November 3. I’ve been so busy that I’m a bit behind on the preparations. Monday, I had to teach a class, and yesterday I had two medical appointments. The first one was for blood work ahead of my quarterly doctor’s visit next week. The nurses stuck me four times before they could find a vein. My arms are so sore and somewhat bruised. Thank goodness I’ll be wearing a long sleeve shirt today to cover up all of that. My other appointment was with my neurologist to discuss the sensitive and embarrassing issue I spoke about last week. Thankfully, she understood the issue and came to the same conclusion as my PCP. She’s adjusted my medicines to try to take care of the problem. Poor woman, she’s seeing patients virtually but she looked a bit rough. She was definitely not as put together as usual. Whatever is wrong, she’s out for a couple of weeks, but still seeing patients virtually from home.

My neurologist is also trying to help me with some issues I’m having with my sleep medicine people. Because of that, I got some snarky (i.e. bitchy) messages from the sleep clinic, which ignored much of what we’d discussed at my last appointment or the notes from the respiratory therapist I saw last week. I’ll respond to the messages, but I need to calm down first. I am also going to ask my PCP if it’s possible to send me to the sleep clinic at the University of Vermont. While I have every confidence in the people at the Headache Clinic at Dartmouth, I barely have any confidence in those at the Sleep Clinic down there. They never followed up after I initially got the CPAP, and when I contacted them about the issues with my trigeminal neuralgia, I was told I was supposed to have seen them four times before then. Not only did that not inspire confidence, but the way they are jerking me around about trying out various sleep masks seems a colossal waste of time.

So this week, I seem to be destined to be worried, aggravated, and busy all week long. I hope and pray the week improves, but I don’t see my prayers being answered on this.