I've been out of work for eighteen months now. Even if I had a 'normal' routine while working, I've devastated it with my new situation. You see, I have nothing to be ready for. When I look at my calendar here on Monday March 10th, my next thing is a session with my therapist on Thursday morning. The next thing? Another session with my therapist in two weeks. I have no reason to get up at any particular time, no reason to be clean and fresh, no reason to 'get ready' for anything except two appointments in two weeks.
Before this current derailment of my life I had to have a way to get ready. I method that I don't follow any longer. Right now here is my morning routine:
- Wake up between 5 AM and 7 AM
- Get a cup of coffee and sit down at my computer
- Turn some music on, load Chrome, and check my email
- If its after 6:30 AM part of my email will be the New York Times morning newsletter. That gives me my news update as well as links for their games.
- Regardless of having the newsletter or not, I play three New York Times games (partially for fun, partially as a way to assess my mental acuity
- The mini crossword
- Connections
- Strands
- Once I'm done with the games, I move on to social media
- Threads, where I keep up with the world in general
- Facebook, where I keep up with family and friends
- Once I'm done with social media (and have saved back several funny and/or political memes) I load up Discord, where I have two profiles
- The first profile is Calvin. I connect with my brother's political server and several other servers that I monitor for information
- The second profile is Caitlyn where I connect with the D+X Institute server and several other servers that I monitor for sexually fun content
- When my Discord use is caught up, I go through my Caitlyn web sites
- Checking both of my blogs
- Checking my Tumblr blog
- Checking CYOA
- Social media
- Bluesky
Lunch comes around 11:10 AM. That takes us to around Noon, then I shower every other day at that time and decide what to do with the afternoon. YouTube? Watch a movie? Continue to write? Watch a lined up television or streaming show?
That takes me to dinner which is around 5:30 PM. Help set up dinner, eat, clean up afterward. That gets me to around 7:00 PM. I rarely write at that time and instead focus on streaming entertainment or on the very rare circumstance, play an online game with my brother and/or my nephews.
That takes me up until 11:00 PM where I settle down and go to sleep.
Over the last 18 months, I was fine with that. But something happened yesterday that I'm getting more and more excited about. Yesterday after I did my Caitlyn social media, I felt like I should be doing something more. As in 'getting ready for work' more. It made me sit back and try to remember what my mornings were like before leaving work.
Before this dark period, I'd get up around 7 or 8 AM. I'd do about half of the morning ritual and jump in the shower at 10 AM. A quick Lunch followed by me packing my dinner and heading to work. I'd get home around 11:00 PM and watch an episode of TV/streaming or a movie, then get into bed and sleep by 1:00 AM.
Even my days off were filled with far more than they are now as I'd do the things I couldn't do while at work. Shopping, prepping my lunch/dinners for work, banking, laundry, and any other tasks that had built up.
I remember that my YouTube viewing was far more limited than it is now. I.e. I'd watch only the best of what my subscribed channels had to offer. Now, with nothing pulling me away from my computer, I watch almost everything that's produced by my YouTube subscriptions. I'd try to keep up with one or two 'new' streaming shows like Star Trek or Marvel or Star Wars content as they'd come out on different days. So say Thursday was the new Star Trek and Tuesday was the new Star Wars show. In between I'd watch some other newish content but it would take me like a month to get through 10 episodes of something. Now? Hell I watched all of the last season of The Morning Show on AppleTV+ in a couple days. I think it took me all of three weeks to watch all 7 seasons of The Rookie.
But yesterday I felt like I was waiting for something. I was waiting for something to spur me on to something else. Getting ready for work, doing laundry (I always did my laundry on Sundays when working), going shopping.
Here's what I think is happening. I'm now going so long in between migraines that my normal body clock is starting to get winded up again. Before I quit, I was always waiting for what's next. Both in the short term like waiting for lunch or waiting to get ready for work or waiting to do my laundry or waiting to do my shopping, and the long term like waiting for pay day or waiting for College Football season or waiting for a trip to visit friends.
I'm currently on day 10 of not having a migraine. Before that was a 4 day moderate migraine. Before that was 16 days without a migraine. 4 days of a mild to moderate migraine preceded that and 8 migraine free days preceded that.
To show how big of a deal this is, consider that I both count my migraine days and migraine days that I believe I could work through. I want it down to 1 or 2 days that I couldn't work from migraines as I would earn one 'sick' day each month. Assuming that one of the non working migraine days might come on the weekend, I think I could keep up with it. In January I had 8 migraine days that I couldn't have worked through. in February I had 3 migraine days that I couldn't have worked through. Hell, I only had 9 migraine days at all. And now a third of the way through march and I haven't had a single migraine day. (Technically the 1st of March was my first migraine free day, but that includes a postdrome bad headache).
I mean.... FUCK how close am I to returning to work!!??
Over the past few days I've been going back and forth with how I'd return to work. Going back to the hospital would be the easiest job to get, but I did hate that job. Going back to the prisons as a floor nurse would be easy and I'd probably be able to go back to the facility where I worked last as a nurse manager. Or I could even look to get back into the prison as a manager, but I'd have to wait for them to list those jobs. I interviewed for a couple near the end of my time at the hospital and bombed them. Although it was mainly migraines that kept me from having successful interviews.
As I find my mind swirling around with all the advantages and disadvantages of those possibilities, I have to stop and add it to my 'worry' list. I.e. around Noon each day I give myself time to sit back and do all of my worrying. Mom's health, my health, my finances, and my friends have been most of my worries. Those worries are all in the past or in the present, but now I have to put in a worry of what to do in the future.
I've been circling so much on this that I'm already car shopping!
Now, let's take this through the line of thought to shows just how far in the future that is.
I'm ALMOST good enough to return to work. I see my neurologist at the end of March. I'm hoping that by adding another treatment we might be able to knock one last non working migraine days off and be ready to return to work. I'd want two months of results before I decide to go back to work as I don't want a few good months to make me think I'm ready before I'm actually proven ready. So let's say April and May go well. I get one of my docs (my main doctor or one of my neurologists) to write up that I'm ready to return to work and I start job searching in early June.
I'd have to pick which job(s) that I want to interview for as two of them should be rather quick and the other might take a few months. Let's say I pick one of the quick routes. Applying for a job, interviewing for the job, getting approved and hired and finally getting a start date. That all will probably take about a month. So say I start in July (ironically I started my first nursing job in July... of 2013). I'd want to work four a couple months before I decide to go back into debt for a vehicle. That's July and August. Only then, if everything is going well, would I allow myself to start shopping for my next car.
But I've been so excited about even POSSIBLY being that close to returning to work that I've done most of my pre-shopping. I'd want to get a 2024 or 2025 Lincoln Nautilus. I'd ideally get a used one with low miles in the Black Label trim. But I could just as easily and happily slip into one with the Reserve III trim. I'd want either the blue interior with the Reserve III or the brown interior with the Black Label. So for the Reserve III trim, I could have black, white, or blue paint while the Black label would be black or white only. I've compared these vehicles to Lexus RX, Cadillac XT4, XT5, and the all electric Lyriq or Optiq. All of those had to many drawbacks when compared to a new (or slightly used) Nautilus. And according to the prices now, I could get into a slightly used Nautilus (with trade in) for about $800 a month.
You see why I have to push that away thought, right? Buying a car would be five or six months away from now. What will President Trumps tariff and trade wars do? I mean, the Nautilus is manufactured in China! Do the prices go up by 20%?
I'm just practically vibrating with happiness and excitement! WORK!!!
I even need to start thinking about visiting with my friends A & E. Before I was in no hurry as all I had is time. But if I'm going back to work in a few months, I'll start with very little time off and I'll be at the bottom of the seniority lists.....
See... I need to stop thinking about this. I need to get two or three steps closer and that begins by seeing my neurologist in three weeks time!
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