stuff

Things have been pretty all over the map lately. At end of Nov, right before Thanksgiving, my grandfather started to seriously go down hill. This year has been fairly touch n go with him as he entered stage 3 Alzheimer's Disease which he has had for about the past 10 years, he's also 90 years old. And so the family stress level started to increase significantly. And I stopped being able to read.

The family begins to conglomerate from various parts of the world, and Thanksgiving happens pretty uneventfully. A week later my grandfather passes. With that act I am rather ok. I feel he had a nice long life and really to me he was 'dead' a few years ago when he stopped really interacting with the world and being cognizant. What was left was not really him at all. that is my personal opinion on the matter anyway.

With his passing comes extreme upset in normal family routine and actions and I have to play "normal" and social and all the things that I have a very difficult time doing in high stress situations, but I manage to pull it off. 4 days, 4 solid days. Managed even to get high compliments from my mother on my behavior. Amazingly enough as she can be rather critical about stuff like that. And that was with periods with out my SD J due to him not being able to be in certain places where things were going on. But I did it.

That obligation ended and I promptly crashed. Rather hard. The noise came back in full force. I couldn't read. Soon I couldn't even focus enough to watch movies. I started zoning in and out multiple times a day, loosing lots of time and not being able to do certain things because of this. I had to cancel obligations because I couldn't manage to do them. My family had to be called in help me out as happens when I start crashing badly since self care starts to go down hill and I can't manage to figure out what to cook so I start not eating enough which causes other problems. My psych meds started to get played with to see if that would help. My migraines got a lot worse. So those meds started to get messed around with too to see if any improvement could be found. One of the new psych meds started to we think actually make my migraines worse as well which did not help.

In the midst of this I learned that one of my very favorite dogs belonging to a friend was dying. Which was very upsetting. And I started getting rather paranoid about my own dog J and on every walk seeing him stumble and imagining his leg was going to shatter due to bone cancer and he would be dead. When I know logically that was no happening, I still am worrying about it.

And then of course we have Christmas coming up and the stress that that entails with familial obligations and everything about it that I don't like.

But yesterday I was finally able to watch some movies. And spend some time at my parent's house without getting really stuck in my head and having the noise bug me too much. And I was able to follow through on a new project research beginnings. And today I was able to be out with a friend and her family and that was overall pretty ok. And I learned some disappointing news and some more really upsetting news (that my friend's dog who is doing badly has a date at the vet for Sat and he will not be coming back from that appt) and I was able to handle it ok. So that is good. Maybe the med increase and changes are helping as in the timeline of how that generally works it would be about now that I would be seeing any positive improvement if it was going to help at all.

Now it's just managing to get through Thursday and Friday without falling back again. Thursday is family stuff with Christmas Eve (we don't really do anything on Christmas day in my family, it's all on the eve) and Friday is saying the final 'good bye' to the dog who I care very much about.