Report from Pillville: It's all about me, me, me.

me

The trip with my mom to the blood lab didn't start well. Half-way there I realized I'd forgotten my phone, which brought on a wave of anxiety. I know. First world problems, right?

I wonder what it must have been like for my grandmother out in the country somewhere when she went to look in on her bed-ridden mother at her brother's farm and found that she really wasn't being cared for all that well. I guess she didn't whip out her cellphone from her apron pocket. She carried on.

So I carried on (anxiously) and just as I was about to turn into the blood lab parking lot, that rarely heard Prius chime, warning me that I was very low on gas sounded. Oh great, now I'm going to run out of gas on the way home with my 90-year-old mother in the car without my cellphone. Don't you just love the voices inside our heads and all the worrisome shit they come up with? And of course now that my brain had shifted into that gear, I remembered that on the blood draw the time before last, my mom got horribly nauseated with a brain-cracking headache afterwards and as we were headed home, my mom asked me to drive her to the ER where her blood pressure was found to be dangerously high. Oh great, you idiot asshole, now what if your mom gets sick again and you have to head for the ER and you run out of gas or what if  you're driving home and you need to call 911 and you can't because you forgot your phone, you fool? 

But the blood draw went so smoothly my mother said she didn't feel a thing and the tech doing the draw was wearing a button with a teddy bear (his spirit animal, I'm sure) on it that said "HUG ME!"and when he was done, my mom said, "Okay, I'll take that hug." Oh, no. Mom, he really doesn't want to hug you, said the voice. But he did. He hugged her and his eyes welled up and he told my mom she'd made his day. You're an asshat, Denise.

So my mom felt fine and we got gas and drove to get fro yo and then went home. But before that, as we were walking the mere 20 feet to the car, she made a tiny misstep, not a stumble exactly, just a minuscule something--oh my fucking god, she's falling, oh no--and my brain and my muscles conjoined their anxious efforts so that evil talons of pain clutched my lower back. Now you're fucked up for sure. 

And I kind of am. I almost never take Advil, but I took two this morning before I went to yoga where I pretended to be 90 and stretched the tiniest bit while moving almost imperceptibly and imagining my breath and powers of the universe marshaling forces to heal me. I'm somewhat better. Oh, shut up, Denise. Just shut up.