The Way Things Never Stop

The end of 2022 was what we might call interesting. The start of 2023 is, thus far, the same. Not in a great way, either.

I’m never shy to admit to my stack of chronic illnesses. Around October last year, one of them came front and center to remind me that my baseline ‘ok’ status sits on top of a shaky house of cards. A medical device I rely on was invisibly broken, and I was sick and barely functional before I realized what was going on.

The next few months were brutal. While I fully support the Canadian medical system, I know first-hand that it isn’t perfect. It didn’t threaten my livelihood, and I was never at risk of not receiving care at all, but there was a lot of waiting and I had to follow up and push my case constantly to make sure the gears were still turning. I called doctors every day, got an expensive rental for essential medical equipment, got sent to a shady test facility to prove I still needed that equipment, discovered the facility was a scam and had to get a new referral from my doctor to get into a better facility, waited forever on test results, got the results and realized even the rental wasn’t actually fixing my problem, and got a new prescription.

Problem solved! The world is back to normal! Everything’s good, right?

Not exactly.

You can’t pick up the thing I needed at the drugstore, and the supply and demand situation isn’t great. I’m told that if I wanted to replace my original unit for any reason other than it being broken, there would be a waitlist of 300 people. Thankfully (?) because it was an emergency case, I just had to wait a few weeks to get an appointment to get one.

A few weeks, during which, I caught the flu. Or something. It wasn’t covid, but there are a lot of weird things going around lately since our immune systems have been taking it easy behind our myriad of anti-pandemic measures. Whatever it was, it sucked, and I was living under a cloud of anxiety that it would linger and I’d have to reschedule that essential appointment. That would be a bonus level of awful because right after that appointment I was supposed to be leaving to visit my family for Christmas. It’s a 9-hour drive to get there, and I only visit twice a year.

Thankfully I did recover on time – mostly. The virus left me with a nasty ear infection and a lingering cough that would bother me for a few weeks afterward, but I was assured that was normal. It didn’t help that the night before the appointment someone in my apartment building set a fire in the parking garage, and I had the pleasure of climbing down 14 flights of stairs with 3 cats arranged in a pair of carriers and a specialized backpack, but I made the appointment the next day and the trip went off without a hitch as we drove north just barely ahead of a giant snowstorm that would close the highways, ground flights, and trap trains over the holiday weekend.

DOMS from the fire alarm event caught up with me that weekend. By Christmas, I could barely stand up to get the cough drops or the ear drops or my regular meds. I try not to let my illnesses define me as a person, but there are some days when you struggle with those kinds of things, and months of fighting the issues every day made it more difficult than usual. My body sucked. My luck sucked. The doctors sucked. The world sucked. It was a good time to be home with family and a reminder that not everything in the world is terrible. At least it was temporary. At least it would pass.

Onto 2023.

I was on the mend. I got back home to my apartment, my cats, and my roommate. Given this is the first post where I’ve mentioned them I feel the need to say that I only have two cats and the third is hers, as if this spares me the crazy-cat-lady status. I had a few good days of trying to get back into a more productive work schedule and dreams of having the energy and the spoons to try the latest BeatSaber music pack. I actually had a few good days.

Then someone straight up broke the fire alarm. After a regularly occurring false alarm, the fire department forgot to reenable the elevators. The building staff tried to fix it themselves, and… well, having it turn itself on and off every two minutes for over an hour isn’t great for someone with anxiety. Especially not when I live on the 14th story of a high-rise and the elevators aren’t working. There was no escape. I can only imagine how the cats felt.

Another day goes by and I need to call my psychiatrist. My medication is disagreeing with me, and I’ve found some studies suggesting that it could be worsening the condition I needed the medical equipment for last year and possibly explain the need for a new prescription. Except – whoops! – I’m no longer registered as a patient! Apparently, we had been operating on a system where I had to have a follow-up booked every six months, and since their admin staff hadn’t automatically booked the follow-up like they usually did, and I was completely oblivious to this requirement, I’d been kicked out. Time to get back to our regularly scheduled slew of phone calls and follow-ups.

This is when, nerves already frayed, I notice that my work laptop’s trackpad is sticking weirdly up above the rest of the case. I vaguely remember hearing this was a bad thing and consulting slack. The particular model I was issued is known to have a battery swelling problem, and swollen batteries on laptops have been known to catch fire or randomly explode.

Queue a flurry of after-hours messages with my manager (who is an amazing person and has been incredibly supportive through all of this madness) and the next morning we go to the IT office for our otherwise completely remote workplace, where I get the laptop replaced by a newer model that is thus far not known to be a fire hazard. It’s going to take a day to set it up and install all of the dev software I need, but it’s not going to explode, so I’ll take the tradeoff.

Except I can’t set it up at all, because some third-party SSO provider we use is erroring when I try to log in – which I need to do just to start the process. Nobody else seems to be having this problem, so I spend most of the day checking status pages and exchanging messages with IT to see if I’ve gone insane. Then after a few hours, I get about 6 MFA messages at once and more constantly through into the evening, but hey, at least it’s working.

The next day the power goes out at my apartment, which has never happened for more than a minute in the several years I’ve lived here. It only lasted a few hours, but having to explain that there was yet another problem cost me more spoons than I had, and I still feel burnt out today because of it all. Then I got a notice that they’d changed the keys to the main entrance because of a problem tenant, so I couldn’t go out without getting new ones.

The way things never stop long enough for me to get my footing is exhausting, and just telling people about my day feels like making excuses for not being functional no matter how much of the problem at hand isn’t my fault. It’s exacerbated by the unending combo of unlucky punches that have happened here as much as the anxiety disorder on my list of diagnoses. It’s brutal.

My situation has been improving over time. As things go, not being able to work because of technical problems is a much smaller issue than having your health massively decline because of faulty but essential medical equipment. The issue is that none of these problems exist in a vacuum, and I haven’t had more than a few days of respite between them to feel like anything is getting back to normal.

It’s got me questioning whether this is just what normal is and whether I’m just weak for not being able to handle this every day. I keep telling myself no, but I really don’t know what to think, and I’ve been told that writing things out can help you see them as if they’re happening to someone else. This post is some combination of venting, expressing the challenges of chronic illness, and just laying out this madness in writing so I can see it all outside of my brain. It’s a lot to deal with. It’s a back-breaking pile of straw.

Quotes and adages that survive for generations do so because they resonate with people, either day to day or during the memorable parts of life, good or bad. A line I like that’s often passed around in mental health circles is a good example, and a good mantra, for these times in life.