Category — Health

Let’s see how life has been at the Bahm Shelter lately:

My OB/GYN confirmed with a blood test that I’m smack dab in the middle of menopause. Now I didn’t particularly want to have any more children, and I don’t particularly want to be 20 again (even though babies smell delicious and I miss my abs), but this was not welcome confirmation. I am losing possibilities.

For the next year or two while a new building is going up, my work group moved to a new location in a … what would you call it tactfully? … low-income urban area with an intimate familiarity with sirens and blue lights. I’m leaving my nice jewelry at home these days because I don’t want to be mugged in the parking lot.

I blew three days on my diet, starting with not reading the menu carefully at a friend’s birthday celebration and eating the food anyway (oh GOD the Fuji rolls were good at the sushi house — best damned fried tidbits stuffed with cream cheese I’ve ever eaten). In the only good news of the day, I still managed to lose 4.8 pounds this week somehow. Guess all the guilt I suffered the rest of the week made up for a few excesses.

And the worst of all, I really can’t talk about in detail yet because I have an icepick in my heart and a 1,000-pound weight on my chest. My 18-year-old moved out to live with her 21-year-old lover and (I hope) attend college over there in another state. She called as she was leaving, while I was at work today. She is tired of being treated like a child and wants to pursue her dreams. I was flabbergasted, but I managed to tell her I was terribly sad she didn’t think she could talk to me openly, and I told her I loved her and hope she stays safe and happy. I said I believe she’s making a mistake by walking away from $35,000 in college scholarships (one was recently increased). But I also said it was her mistake to make.

I really don’t know what to do with the rest of the night, to be honest. Or this week. Or this year.

As I sit here in my spacious cubicle — surrounded by an Operation game, a ginormous stackout of kidney beans, photo frames now holding closeups on various rocks, a quart of cranberry juice, streamers, and a desk and floor strewn with kidney beans and pink-tinted fish tank gravel (for “stones”) — I am reminded that what goes around, comes around.

See, I helped decorate a co-worker’s cubicle when she returned to the office after a nasty bout of pinkeye. Today, when I got back from three days off after my lithotripsy for a big kidney stone, she returned the favor. In spades.

That’s literal — they included a toy shovel to help “move things along.”

See their wicked handiwork below.

Technorati Tags: lithotripsy, office prank, cubicle decoration, kidney stone

Check out the pollen piling up in drifts in my office parking lot yesterday. My eyes are getting puffy and gritty just looking at it. Allergy medicine, anyone?

Technorati Tags: pollen, gritty eyes, allergies