I have several personal rules for this blog.
- I try to remain upbeat at all times. It’s why I didn’t post much after the Iowa floods.
- I minimize talking about my health problems. It can be depressing and overwhelming.
- I almost never talk about my day job. I believe in the separation of work and life whenever possible.
I’m probably going to break all three rules in this post.
I’m feeling blue.
The reason I’m feeling blue is I’m having more problems with migraines than ever. If I count from Saturday to Friday of last week, I had four separate migraine events. That’s the new terminology for them: “Migraine events.” They’re not “just headaches.” The latest research is showing them to be neurological in nature (um, duh!) and one article I read recently in the August issue of Scientific American suggests that they may be related to epilepsy.
I’d like to go 30 days without seeing my primary care physician. As it is, I’m seeing him so often that all the office ladies know me by name. I’m greeted with, “Oh, no, dear. Not again.”
No. I can’t take Imitrex. I had the cardiac reaction to imitrex, so no triptans for me anymore. I’m stuck with heavy duty narcotics, which I hate taking because they knock me out when I’m lucky, and just make me groggy and loopy in addition to being in pain when I’m not, and lifestyle changes which are easier said than done.
No, having a chiropractic adjustment doesn’t help when I have a migraine. It’s very helpful for more run of the mill tension headaches. I’ve been getting enough of them to fill in between migraines that I’m beginning to feel made of pain of one sort or another.
My biggest issue right now is job stress. I don’t mention my employer by name partly because it doesn’t really matter who I work for from a standpoint of this blog. Partly though, because they’ve just put out rules about how one should behave in one’s personal blog, and quite frankly, given the vagueness of the rules, but the emphasis on not making the company look bad, I fear that actually mentioning my employer’s name could put me in bad graces in light of that policy.
Besides - this blog isn’t about them. It reflects only my views, not theirs. I don’t work for anyone in the knitting industry, and so there’s no point in talking about them beyond mentioning I have a day job.
Like most gen X-ers (and I despise that categorization, but in this case it’s accurate), I work to live. I don’t live to work. When I’m not at work, my job, shouldn’t exist. That’s the definition of work/life balance in my book: I go home and leave work at work.
That’s just not happening right now. I’ve got too much job related stress. Part of the stress is that one of my department’s programs is really in a big crunch and the other programs are barreling down that path not far behind it, so I never really feel like everything’s under control and being handled properly. Part of the stress is that I’m an overachiever and I feel like I’m failing because my migraines are taking me out of work, so then I stress out even more.
I stress out. I eat poorly. I drink cola instead of tea. I don’t feel like I can leave my desk at work because there’s just too much work to do to take a break. I have trouble sleeping because I can’t wind down from the day’s events.
My game, World of Warcraft, feels like a job unto itself. A job away from job, if you will. It’s supposed to be a game, something I do for fun, but my friends are getting into raiding and it’s stressful and feels like an obligation, not a joy.
I’m under orders from both my doctor and my chiropractor to get up and leave my desk at work twice a day as a minimum, and I’ve put it on my calendar as a meeting to try to avoid double booking things. My boss is asking permission to hire another person to help even out my work load.
I’ve withdrawn from graduate school. (I got accepted to grad school to get my MBA, by the way.) I’m taking a month off my game. I’m not doing anything but resting and trying to stay on track.
Eat right. Exercise. Get more sleep. Worry less. Maybe even knit. Maybe even blog about knitting.
Beyond that, I don’t know what else I can do.