The up-swing

Amazing the things that can happen in a week. And the huge effects it can have on one's mood and outlook.

My Teta (read grandmother in Arabic) is home from hospital. She had a lumbar puncture, which drained some of the excess CSF in her brain. And has resulted in some very positive albeit slight improvements.

I finished my group presentation in the course I am taking, just one final paper to complete (I am procrastinating a little on completing it) and 3 classes left.

I have actual food in house more often than not now, not only beverages :)

It's not pitch black outside at 4:30pm anymore!! I actually didn't have to turn my headlights on in my car until 7:43pm yesterday!

And I am feeling great!
It's such a turn around.
I was tired and grumpy, and sick just a little while ago!

So I'm looking to celebrate!
Life is sweet.
God is good (well, God is always good, I just wasn't paying attention for a while).

I HATE feeling helpless

I think my parents were extra-diligent to make me independent and self-sufficient. Maybe it was foreshadowing for the future they knew was inevitable.
Then when my parents' divorced I was totally parentified, and had to flex my "be in charge" skills.

And they did a good job, I am good at it.

I don't know how to ask for help, because even when I wanted/needed it, there was nobody around who could help.
So I learned how to figure things out on my own. How to take care of things.
That is my job. My role.

I think that's also why my mom relies on me so much in facilitating the care of my grandmother.

Here's where my steps start to falter. I feel so helpless, and I don't know how to deal with that. My mom is stressed, and over-reacting (as she is apt to do), and my whole family is looking at me to take charge.
And I'm trying, but what can I do?

Sometimes I think if only I had followed through with becoming a doctor I could be more helpful now. But then, I might have been just as helpless, it's not like I had planned to be a geriatric psychiatrist or neurologist.

My grandmother was admitted to hospital today, for hopefully what will prove to be a short stay. She had a CT scan done when we brought her to the emergency room 2 weeks ago, and it showed some hydrocephalus(sp?).
So now she needs some more tests, and possibly a spinal tap to help drain the excess CSF.

It's funny how I expected to spend the bulk of my life working in a hospital, and how I never minded them, and now I hate hospitals.

Her room stinks of urine.
She seems so small, and distraught by all the strangeness around her.
A different stranger (part of the nursing staff and medical team) keeps coming in to ask the same questions.

I can hear the others in other rooms, and their loved ones, trying to help, trying to bring some routine and normalcy into this abnormal existence.

And I feel totally helpless. I can't do anything when she complains of pain, because she can't tell me where it hurts. I can't tell the doctors what to do, because they're already doing what they can, and what they should. Well, that and they know more than me :)

I don't know how to help reassure my mom or my aunt, so I just snap at them to hold it together. Tell them this is not the time or the place to behave this way. Then I feel guilty. It's not fair, that's how they're handling what's going on, they have a right to their own coping strategies.

So I am left feeling helpless, and I hate it.

Karma

Do you ever notice how people always only ever talk about Karma in a negative sense?
They seem to only notice when things are not going well.

I am no exception, I was over at a friend's last night, and I guess said something about having bad Karma several times - and well I was called on it.

Now the other weird thing about my perceptions of Karma is that it's not overarching, it seems to be localized to certain areas. However by definition, Karma is a general overarching principle - you get back what you put out.

So I technically have good Karma for some things - I seem to win a lot of tickets to sporting events - and pretty good seats too.
And I seem to have very good Karma with strangers. Just the other week a gas station attendant bought me a lottery ticket, because he felt I looked lucky, and I didn't want to buy one.

I have good Karma for finding people to spend time with - I am never alone for too long when I don't want to be.

Here's the other inconsistency, Karma's suppose to be about what you put out there. Well, I'm pretty sure that I'm a consistent predictable person, so shouldn't my Karma be consistent across all genres?

I guess Karma is definitely not an exact science - if a science at all :)