Wednesday, March 11, 2020

March 2 2020 - Two weeks post surgery

5:53 AM

Asleep at midnight. Awake at 4:00 AM. This seems to be my new pattern. I wonder how long I can sustain sleeping so little.
Had a dream about a husband, but not Doug: I dreamt that my first husband was driving us somewhere, but in Doug's car. It was raining very heavily.
For some reason, Thing One drove over a road that was covered in water - much more water than it appeared. The car's engine cut out, and we were adrift. I awoke, feeling panicked.
I stayed awake for a few minutes, and then fell back to sleep as soon as the panic subsided.
Cut to our house (Doug's and mine). I was sitting in the living room, and Thing One was somewhere in the back of the house, talking loudly on the phone - about what, I can't remember. It was raining heavily. I kept telling him that we needed to pack some dry clothes into plastic bags so that we'll have something dry to wear after we swim to safety, but he continued his conversation as though nothing was going on. I woke up confused and angry because he wouldn't listen to me.
For a minute.
UPDATE: another snippet of that second dream just came back to me. I was wandering the house, and it was quite literally falling apart: there was an enormous horizontal crack running through the center of every wall of every room. Nothing else in those two dreams makes any sense at all, but I'd have to be a moron not to understand what THAT'S about.
Back to the story: I woke up, confused and angry, and then I was overwhelmed with sadness, because what kind of cruel cosmic joke was THAT?!? I mean, I don't hate or even dislike my first husband (whom I divorced nearly 19 years ago and who is, by the way, VERY much alive and married to his OWN happily ever after), but why am I dreaming about HIM and not the love of my life?
And what in the actual fuck is the meaning of that dream?
Two weeks ago today, I was sleeping peacefully next to my beloved husband, about five minutes from waking up in his arms for what would be the very last time. Ten minutes from bringing him coffee in bed for what was the very last time, and preparing to drive him to the hospital for the surgery that we thought would give us the life we wanted; the surgery that led to his death.
Two weeks. Fourteen days. 336 hours.
Time goes too quickly. In the blink of an eye, Doug will have been gone longer than I even KNEW him. And, at that realization, I can't breathe again.
I've washed all the clothes that were in his laundry basket. I'll never have to do that again. Each day takes me further from the last time we held each other, kissed each other, loved each other. I can still remember the feeling of his arms around me, of the contented sigh I would release every time I woke up feeling him next to me. It's that same sigh you give when you come home from a long trip away: peaceful, grateful to be home, and content. Four years together, and that sigh of relief and gratitude happened EVERY time. I NEVER stopped being grateful for him. I hope he felt the same way about me.
Doug WAS home to me. Without him, I'm homeless. Yes, I have a roof over my head, but my home is forever gone.
And I'm so cold, still. I need him to warm me up, but we all know that's not going to happen. I need him like I need air to breathe and water to drink, but somehow I'm still here, drifting along hopelessly without him, wishing I were wherever he is.
Music, which used to be my refuge, is now the enemy; I heard an Ed Sheeran song in Peggy's hotel the other day, and broke down crying all over again - and not because it was an Ed Sheeran song.
Today, had all gone according to plan, Doug would have been home a full week. He would be resting in the very spot on our sofa recliner where I now sleep but a few hours a night.
Is there a parallel universe in which that's exactly what happened? And if there is, can I switch places with THAT Kathleen?
Today will mark my first, tiny step back into reality: I'm picking up Kellogg from the doggie day care and kennel where he's been boarded for the last two weeks.
Kellogg was crazy about Doug. When I was working, Kellogg would often jump up on the couch and lie there with his head on Doug's lap. He wasn't allowed on the couch without being invited, but that never stopped him; nor did Doug stop him, because he was a softie when it came to all our pets.
Do I have the energy to deal with walking the dog multiple times a day when it's a Herculean effort just to feed the cats and scoop their litter every day? I hope so.
Is Kellogg going to take Doug's absence as badly as Houdini, who still won't go into that back room to eat his damn canned food?
It's time to make coffee that I can't bring to him in bed. It's time to decide what to wear when I venture out to see the grief counselor and then pick up our dog.
It's time to do the routine things that people do every day when, really, I'm dead inside.

11:08 AM

Forgot to mention it yesterday, but when I turned on Doug's phone Saturday morning, there was a voicemail. A voicemail for me, from the Patient Relations/AKA Quality and Risk Management/AKA the "PLEASE GOD, DON'T SUE US" department. A department with whose VP I met, personally, on the morning of the day Doug died. If you'll recall - or, if I forgot to mention it - I met with her that morning to express my anger and frustration at the delay on getting Doug on dialysis when he was so very ill, at the fact that I didn't get a phone call at 3:30 that morning when he started doing downhill, and at the fact that I didn't get a phone call when Doug coded, despite the fact that I KNOW they had my number and they'd promised to call me if his condition changed. I asked for an explanation as to the delay in the dialysis machine, an explanation as to the failure to call me as directed, an apology for all of the above, and evidence of what policies and procedures they'll be changing to assure this NEVER happens to another patient and their family.
Becky - because OF COURSE she's named Becky - wants to speak with me about the post-"visit" survey that they sent to my dead husband. Her voicemail didn't mention ANYTHING about those other issues.
I just returned her call, and it went to voicemail, so I left her one: Hi Becky, this is Kathleen Allen returning your call. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, but I was busy this weekend with my husband's memorial, and didn't check his phone. I'm also puzzled as to why you called HIS phone - you know, the phone of my dead husband, who died in your hospital - rather than mine, when I gave you my number when I met with you on February 17. Please call me back at [sorry, kids, not putting my phone number in a public post on Facebook].
So far, we've got:
Strike 1: a patient who was on the verge of flatlining for three-plus hours while waiting for a dialysis machine - said delay quite possibly contributing to his death.
Strike 2: no phone call when my husband's condition took a turn for the worse at 3:30 AM the morning of the day he died.
Strike 3: no phone call when my husband CODED at 5:30 AM on the morning of the day he died.
Strike 4: the hospital sent A SURVEY to my dead husband's email, asking him how his experience was.
Strike 5: the "PLEASE GOD DON'T SUE US" people, in an apparent attempt to do damage control, called my dead husband's phone to speak to me, instead of calling MY phone, despite my phone number being listed as next of kin AND my having given it to them personally when I met with them to discuss Strikes 1, 2, and 3.
These people CANNOT get it right.

6:49 PM

Saw the grief counselor today, for a whopping 2.5 hours. Got to fill out more paperwork, because that's always fun and I haven't done nearly enough of that lately.
I was zipping right along, filling out my intake form, and there it was: Emergency Contact.
Doug is my emergency contact.
Again, I couldn't breathe.
And the tears, which had been threatening from the moment I walked into her office, overflowed in a torrent. My emergency contact is dead.
I put down my son's name (sorry, Andrew, but you're the only one who lives locally).
I can't say she was helpful, because... well, nothing is. But she did reassure me - so that I could reassure you - that not wanting to live without him is perfectly normal at this point.
Alas, she CANNOT tell me at what point that becomes ABNORMAL.
I am an action-oriented control freak. I'm also mildly anxious on the best of days. My particular flavor of anxiety plays itself out as taking the devil's advocate position to the extreme, and creating increasingly outlandish scenarios that may or may not ever happen. That didn't happen often, but when I DID start spiraling, Doug could snap me out of it.
There's no one else to do that now.
I need tasks and target dates. Open-ended doesn't work for me. But she can't tell me dates or time intervals for when I may actually want to live again. And that not knowing, that ambiguity, that TERROR that this is just who I am now? This empty husk, dead but somehow still walking around? I don't know what to do with that.
Losing Doug has put me into a spiral that I can't break. If you've ever used Excel, you've probably run into a circular reference error; that's when you write a formula that refers back to itself.
The 20 hours I'm awake each day are spent in one big, long string of what are effectively emotional circular references: I need Doug. I can't have Doug. But I need him. But I can't have him. I don't want to sleep alone for the rest of my life, but no one could ever fill Doug's shoes, so I'm going to sleep alone for the rest of my life. But I don't WANT to sleep alone for the rest of my life.
I am so lonely. I am SO lost. I am so PATHETIC. I don't know how to navigate this. Sure, I can be distracted briefly, but it doesn't change anything.
I hate going out in public, because I may (read: WILL) start crying for any reason or no reason at all. And I don't want to be an object of pity, but what's a newlywed widow (newlywidow?) if not an object of pity?
The counselor - we'll call her Grace - suggested I need to stop worrying about the future and focus on today. Clearly, she doesn't know me. That's just not in my wheelhouse.
The good news, if there is any (which, spoiler alert: there's really not) is that Grace thinks I'm doing everything right: allowing myself to feel my feelings, writing about it, not self-medicating with drugs or alcohol. She'd prefer, of course, that I also do little things like eating and sleeping, but she's gonna have to take what she's got.
After I got home from picking up Kellogg from Houndstooth Grooming, Boarding & Doggie Day Care (those folks, BTW? Yet more people who have been SO GOOD TO ME since Doug died), my phone rang. It was the "PLEASE, GOD, DON'T SUE US" folks from Summit. I'm far too emotionally spent right now to recount that conversation. They're going to get back to me next week, and perhaps I'll recount the discussion tomorrow.
Then, I got the mail, which I hadn't bothered to do since Wednesday. Mixed in with the usual assortment of bills and junk mail are a number of cards, which I assume are condolence cards. If you sent one, please understand that I CANNOT open them right now, which means that I can't thank you for them just now. I hope you can forgive me.
You know what else was in the mail? My new social security card, with my new name. Another knife in the gut. There are too many of those coming one after the other.
I have to go feed the dog and the cats. I don't have a clever conclusion, because I'm too busy spinning and spinning and spinning.
Maybe I'll write more later. Maybe not until tomorrow.

9:09 PM

Ordered a few things from InstaCart (cat litter, toilet paper), and decided to order some naan and hummus, thinking that would at least be something healthy that I could eat a bit.
Evidently I forgot to actually ADD the hummus, because I'm so cognitively impaired. So I have plain naan. Yum.
In other fun, we're expecting tornadic storms tonight. No biggie, right? I've got a storm shelter.
Except for one small problem: there is NO WAY that I can wrangle three cats into their carriers, and get all three of them, plus a 50-lb dog, into the storm shelter alone.
It's just another example of how much harder everything is without Doug.

9:20 PM

20 empty hours each day is a lot of time to fill. And for me - prone to overthinking, worst case scenarios, self-loathing, and unable to just be in the moment - that's dangerous.
Before I met Doug, I was happy (ish). I had a really full, enjoyable life. But I didn't know any better.
Now I do.
Having finally had a taste of being REALLY understood, REALLY loved, and experiencing the little joys of intimacy that you can't get any other way than with a true life partner, the thought of going back to the pseudo-life I had before is impossible.
Grace told me that we had quite a love story, what with the proposal on the beach and the dream wedding in Hawaii. And she's not wrong, but... those big, glorious moments were wonderful,but they weren't the source of my happiness with Doug; they were CELEBRATIONS of it.
The source of my happiness with Doug was all the little stuff: Sending each other schmoopy memes. Little jokes we'd share that no one else would understand. Sitting and having coffee together in the morning, talking about politics, or watching a documentary and talking long into the night about it. Taking a trip down memory lane and staying up all night reminiscing and laughing. Just sitting next to each other, holding hands. Running little errands for each other. Buying him a giant Reese's peanut butter cup when he'd had a bad day.
I used to be really selfish in relationships; they were ALL about me and making sure MY needs were being met.
Not with Doug. With him, I was all about doing everything I could for HIM. I mean, SOMETIMES I wanted it to be about me, but mostly, I just wanted to make him happy. And he just wanted to make me happy. And he DID make me happy. Oh, how he made me happy.
Having had that, how am I supposed to live without it now?
Yes, I realize I sound like a broken record. I'm saying some flavor of the same thing over and over again. But it's because I can't get out of this "I need him but I can't have him but I need him but I can't have him" loop. I'm like Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining during that "all work and no play" scene - minus the homicidal crazy. My crazy is self-directed.
I'm writing because Grace said that writing is good. I'm writing here because... I don't know why. I guess I'm trying to be seen? Understood? Hoping that maybe some other woman may read these posts, see herself in them, and at least feel as though she's not alone?
Maybe it's as simple as I'm trying not to disappear.
I am diminished. I'm getting smaller in every way: I've lost ten lbs in the past 12 days; I don't stand tall (to be fair, I'm 5'1", so I guess I never did, but now I find myself pulling my shoulders in to take up less space); my voice - formerly loud and boisterous - is quiet now; I move slowly, as though I'm carrying some invisible pain (ok, so that's true).
All the color has gone out of everything: what used to be beautiful is now meh; what used to be uproariously funny now gets the smallest hint of a chuckle; EVERYTHING is dull. Except, of course, for the constant, sharp pain of missing my love. That's not dull in the least.
I feel as though my grief is a Kathleen-shaped vice, slowly pressing me smaller and smaller every day. Soon, I'll disappear.
And disappearing would be great if it meant that I'd be going wherever Doug is.
But it doesn't mean that. It means simply that, whatever it is that makes me ME, is going to vanish. Maybe it already has.
I need to sleep, but I can't. I need to eat, but I can't.
I want Doug.
I need Doug.
I can't have Doug. Ever again.

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