Kris Rusch has an excellent post about life rolls, those moments in your life when one phone call can knock you in the gut and send you to your knees because something huge and bad has happened which puts the writing on hold and changes your life. I read it at the time, acknowledged it as truth (I’ve had some ongoing affects from work drama over the past few years), and didn’t think much about it.
Then a few days later we started on a saga that was, effectively a life roll.
For me, most of the life rolls I’ve encountered haven’t come from phone calls. Some have, such as my mother’s final cancer. The starkest life roll I had was when the husband had his ski accident and I was on the slope above him, looking down to see him clutching at his shoulder and rolling around in pain. Almost as stark but more drug out were the son’s first struggles with Crohn’s Disease when he was sixteen. We’ve lived a life of compromise with Crohn’s since then, a whirling circle of compromises with the Remicade treatment protocol and negotiations to make it work. We’d finally gotten to where he could do the typical Remicade administration, which changed it from a day-long slog to a quick few hour infusion.
Well, so much for that. This life roll started with the son (now twenty-five) telling us he couldn’t keep any food down and had abdominal pain. Went to the ER the first time. Got meds, came home. The next evening DH had to take the son to the ER and he ended up being admitted. That hospitalization lasted several days, but we thought we had a handle on it.
Uh, no. Five days after that discharge, DS started throwing up as I was getting ready to go to work. I got that same feeling I’d had on the ski slope watching the DH writhing in pain. I told him we were going to the ER, called work and told them I’d be there but I didn’t know when, called DH and begged for help, then went to the ER and waited until DH got there, then headed for work. That ushered in five days of work climaxing with an emergency surgery which turned out to be much more major than we’d thought it was, ending with a really rough hospital recovery that kept DS in the hospital for almost two weeks. He’s at home now, and recovering well, but, overall, it’s been a really rough four weeks for the three of us.
Long-term impact is that not much writing work has gotten done in those four weeks. I’ve made some stabs at progress but the worry has shut a lot down. Meanwhile, work drama has continued apace, and it’s probably been a good thing that I’ve been detached from it. Still, it’s fed into things.
The brain is starting to stir again. Nonetheless, it means I’m really behind the eight ball with regard to website updates, with writing, and with getting on with my life. I hope to be able to move on from here, though, and be back to writing work with a vengeance.
Changes need to be happening and they will be soon. But still, yikes. So much to do.
