That would be me. Ha, ha.
I've been through some life changing events, some culminated into what I call my "earthquake".
My earthquake started years ago with the unexpected death of my husband.
Four months later, my Father was diagnosed with cancer #1.
After surgery and radiation, he survived. Until cancer #2, which came 5 years after surgery from cancer #1. Cancer #2 was lung cancer, the cancer was in an inoperable and ultimately fatal. After 35 chemo treatments, his lung collapsed and Dad made the painful decision not to continue with life saving measures and was put in hospice. He passed in 2006.
That's when I was told by others that I was now the sole caregiver for my Mother. That calling in life ended abruptly in 2017 after suffering a heat stroke.
My life at that point, for the next few months, went from crazy to insane as I had to go back to work full time while caring for a family member and working with an attorney for the probate on Mom's estate.
Then, all of a sudden, family left town and I found myself with a home filled with cats and a dog (I took on Mom's cats and dog in addition to the two cats I already had). I still had the full time job, but a big gaping hole in my life and heart where Mom had been.
Given that all of this happened at the same time as the annual peak workload at work was hitting, so everything regarding grieving was set aside to focus on my job. That arrangement worked for a while until 2020 when things shut down and my job took on completely different roles in order to provide service to the staff who needed it. By this time I had gone numb in the grieving process and put myself in psychiatric care and therapy. The shutdown changed not only how I worked but how I received care. This meant I had to come back to the office and work, meeting with people face to face to maintain and fix equipment that didn't want to function properly. The medical care went virtual.
My coworker became ill with non-Covid issues and I found myself handling the peak season by myself, without my more experienced coworker there to manage the workload. While I enlisted assistance from others who were starting to return to the office, the responsibility of knowing I had to manage the workflow between myself and my coworkers, handle phone calls for equipment issues that were continuing to occur and also continue to process the refresh of equipment that had been started just as the shutdown first began. All of that while grieving the loss of my ill coworker who never recovered from her medical issues. Oh, and I still had cats to take care of at home, after finding homes for the dog and one of the cats, two of the most senior cats had passed away so I had 4 cats still at home.
Sleep went out the window, my diet consisted largely of chocolate, I was working overtime hours then going home to feed the cats and sleep. Rinse and repeat.
We had managed to get to a stopping point on the refresh, however there were other scheduling issues that kept postponing my vacation.
You can see where this is going, right?
I was able to take two weeks off of work the week before Halloween and the week following. The day after I came back to work in November I received a spiritual experience that indicated to me my coworker had passed. It was announced by her family two weeks later
It was when I took the two weeks off that the earthquake had hit and I was barely functioning at work. I took pictures and video of how I did the work that I did and shared it with my manager at work in case I didn't make it back. By that time I was not sleeping, not eating and waking up literally feeling like my brain was producing smoke from my head from the lack of processing I was able to do during sleep.
I went grocery shopping to stock up on food, went home for two weeks and went through the repeated processes of sleeping, eating, taking doctor prescribed medications and taking vitamins. I couldn't leave my home for the first week.
I'll share the post I wrote on the second week to share what I recorded the second week.