Blue and fuzzy

One way of describing me today.

For what should be a straightforward day for me in terms of teaching load, today has been a monumental rollercoaster ride which left me feeling utterly frayed around the edges.

Lots of positives, don't get me wrong. Students who, when faced with tasks that need resolving urgently to ensure that they get what they so desperately deserve in terms of their work, step up without complaint and just get on with it, and make me proud to be able to work with them.

Moments where I think I have been able to support and certainly will step in when the next opportunity arises.

Unexpected apologies that mean so much more than when they are received via a bloody good bollocking.

Achieving the right outcome when faced with teenage angst.

Time with my boy researching different bodies of water for a geography project and finding out some really quite interesting facts.

Beating my 10k time from last night by 2minutes and 20 seconds.

Yep, loads of positives.

And yet, I am haunted by the reality of the document I have blipped - my pain diary....5 months worth of it....showing no signs of improvement and on some days, definite deterioration.

I am stuck between the reality of there being no time until next week to get to the docs to really start making a fuss (and thinking that even if I did have time this week, the fuss would, likely as not, not make a difference) and the other reality that I have no one to blame about the current inaction but myself. The knowledge that deep down I am prioritising work over doing something about this and screaming and shouting about it. I think I know what my epitaph will say! I certainly know what a colleague I miss a lot would say - work to live, Sarah, not live to work. However, despite my interim measure of sending my diary to my doctor with a letter, in lieu of me getting there next week (which is when they have told me I have to go) - I have had no response. It's only a week...was kind of expecting a phone call though.

I still have daily moments where I doubt that there is anything wrong with me despite my evidence to the contrary and the fact that I leave a trail of post-it notes and scrawled ramblings in a notebook to remind me of all of the instances during the day. Some days, there's so much that I reach the point of frustration and just cannot be arsed to write it all down.

And with all this going on, with nobody except me and my Doctor knowing the REAL extent of it, I find myself reacting in ways that I normally wouldn't. I find myself feeling beseiged, annoyed, not respected, upset and frankly, a lot of the time today, downright bloody useless, because it seems that whatever I do, it is not enough or it's not the right thing at the right time or for the right person.

And now I feel utterly ridiculous.

I don't want a response - my blip has become a kind of supplement or appendix to that infernal pain diary, because what I don't write in there is what it is doing to me as a person...so please, read on, move on.

Ultimately, I do know that I am stronger than all of this, so I will bounce back, I just wish I could tell one or two people who I think consider me to be just bloody minded at the moment that I'm not, I am just not coping particularly well with this.