All You Zombies

Not sure when I wrote this. Maybe last night? Maybe the night before?

Sigh.

It's a full moon tomorrow. The myth about full moons is that people go crazy, right? I already work in a mental hospital and I could tell you stories about what full moon nights are like there. Luckily I'm not working on a full moon night, but one of my friends is and she texted me that all hell had broken loose earlier in the night.

The hospital is packed to capacity with children who are brought in because they are suicidal or homicidal. Right now, the balance is tipped toward homicidal and packing in a bunch of aggressive, angry adolescents together is not a good thing. Any fool could tell you that, but the doctors that continue to push in admissions don't care. They're a phone call away, not actually at the hospital, so they're removed from the consequences of their decisions for the most part. The rest of us are not so lucky.

Anyway like I said, I'm off tonight, so I don't care. I go in, I do what I can, and when I'm done with my shift, I try very carefully to wipe the dust of the place off of my feet. That is easier said than done, of course, but I try. That is what I have to do to preserve my own mental health. If I mentally carried home every abused, violent, suicidal child...I would be a mess.

I'm glad to work with the older kids. Some of them, I want to say, look, you're in a shitty situation but hang on. In a couple of years, you'll be a legal adult and then you can get the hell away from the parent or guardian that is making your life a living hell. Some of them, I want to say: Get a job and get out now. Some of them, I want to say: If you're on the way out, then take out whomever did this to you too. Call them out.

Because if I've learned anything, it's that no child gets to this point unless an adult has done something (often times many things) horrific to them.

In the past six months, I've met children whose parents have tried to murder them. I've met children who have been locked in rooms for days. I've met children who have been sexually abused by their fathers and by friends of their fathers. I've met children who have been trafficked, pimped out by their families. I've met children who are legitimately mentally ill and whose parents refuse to medicate them or who take the medication and ramp up the doses until their children are zombies.

That's the tip of the iceberg.

It's Very Early Saturday Morning

Things are going on with my vision. I'm having a hard time with it. I had a vitreous detachment in my right eye about two weeks ago (it's a relatively common part of growing older but usually doesn't happen until after the age of 50, so I'm a little ahead of schedule) and ever since then, I've been dealing with the symptoms of it (floaters, light sensitivity, etc). I'm so paranoid about my vision and losing my vision that my anxiety has been through the roof. The symptoms can go on for six months or longer and can, in rare cases, cause retinal detachment, which is a medical emergency. This is the last thing I needed to know.

I've also been getting headaches recently, the result of many things: Work stress, hormonal shifts, the changing weather patterns as what is left of the monsoons start to come through. My head hurts more days than not.

So I just feel generally unwell right now. And that sucks.

I've been trying to get more rest and drink more water and so on, but those just feel like bandaids. I've got an appointment to have my own opthamologist check out my vision on Wednesday (I went last Wednesday to a different opthamologist, but I want to see my own because I trust her a bit more, even though I hate the practice she works for). So hopefully that will go well. She always makes me feel a bit better about things, which is what I need now.

My brother is coming home from the rehab hospital tomorrow. Dave and I went to pick up a grocery order for him last night--I was glad to see that it was mostly vegetables and fruit and some meat along with sugar free stuff. I had ordered him some things from a website that sells low and no sodium products, things that are hard to find low/no sodium, like salad dressing and the like. We went by his house, cleaned out his refrigerator, and put everything away.

Whenever I go out these days, my anxiety goes through the roof. Yesterday was no exception. We're doing grocery pickup, so we don't leave the car, but then we go though and wipe everything down before it gets put away. I wear a mask pretty much the whole time I'm out of the house. I've also started to wear the plastic sunglasses I got when they dilated my eyes because I'm feeling more light sensitive (working nights and never seeing daylight hardly doesn't help). So I look like the old film version of the Invisible Man.