never-ending in Each Day

My boss is a fucking gem. I swear every other interaction with him works to restore my hope for a career in this organization.

Today he was talking to a coworker about their fucked up promotion/pay situation, and, since I am in a similar but unrelated situation, he made mention of my aborted promotion. Which, turns out, I’m emotionally reactive to the mere mention of it. I ended up expressing my anger (fucking rage) that there is no medical employment limitations (MELs) for mental health. His face lit up as he realized he had stopped tracking what has been going on with my head. We haven’t talked about it since the grievance thing (did I even write about the grievance thing?) and that was last September.
He also followed up on a brief conversation we’d had on Tuesday of last week, where he asked how I’m doing (in the context of the situation with M, which, believe me, I’m getting to), and I said, “Not Great”. He asked if I wanted to talk about it and I said no, there was no point. So when he asked again today and things were no better, he suggested we talk about both things tomorrow when he’s not heading out the door.

Things are better, for M. But not really much better for me. I’m in such an activated state that him sighing sends me into anxiety. The same thing happens when he’s having an acute kidney situation. M is still off work. He is still extremely light sensitive. It takes him about 1.5 hours to go from basically blind and in excruciating pain to light sensitive with tolerable pain. Every. Single. Morning.
On Saturday he was just desperate to do something other than ramble around the house, so we went in to a local bicycle shop. Except the entire drive in was agony for him. And utterly unenjoyable for me. I don’t say this as a woe is me, but as a fact. It is impossible to enjoy even a silly car ride when your partner is in utter agony beside you. If you’re not reacting out of stress, you’re reacting out of helplessness, or end-of-your-rope-ness. The nice part is, even though everything is pretty shit, there are good moments, and there is a lot of appreciation of those moments between the two of us. We’ve been very good at counting the blessings spattered in amongst the shit.

But, like, maybe it’s the stress and my utterly fucked up libido, but I’m not sure I have ever been this horny. Like, I’m always DTF, normally. But like, waking up at 3 am and getting myself off just to fall back asleep is new territory, even for me.
The thing is, M’s pain noises sound an awful lot like his pleasure noises and god damn it I just want to make him make the good noises… We have managed to bang a few times, but… like, twice? Every time we have, M needs literal days to recover, his energy is so low because pain is exhausting.
And damn, we’re good at it. It just makes me want more.

So the state of things: M’s skin is completely healed. He has one scar on his forehead, I say it looks like the topographical map of a lake. For some reason shingles scars are really deep (so are chicken pox scars, come to think of it), so he will probably have this scar for life. He still has nerve pain in his head and face (and eye but there’s more to that), but it’s changing from excruciating itching to tingles that make his entire body shudder. Everything is so ridiculously extreme.
His right eye is the main problem. He’s seen an ophthalmologist twice, has another appointment tomorrow morning, just to make sure he’s progressing in the correct direction. And so we’re not really worried about if his eye will calm down, but when. Today is 30 days since he discovered the blisters. We’ve been home for over 2 weeks. Neither of us expected this to still be this disruptive of his (our) life. He has moments of acute fear that the pain is never going to end.

I am fucking exhausted. I said to both M and my boss (independently) that between having to drive M to his appointments, my working full time, and trying to eke out any good times together between the pain and the meds, I have zero capacity. I’m having more emotional dysregulation than usual. Last Tuesday my lack of processing what is continuing to happen (by writing) had caught up to me, as I sat at work trying to not burst into tears for no reason.

M had called to tell me the results of his appointment, but he got overwhelmed because he was in pain and also hungry, so we got off the phone, him saying he’d call after he ate and got some painkillers into him. He emailed shortly after to apologize saying he’s feeling “overwhelmed”. I replied that I realized I was, too, and he had the shitty response of “I’m sorry I’m such a burden” or the equivalent. So of course I felt like I had to make him feel better. Feels manipulative. So I told him that.
Our communication through this whole thing has been next level. It is actually incredible with how attuned M has become of me (I’ve always had to be attuned to the people around me, yay shitty childhoods!). How statements are accepted as facts, we don’t become defensive or have to elaborate. When there is a conflict or miscommunication (like above), it gets dealt with, pretty quickly. It’s been good.

Today was my last appointment with my social worker. As we were saying goodbye she said, “it was a pleasure to meet you and get to know your… particular brand of… ” and hesitated long enough that I offered, “Chaos?” And she laughed and said YES! Heh.
I start with a new psychologist on the 20th.
I do see my psychiatrist tomorrow, so I’m hoping to get the new ADHD meds prescription, even if I have to pay for it out of pocket.

And Friday I’m getting my hair dyed. And cut! I hope it’s cute :P