This is my third day back in the office. On Tuesday morning, I woke up really anxious, not quite to the point of being nauseated but not too far from it, either. That seemed very strange. Why the butterflies? It’s just work. I’ve been to work before, lots of times. I wasn’t going to have to deal with a whole new set of people or go to a new office, which is what I dreamt about the night before, arriving to find the place completely changed and having no idea where my desk was or who most of the people I saw were. Sure, I’d been away almost seven weeks, but I’d kept in touch, checking my work e-mail almost every day and even going up for lunch one day. Still, I had that churny feeling like it was the first day of school and I might not be up to facing it.
Once I got to work, I felt better. My desk was just where I left it, and people remembered who I was, and I hadn’t forgotten how to do my job. The biggest issue I faced was eyestrain, which led to a headache. I’m out of practice, not able to stare at a screen for hours on end. My incision is giving me some trouble, too. The one spot that healed over last, the spot I snipped the suture out of about three and half weeks in, evidently wasn’t healed all that well and started bleeding on Tuesday. I stopped on the way home to get some of the advanced healing pads I’d used earlier and put those on. I have to be careful when I sit down or get up or bend for any reason at all lest I experience a jolt of eye-widening pain. Still, overall the scar is looking much flatter than it had been, and that’s a good thing.
Now that it’s September, I need to do a goal check-in for August. I’ve been resisting, though, because it feels like I didn’t accomplish much last month. I wasn’t allowed to work out or diet, so I’m still above my goal weight. I’m farther from my goal now than I was a month ago, farther than the weight log shows because I cleverly updated it with a pre-Chicagoland reading rather than the post-visit figure. I only read two books all month, which meets the goal but is not as good as I did in July. What did I do with all my free time? I wasn’t going to work, and I wasn’t working out, and I wasn’t working on the house, because not only didn’t I get the room of the month done, I didn’t even choose a room of the month. I did get my clipping box for the month emptied, barely, putting the last things in the files late on the 31st. That’s something, and I did do a lot of quilting, too. I made the giant potholder, finished my part of the latest group baby quilt we did at work, and made a lot of progress on the memory quilt. Still, I wish I’d done better, done more, had something more significant to report after a whole month off.
About a year ago, I was also writing about a break from work, but that was only a three-day weekend.
Powered by WordPress
