Overcast Brain On A Friday Morning

While glad that it’s Friday, I’m not feeling the same amount of joy and excitement knowing that the weekend starts at 2pm today. My brain has an overcast feel to it; kind of gray, misty, and hazy. As of late I’ve had this lingering sense of melancholy and a touch of anxiety. Worrying about my brother and his kidney issues. He goes December 1st to have his biopsy and get the two masses removed that have popped up, one on each kidney. It doesn’t seem that anything else is going on, so hopefully these are just plain old fatty masses.

My best friend is dealing with some kidney/bladder issues as well. He’s prone to kidney stones and has several that need dealt with. There’s a little extra worry thrown in as his dad had bladder cancer at the end of his life.

My wife is going in to have a scan to check her thyroid, as during an exam they felt little nodules. This is more of just a precautionary thing, but precautionary doesn’t make it any less worrisome to someone like me.

Last night while cleaning the house and doing laundry I heard a gurgling in the kitchen sink. When the sump pump runs it’s normal to hear that as the pump is sucking the waste water out of the sump hole and to the septic tank. But when it’s really loud, and does that sucking sound when there’s no laundry running that typically means there is something going on with the septic tank. A septic back up five years ago left psychic scars on my mind that will never go away. Cleaning out tubs and sinks filled with septic back up on a sunny Sunday afternoon is not something I’d endorse as a “good time”.

So when I hear that noise nowadays I go into full panic mode, like last night. My wife called the septic folks to have them come out and clean out our tank. It’ll be two years in January from the last time, and there have been many showers and loads of laundry done since then. But the main reason it was starting to back up was because there was a massive clot of toilet paper covering the pipe that leads into the tank. That’s what happened five years ago, and after going outside last night and taking the cover off the tank that’s what happened again yesterday. I “removed” the waste paper cork and it released the water in the pipe. So I’m not worried about another back up, but the tank is full so it needs cleaned out.

In the midst of my septic tank panic we found out that our son’s girlfriend’s sweet pup Fluffy wasn’t doing well. Our daughter went down to Indianapolis to visit her brother and his girlfriend yesterday. They all had the day off so they thought they’d hang out for the day. Well as we were gearing up to go out and deal with the “shit” problem we got a call from our daughter. She was letting us know that she was getting ready to leave, and that when they got back from dinner Fluffy was laying in front of the sliding door of their apartment. He had peed and was just laying in it. He couldn’t get up. They picked him up and my daughter noticed he was salivating quite a bit. This led to them taking Fluffy to an emergency vet hospital nearby.

Our son texted us to let us know that Fluffy wasn’t doing good, and that they were going to have to put him to sleep. The vet said he had a bleed in his liver, and that there was nothing they could do. He was 15, so Fluffy had lived a very full life. He was loved by his humans, as well as his younger brother Riley.

No matter how you slice it and how humane at the end that it is to give your four-legged family some much needed peace, it’s never easy. It’s one of those facts of life that is never easy to swallow. Fluffy’s passing coming almost two weeks to the day that we had to say goodbye to our Otto made it all sting even more. Our son and his girlfriend were there in the vet office with my wife and I as we pet and hugged our Otto until he’d crossed over that Rainbow Bridge. I wish we could have done the same for them. Thankfully our son’s girlfriend’s mom was able to get down there and say goodbye and be there with the kids. Fluffy was her dog as well, as Fluffy and Riley have been with them for years.

You know, I’ve said that I have felt like an old man in a younger man’s body for a long time. Maybe even since I was a kid. So turning 40 almost 12 years ago felt more like finding the perfect pair of shoes. No wearing them in because they feel just right. That’s how I felt when I turned 40. It felt like finally being comfortable in my own skin. The awkwardness of my self sort of melted away knowing I was officially “over the hill”. I’ve felt over the hill since I was a kid. It took me 40 years to finally feel comfortable in my own skin.

And while my thoughts on aging are the same, I’m not crazy about the maladies that come with it. Aging adds hopefully some wisdom and common sense to your life portfolio, but it also takes away the time we have left here. We begin to break down and things don’t work like they used to. Little over two years after my 40th birthday I found myself on an operating table having herniated disc surgery. I managed to give myself tennis elbow not long after that. Don’t have that mobility like I used to have(I was never THAT mobile to begin with.) It’s just the breaking down of the body that kind of sucks. Besides joint and muscle pain I’m okay, for now.

So going into this weekend I feel a little heavier than normal. Looking forward to a trip up to Grand Rapids tomorrow to hit a thrift store my wife’s been wanting to check out. Besides that, I guess you deal with the hands dealt. That’s all we can do.