Shift work...

I am not a shift worker.  At all.

Ever since I was a little girl, I have been one of those who works hard and works long.  In fact, at 11, I was cleaning housing for very good money.  Actually cleaning entire houses by myself.  Including making patterns with the vacuum cleaner, cleaning out appliances, and cleaning all the glass in the light fixtures, on top of tackling bathrooms, the kitchen, dusting, and laundry.

The last three moves, I have unpacked everything and had all the artwork (save for the heavy stuff here since I had to learn how to do so in lathe and plaster walls) hung within the week.  That includes cutting down the boxes and cleaning up all the stray packing materials.

Really, I only know one type of work: Work until the job is finished, even if you drop dead afterwards.

So, while my life has become one that is primarily lived in the GREEN chair, I still have yet to shed this aspect of who I am.  For someone whose disability is making itself ever more known, this is not good.  I need to acquire the skill of shift work.

Even here.

When I finished painting the closet wall/door in the basement living space, I swore ... took a solemn vow ... never to paint again.  I hurt too much.  I mean, who else would duct tape a paint brush to her hand in order to paint?  Me.  I had to finish the job.

In the past week, I have been confronted by the fact that I am no longer capable of doing the yard work that I did even last fall.  I weeded for less than an hour the other day and was certain I was close to meeting my maker.  I shall not mention the number of times I fainted or how knackered I was for hours on end afterwards.  I chalked up the unexpected reaction to a fraction of the time I have spend sitting on the ground mucking about in the soil to it being extra warm day with bright sun.

But.  No.

Yesterday, I went over to a friend's house to edge her yard and dig up a small amount of junk bushes from her front bed.  I wanted to give her some visual rest from the mess in her bed for when she came home from her trip.  [I also arranged for someone to remove the large bushes and created an initial plan to beautify the front bed the previous owners grossly ignored.]  While there, I also unburied enough edging stone to re-establish a border on the bed, since it was only lined at the corners.  With all of the rain, the small bushes practically leapt out of the ground.  However, she does have two more sidewalks (perpendicular-to-the-house ones) than I do.  Even if I wanted to do so, sweeping up the mess I made was utterly out of the question. I lingered there quite a while just to try and gather the strength to drive the single block back to my house.

Thinking of this new reality for me and of the needs of my own yard, I spent the evening overwrought not only in body, but in mind.  How in the world am I going to keep up my own yard, even with primarily low-maintenance beds?  Weeds can never be completely eliminated.  And I have this rather pesky ground cover, Snow-on-the-Mountain, I have systematically been removing from the beds I created in all but two locations.  SIGH.

This evening, I tried shift work.

I had three spots where the ground cover had really started to re-establish itself, two of them being on the other side of the brick border of the section I left for the wild rabbit that lives in my back yard.  So, I worked only on a single section at a time, sitting on the ground and using my trowel to hasten the job.  Three rounds meant that I finished in pitch dark (after an evening nap), so I used the headlamp a plumber gave me when I admired it in an effusive manner over the course of a two-day job.  

I supposed you could call this first attempt success, but it has dawned on me that nearly everything I do needs to be shift work.

I should not be doing all stages of laundry on the same day, simply for the fact that doing so means too many trips up and down the stairs.  Cleaning, also, needs to be done in even smaller shifts than I had imagined.  For example, instead of cleaning just the bathrooms, I need to clean only one bathroom at a time.  One.

I have been tackling smaller jobs, but have done so one after another after another.  It is how I was raised. It is also who I am.  The hard worker.

My Ph.D. was completed in less than three years.  I have always been both admired (and chastised) for my rather prodigious production levels at work (apparently being highly productive can intimate others???).  In my first house and this one, I have done an enormous amount of hard labor, repairing and renovating.  Even as my body has been slowly falling apart, I still managed to finish a basement.  From the outside, I am sure I look odd ... or even a tad crazy.  I work in pain. I work in tears. I work even when I can barely move or knowing that when I try to move from where I am working an explosion of pain will come. I work until I faint and then awake to work some more.  There is only me and so I must do the work.  If there is work needing doing, once started it must be finished.

True, I like order.  I like a clean and attractive house. But the truth is that I really enjoy leaving something better off than I found it, from a job to my own home and everything in between.  For example, back when I used to babysit, after the children were asleep (having picked up their rooms and bathed), I would clean the kitchen and even do laundry.  Sitting in a chair watching television or reading a book seemed somehow wrong to me.  If I was there to be of help, then that meant even after the children were in bed.

With this house, I want very much for the next owner(s) to feel as if it is modern and livable even as its historical nature is preserved.  When I was looking at houses online before I moved here (I bought it sight unseen/online photos only), I saw so many that were as old as mine, but that had been gutted and updated so much so that no one would know the house was built nearly 100 years ago.  So, I have made careful choices as I have worked on it in order to balance its nature with modern living.  Creating an inviting utility space/laundry area, restoring a basement bath area, and adding a living space is a part of making this an attractive house that has three living levels, not merely two.

Of course, not working, I had to do most of the work myself.  And in so doing, I ignored pain others would have not endured in the first place and have driven my body to the brink over and over and over again.  However, even if I wanted to continue to do so, I cannot.  This week drove that point home in a harsh and unequivocal way.

Shift-work-weeding, three sessions of no more than 15 minutes, still required one nap, a couple of hours of resting, and enduring pain in my body even as I type this.  For me, now, sitting unaided and/or using my hands for any length of time has dear consequences.  The same is true for standing and trying to walk for extended periods.

How in the world am I going to learn to do things in small increments?  
How am I going to learn to leave work undone?
How can I change who I am?

If truth be told, I have come to another disturbing realization that coincides with what I have learned about extended laboring.  I believe that another part of my body is mal-functioning and discovering that is the real reason behind setting out to get some hard work accomplished.  By this I mean I realized that my reaction pattern to noticing another loss within my body is to act as if nothing has changed at all.  To ignore. To pretend. To mask.

Last Friday, I came back from picking up a prescription and nearly vomited when I opened the door.  The house was filled with such a rancid smell that I immediately proceeded through the house and out the back door to escape the smell.  And then I panicked.  Surely, there was a dead animal somewhere.  Surely, what I was smelling was not the seminary grad student's cooking.

Just in case, I darted back inside, ran the disposal with hot water and lavender dish soap, and then followed that up with spraying Clorox cleaner down the disposal.  Afterwards, I fled outdoors again, voicing my worries about the smell to a friend on the phone.  Finally, unable to find a dead animal, I asked the seminary grad student to come upstairs and take a whiff.  As I did so, I noted it was only on the first two floors.  After being in the kitchen for a while, sniffing here and there, he finally recognized the lingering oder as his dinner.  His dinner that he found tasty.  A normal sort of dinner ... no sardines or anything like that.

My hearing does not work well anymore.  Sounds are distorted. In fact, even the vibration of an open window in the car is so painful to me I cannot bear it.  When I listen to music, I have the bass completely turned down (-5) and the treble completely turned up (+5).  I can hear it better that way.  But when my best friend was driving me to my father's funeral, she could not tolerate what was coming from the car speakers.  What was "normal" to me was painful to her ears.

My vision is the same way ... has been far longer than most everything else.  Even with the right correction to my contacts and now glasses, I often have blurred or double vision.  Several years ago, I went for a new prescription and had a melt-down of sorts in the doctor's office when I looked at the piece of paper in my hand and saw that she had not changed the numbers at all.  How could that possibly be?  I could barely see!

I am ashamed to admit that not only did I weep in frustration, I refused to leave until she tested me again herself ... no technicians at all.  The results were the same.  I had gone to see her because she specialized in patients with neurological problems.  As I wept, she carefully explained that while the lens correction was right, my brain was not interpreting what I was seeing properly.  The nerves were not functioning as they should.  In fact, she was not surprised at what I was experiencing.  Blurred and double vision are, after all, facets of multiple sclerosis.  The color loss, painful movement, and sensitivity to bright light I also battle she marked up to optic neuritis.

For months now, I have been noticing that many of my favorite things to eat no longer taste right to me or no longer bring the same enjoyment when they do not taste wrong.  Suddenly, it hit me.  My smell-a-nator must be malfunctioning, too.  Whatever nerves control olfactory senses surely are growing wonky because I know the seminary student would not be eating rancid food.  And, when he first came in August, I had no issue with what he cooked.  Last Friday was the worst time, but there have been others, of late, where I could not bear the smell of his culinary efforts.

Another loss within me.  Another change.

Of course I care little for how I respond to what the seminary student prepares for his meals, but I do care very much about the fact that foods I savor are no longer savory to me. How did I handle that realization?  By setting out to clean up the yard and tend to the weeds that have cropped up with all the rain we had.  By cleaning and organizing and working at any and everything.  By collapsing in the GREEN chair and then dragging myself up out of it just a short while later.  Even when I am increasingly exhausted because I have had more and more nighttime innards writhing bouts.

Shift work.
I need to learn shift work in chores and in facing the things happening to my mind and to my body.
Only how in the world do I change who I am in such a fundamental way?


I am Yours, Lord.  Save me!