15,115...

Friday's mail brought very unexpected, very devastating news. I have not slept much since. I am too weary at heart.  What I have been doing is cleaning out my sister's personal email.  She had the old AOL two inbox system, filled with over 20,000 emails.

Yes.
20,000 plus emails.

I logged on and started wading in so that she could have visual rest in her inbox. I created folders and archived important emails. I created filters for the remaining newsletters to go to special viewing folders so as to not crowd up her inbox. I unsubscribed from marketing and news emails. I marked and deleted spam. And I deleted old, no longer relevant emails. I deleted--by checking the box to mark each bloody one--15,115 emails.

Yes.
15,115.

I don't know how much spam I deleted, but I left my sister with only 108 emails I thought relevant (ones from the start of the school year) to address. Before we hung up the phone, she had already whittled her inbox down to just 44 emails and had used the folders to archive a few emails herself.

My sister had gotten to a point where she could neither see new emails or find ones she needed because her divided inbox (new/old) was too full. Dealing with the problem seemed hopeless. To her, it was. She had no time to wade in and create order from chaos on such a massive scale.

I had been wanting to offer this particular help, because I have oft heard her lament over her inbox. Yesterday, felled as I was, I clung to the opportunity to numb myself in her ginormous problem, to stave off, albeit merely temporarily, the heartbreak of mine.  I am truly grateful for the opportunity to give my sister a new beginning, to give her back control of her personal communications.  Even in my blanketed anguished state, I savored to victory of clicking the button to empty her trash, to wipe out her burden.

To be honest, the first three emails my sister managed of the 108 I left were spam I had missed. A blow to the pride of my labor. I am not perfect. But I am willing to lie in a chair and wade through another person's nightmare to have a respite from my own life.

Was it God's mercy that the perfect moment to approach the email problem came as I sat in sackcloth and ashes??

My GP is leaving the practice. Finding a doctor to take on a Medicare patient with neurological disease, PTSD, a complicated medical history (including malaria and tuberculosis), and a prescription list of off-label use drugs, who is a survivor of sexual abuse that has left its own triggers is more impossible than clearing out an inbox of over 20,000 emails that require marking individually before each action upon the email is taken.

I am utterly, absolutely beaten and overwhelmed.