jinxed

I lost a diamond stud earring yesterday, and it has really thrown me for a loop. I was so upset about it last night I did that almost-crying thing for a good 30 seconds, and then I spent the rest of the night feeling horribly grumpy and fighting with myself not to yell at the kids.

Is this just an inevitable reaction to the break-in last week, with the lost earring being the trigger? Or was yesterday just an exceptionally stressful day, with losing the earring the final touch that set me off?

The morning started very early as I hauled myself out of bed at 5:45 to take DS1 to his final physical therapy session. DH would normally take him, but as this was his final session, I wanted to get instructions from the therapist on the exercises he should continue to do at home. His appointment was at 7AM, so I had to get him up, breakfasted, and out the door by 6:45, which we managed OK.

I got him to school on time, and stopped in to talk briefly with the teacher I subbed for all last week, and that was OK -- I had spent a couple of hours writing up my notes (4 pages, single spaced!) on Saturday night, and sent them to her via email. We were chatting about things when DH called me: he needed his car! Oops -- I forgot that I had it, and in retrospect, I'm not sure at all why I took his car and not my own. Just one odd decision among many on this day.

Got home, got my breakfast, and waited for Mom to call. She wanted me to take a look at her lab results, mailed to her without comment by her new kidney doctor. She read me all the stats over the phone, and from what I had already read, it seemed to me that 1) her kidneys are failing but 2) she doesn't need dialysis yet, just based on her Creatinine level. I was surprised that there was no mention of GFR, which is typically the key number used to determine the stage of kidney failure. Mom said she would call the kidney doctor to ask about her results, because she knows they're not good and it's just odd that the doctor sent them back to her without scheduling any kind of a follow-up appointment.

After we rang off, I did some web-crawling and was surprised (I don't know why I was surprised, I just was) to find several GFR calculators online. I used three different calculators, and every one of them said Mom's at stage 3, where there is moderate damage and the treatment goals are to control the conditions that cause further damage to the kidneys, as well as therapies to ameliorate anemia (which Mom also has) and bone loss, which are common at this stage. Then I agonized over whether or not to call my Mom back and say this to her, but I decided not to. When we talked I had already impressed upon her that her labs were out of whack enough that she shouldn't just let it go until the doctor called her. (Later in the day, I talked to one of my sisters and gave her the update; she'll check in with Mom this week and find out if she called the doctor and what is to be done.)

After that, I went over to TMC to have my head scanned to see what's going on with my sinuses. I spent more time in the waiting room than I did under the scanner; the whole thing took about 10 minutes. The worst was when I had to lie on my stomach and rest my chin on a little platform, tilting my head back to look up as far as I could. Thank goodness that was only for a few minutes, because it was a position designed to aggravate my TMD. The last thing you want to do when you have problems with your jaw muscles clenching too much is have to lean on your chin like that.

And this is where I lost the earring. I forgot I had them on (more muddled thinking on my part), I had meant to leave them at home since I knew I would have to take them off for the scan and I didn't want to lose them. I've already lost one pair of diamond stud earrings, and that made me feel bad enough.

But still, there I was with the earrings and needing to be scanned, so I took them off and put them in my pants pocket. The front pocket. The one I tuck everything -- keys, cell-phone, receipts -- into, when I don't feel like dealing with my purse. And after the scan, I completely forgot about them, so there they stayed, all day, until I realized at about 4:30 that I had forgotten to put them back on. When I reached into my pocket to fish them out, I could only find one. Aaaauuuggghhhh!

Where could I have lost it?

Let's see, after the scan I met DH at Dilly's Deli for lunch, and had my cellphone in that pocket, then out of that pocket. I tucked my receipt for lunch into that pocket, too.

After lunch, I went home for a while. I have a copy of my CT films and decided to play at doctor: radiologist, and looked at them all. Going strictly on the idea that things inside the front of your head are supposed to be symmetrical, I can definitely say there's stuff going on there in my sinuses that is not typical. Whether or not there is anything technically wrong I can't tell, of course, but even I can see the huge differences between left and right sides. (When I get my camera, I'll post some of the cooler looking images.) I don't feel particularly stressed about the sinus stuff -- nor about Mom's situation -- but I think that's just me not letting myself flip out, because I know there's no point. But these are still big stresses.

Then I went up to the Catholic Book and Gift Store in Tempe to find going away things for my RE class, as last night was our last class. I had my car key in that pocket.

Then I went to Trader Joe's, and I had my keys in and out of the pocket, and when my keys weren't in there, the cell phone was.

Then I got the kids from school, came home, put the groceries away, went out again to the supermarket to get snacks for tonight's class parties (four parties, one grocery cart embarrassingly full of junk food). Came home, puttered around for a while, got ready to go to RE, and realized I'd lost my earring.

No time to look for it, either -- out the door, drive about a mile, realize I'd forgotten the going-away gifts, came home, went back, had class, came home, made dinner, and got the kids in bed.

Then I looked for the earring in my purse -- it might have moved in there with a receipt -- in the car, on the floor in the garage. No luck. The kitchen counter and the desk were a mess, the result of about 4 days accretion of stuff. No one could find anything; DD spent 5 minutes looking for the key to turn her expander, it had become so buried.

To top it all off, when I checked my email after getting the kids in bed, I had a message from the teacher I subbed for last week, asking me about an incident that I had decided not to report. I spent about an hour writing and re-writing an account of the incident and why I handled it the way I did and why I did not do what I didn't do. In the end, I felt very muddled about the whole situation -- stay tuned for more blogging.

I ended up staying up too late 1) feeling very upset 2) deciding to get over it 3) doing my PT exercises (they help, at least physically) 4) cleaning off the desk and countertop and 5) falling asleep in front of the TV.

Now I'm just miserable, but there's a lot going on and I'm tired of having a computer that is too slow to run video on (seriously), and I'm very sad about losing about 10 years worth of email correspondence (seriously), and the new stuff isn't getting here fast enough to take the edge of that sadness.

Mostly I'm upset that I've managed to lose another diamond stud earring. The first pair disappeared in the aftermath of my neck dissection surgery in Houston; my ear was numb and I couldn't wear the earrings, so I put them... somewhere to take home -- at least I think I did -- but they never made it home. It may be that I left them in the safe in the hotel room, but by the time I realized I didn't know where they were, weeks later, it was way too late to do anything about it. DH got me new ones for Christmas, and I wore them nearly every day.

It's just a thing, a kind of expensive thing, and not that big a deal, I know. I'm pretty sure DH can't figure out why I'm so upset about this. I think I wouldn't care as much if I hadn't already lost a pair. I'm starting to feel like I have an earring jinx. In the past month I lost one of my favorite opal studs, too -- but that one mystifies me. One of them is in the small dish where I keep my earrings, the other has just... disappeared. I have no idea what happened to it.

Now I'm considering wearing the opal in one ear and the diamond in the other. Eclectic, or weird? Just making do with what I've got left.