The IceMageddon of 2022 has once more rendered the Bunker incapable of outside exploration, save for the brief forays onto sheets of greased ice so that the bunker mascot can perform her regularly scheduled ablutions. The dog loves cold weather, and finds snow to be a magical substance, capable of being solid and melty in your maw at the same time. She delights in a good old fashioned winter frolic.
This is not that kind of snow. It’s hard, crystalline, and crackly. Most humans have to plod through it, stamping their feet down hard in order to crack the outer layer and gain enough traction to keep from slipping and sliding. Both the administrator and the Director of Bunker Operations have slipped and fallen once already, and that was during last month’s Not-a-Problem Cold Weather Event.
This? This is Murder-Ice. It knows we are weak, and it wants to kill us. And the dog, bless her little heart, can’t quite tell the difference between pillowy banks of fluffy snow and murder ice. She only wants to gallop, full speed, digging her forelegs in like a greyhound at the race track, and caper about. Never mind that she’s skidded sideways twice(!) already, and caused me to freak out, lest she injure her recently healed up back leg. She’s still not getting it.
The morning and evening constitutional, then, very much resembles a Yosemite Sam cartoon, with me holding onto the leash for dear life, trying to both keep my balance and keep her from charging into the winter hellscape at 35 miles per hour, yelling, “Whoa, Mule! Whoa, Mule! WHOA!”
New Procedures in Place
Last week’s regular check-in with the Division of Media Review was little more than an ambush; what was supposed to be a meet and greet was really an airing of grievances, along with some personal asides about musical choices in the mess hall and some snarky personal comments about the administrator’s copy of Rocky and Bullwinkle & Friends: The Complete Series. I won’t sugar coat it: feelings were hurt.
But from this heated confrontation came some positive changes, and I for one am tentatively enthusiastic about them. The biggest change you’re going to see is that the Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review will now be sent separately from the Administrator’s Weekly Report. In a five to four vote, it was decided that their update will be sent out on the Monday following the Friday report. This will hopefully keep the size of the newsletters down to a more reasonable size and make them easier to digest. Note: this is a change that is conditional and Administration reserves the right to bring everything back into a single newsletter if everyone reading would prefer it that way.
Look for their first new update on Monday, which will include a write-up of the most recent Directorial Culture Exchange selection, Penny Marshall.
In Other News...
I went in for a consultation for surgery to remove the excess skin and panniculitis from my middle-aged carcass earlier this week. My visit to the doctor’s office was actually pleasant. The staff there knows me well, especially after all of the complications we had to weather when I did this the first time around. When I walked in, all of the nurses greeted me like Norm from Cheers. It was funny, and a little flattering. The folks at the office are, to a person, thrilled with my successful weight loss and genuinely rooting for me in that respect. After a brief consult, they ushered me back into the photography room, and the nurse said, “You need to take off your pants, but you can leave your shirt on and just hold it up.”
I chuckled, and got completely naked, saying, “Is there anyone in the building who hasn’t seen me completely nude and fully exposed?”
“I don’t think so,” she replied, completely serious.
“I just don’t want these pictures to end up as the office Christmas card this year,” I said.
She assured me this would not be the case, and after a round of horrifying nude photographs (not for public viewing), we left with a date in hand: my panniculectomy surgery will take place on May 4th.
This is auspicious for a number of reasons, the least of which is that I will be able to convalesce by watching Star Wars movies and TV shows for the rest of the day. I chose this date because I was afraid that if I picked May 5th, the staff’s idea of anesthetic would be a shot of tequila with salt and lime. They party hard over there. I’m not even kidding.
In all seriousness, I am very relieved and excited to be moving forward with this. I feel like I’ve been in a hamster wheel for years now; this process began nearly five years ago, and it’s been fraught with difficulty along the way. I’m not complaining about all of the obstacles that appeared in my path, but...no, you know what? Screw it. Let’s talk about this for a minute.
I don’t know that the cost will ever equal out for me. It’s not fair and it’s not accurate to weigh all of the time spent dealing with Cathy’s cancer and the toll it took on us both against my own physical and mental health. They are separate issues, and I shouldn’t conflate them. But there’s something in my mind, something small and dark and built entirely out of Ego that keeps whispering, “Why do you get to live and be happy when Cathy died under the most unfair and frustrating conditions?”
I don’t usually listen to that voice, but earlier this week, it was screaming in my ear all day. You see, when I was losing weight, I was seeing positive results, and it felt really good. But I was doing it by eating my all-time least favorite things in the world: broccoli and cauliflower. I was exercising. I was pushing myself, making myself sweat, I was doing without. And even though it felt good to get healthier by degrees...it felt a lot like I was punishing myself.
This is total bullshit, I know. The punishment was eating the bacon cheeseburger and tater tots at 10 PM. The punishment was not being able to go up stairs without needing to sit down at the top of them. Not being able to take care of myself in some very basic and elementary ways. Not being able to take a knee and get back up again.
That was the punishment, and I inflicted it on myself for over a decade. And I know that being healthy, feeling good enough to engage with the world, being able to walk and laugh without faking it, and all of that normal, mundane, day-to-day stuff isn’t a bad thing. It’s not wrong to be able to wear clothes and bend at the waist.
It’s my survivor’s guilt, is what it is. I powered through the back half of 2020 and most of 2021 on a steady IV drip of unquenchable rage, which is its own kind of exhausting. So much so that my drip is now empty and I don’t need it anymore (don’t worry; I’m still mad, and I always will be). But with anger no longer running interference for the other dark thoughts, survivor’s guilt has taken up residence in my long-term goal of living to be a ripe old age. It says, “How dare you find any measure of happiness when you watched your wife die?”
It's wrong. I know that. And I wake up every day and find several things to do that prove it wrong, and it usually shuts up pretty quick, shouted down by all of the positive things in my life going on right now.
But there was something about saying (with a down payment of 10% of the bill, no less) “I’m taking this next step for my health, my happiness, and my commitment to physical fitness” that my little dark speck of ego didn’t like. And so, I spent the day, sitting with it, trapped by the IceMageddon, and letting myself feel like an entitled jerk. After that, I got up, turned the volume all the way down, and got back to taking care of myself.
One of the things I learned during the last five years is that sometimes, you need to let yourself feel the bad feelings. You have to give yourself room to be angry, be sad, be whatever you’re going through. You give them the floor, let them say what they are going to say, and then you politely clap them offstage. They feel heard, and you get to move on to the next item on the agenda.
And so, I am excited again about my surgical date. It’s going to be a challenge, and getting there will be full of interesting twists and turns. Expect full, complete, and probably really inappropriate, oversharing updates along the way.
Catching up with Inbox Mountain, and I am so happy you got your date! And yeah, I get how those feelings can sit alongside the pride in your achievement, and the anticipation. I have not experienced anything of the magnitude of losing Cathy, but in IF patient circles survivor's guilt when friends die is a whole thing (and a recent one in my case), and all I can think is that it must say a lot about both the significance of the person who is gone and the extent to which we (whether through nature or social training I don't know; maybe it's both) find it hard to prioritise ourselves on a sort of existential belief level, even though obviously we do the practical work to keep the show on the road.
I'm not even going to do what I'm sure many people have done and go, "Of course you deserve happiness because [umpteen reasons]" - intellectually you know it, and this stuff just doesn't rest on the intellectual plane. Strange apes that we are, we live in this contradiction that we feel we're just us, whereas the Us that friends see is quite a guy/gal, and likewise they would undervalue and question themselves were the situation reversed.
Wasn’t that the shirt you said was too small? Hmmm… I think it’s too big.