Tenacity & Complexity

I have the sort of tenacity that can't be taught.
The sort that borders on stupidity.

Tuesday morning, I woke up and stared at my alarm clock, waiting for the moment it went off so that I could pounce on the snooze button.

You're probably thinking, if she was up, why didn't she just turn off the alarm?

Because I might end up falling asleep again, and then there would be nothing to wake me up. And although I was awake, it wasn't to the level that I wanted to start moving around yet.

The alarm went off. I dutifully smacked the snooze button. I stayed in bed.

Suddenly, I had a tremendous pain in my abdomen. Out of nowhere. Not cramps. Not a stress stomachache. A pain that I had never felt before. Horrible. I couldn't get up.

After a few minutes of this intense pain, I called my mother. My mother is a registered nurse, but she lives in Connecticut, and therefore wouldn't be able to help at all. But this was the kind of pain that I had to verbalize. I had to tell SOMEONE. And thanks to the difference in time zones, it was about 7:30 for her, and therefore I knew she'd be up and about.

I was in enough pain that I had trouble breathing the words out to explain. She was worried (and understandably so). She told me not to go to work, and instead to go to the doctor. I explained to her that I didn't want to go to the doctor. After all, this was a very important day; the day I was going to get to see Brian.

I ended the phone conversation and got a call a few minutes later from my father. My mother had called him and insisted that he try to talk some sense into me and diagnose me over the phone (my father is a doctor). He was asking me to describe the pain and rate it on a scale of 1-10 (10, he said, was getting your head cut off. I couldn't help but think that getting your head cut off would only hurt until they sliced your nerves... and that the whole thing would probably take a second. Amputating a limb with a rusty saw without anesthetic would probably be a better 10). I said it was between 7 and 8 (although really, what the hell does that even mean? I have no rusty saw amputation memories to compare it to).

He then told me to lie on my back, use my hand to push where it hurt, and then release it suddenly. I did this, and then ended up screaming into the phone, crying uncontrollably due to the amount of pain I felt as a result of this seemingly innocuous action.

"Angela, call 911."

"I'm not calling 911."

"You have to. You have to go to the hospital. You have to get in an ambulance"

"I wouldn't even let 911 send an ambulance when I was hit by a car. You really think I'm going to let them get me now?"

He then used some phrase like "positive rebound" or some other nonsense like that... and said that it was not good.

I refused to call 911.

He started using scary words like "ruptured" and "cyst".

I refused to call 911.

He said I might have "internal bleeding".

I refused to call 911.

He said something about not wanting to pick me up at a morgue when he and my mother came to visit on Wednesday.

I tried to laugh in defiance, but it came out as muffled crying.

He said that if I wasn't going to call 911, then HE was going to call 911.

I told him that I was still in my pajamas, and that if 911 was to be called, then I wanted to have pants on before they arrived.

As I said before...
I have the sort of tenacity that can't be taught.
The sort that borders on stupidity.

My dad called me back a few minutes later. I had pants on, and was walking around alright. I told him the pain had gone down to about a 4 or 5. I told him I was going to work. He said that if my pain had gone down that much, that it was probably going away on its own. It probably wasn't internal bleeding after all.

You know what that means?
I was right.
HA!
And no ambulance required.
RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT!
ME ME ME!
This means that for the rest of my life, when someone says I need an ambulance and I refuse, I now have a story to point back to as evidence, saying that I'm right.
HUZZAH!

I went to work, feeling the level of pain increase and decrease at random intervals throughout the day. I told coworkers in my vicinity, but didn't tell my boss. I figured I'd tell her if I was going to the hospital, but until I reached that point it wasn't vital. Besides, I was taking a half day.

I left work at 1:00pm, grabbed some food on my way out of the building, and ate it as I was waiting for the torturously slow L to arrive (for the record, you get weird looks when you're eating a caprese salad with a plastic fork at an underground train station).

Brian would be arriving at O'Hare at 2:27pm, with a 2-hour layover before his next flight.
His flight landed early.
My train got in late (as a result of construction, which I'm very bitter about).
By the time I met up with him, he had found a way to change flights so that we could have a few more hours to hang out.
(Because he's brilliant and fantastic.)

And it was lovely and wonderful and delightful and fun and happy and every other positive word in my vocabulary.

We didn't even really do anything. We just talked. And at one point I was accosted by a homeless woman who was convinced I was "following" her. And I performed a couple of monologues for him (so now he has officially seen me act, which he never had before).

We grabbed some dinner at a food court. Brian called it a date. Whether it was our first date or not depends on what you'd call a night back in August in which we hung out in my car in a Steak & Shake parking lot until past 5am... (if you have the patience to look for it amongst a sea of words, you can search in Michigan Loves Me). That being a date is debatable. I was dating someone else, so at the time I definitely did not consider it to be a date. But in retrospect, I can see how one might come to the conclusion that it was... I guess it doesn't matter. If we hadn't been on a date before, we've been on one now. A very casual, impromptu, almost silly sort of date. Which is exactly the kind of date I would've chosen.

It was a beautiful evening. And well worth avoiding a trip to the hospital for.

And saying goodbye wasn't fun.

As of Tuesday night when he got home from his trip, Brian and I are now an official "It's Complicated" on Facebook. I invited him into that state of quasi-relationship earlier in the week, but he'd been computer-less until that point. I don't know exactly what that means or whether it changes anything, but it felt... good. It's nice to sort of publicly acknowledge that something is there. Even if it's something undefinable and convoluted. It's there.

A metaphysical relationship. Definitely. (As I mentioned in a guest blog last week).

My parents, who have only met Brian once, really like him. Which is good. So do I.

They are now in town. And they're thrilled that I'm not dead as a result of mysterious internal bleeding. I hung out with them last night, and then had lunch with my mom today. She wants to come over and clean my apartment for me. The thought of me living in mess makes her nuts. I can't help it. I nest. If things are too organized, I can't think properly. Ah well... If she wants to clean my place, I'm not going to stop her. Maybe then I'll find the most recent arrival from Netflix that seems to be M.I.A.

Anyway.

I realized two huge, important things on my way home from work today.

1. I'm happy.
Seriously, truly, happy. So happy. And I love life. At the moment, everything is working out quite nicely. Is it perfect? No, of course not. There's no such thing as life being perfect. I'm not rich. I'm not in a production right now. My family lives in a different time zone. My metaphysical boyfriend is in Ne-flippin'-braska. But it doesn't matter. None of that matters, because I'm happy. Even with everything exactly as it is. I'm going to graduate school in the fall. I feel validated as an actor. I've got a best friend again, and he makes me feel good about myself. It turns out 23 is a far better year than 22 was. Yes, I'm a very happy bunny.

2. I figured out why Brian and I have to be apart.
I believe everything happens for a reason (and not just because that's the way it is on Lost), and Brian and I haven't been able to figure out why he's in Nebraska and I'm in Chicago. But today, it made sense to me. We reconnected with each other because we needed each other. And the reason we're apart is because we were going to end up being apart anyway. If we were both in the same place right now, think of how hard it would be when Brian had to go wherever the heck the air force tells him to go. Think of how hard it would have been for me to make the decision to move to Florida for grad school. But because we're already at a distance, we're still able to do the things we need to do. And as I said in that guest blog (two references to it in one post... that means you HAVE to read it now), the distance between us is the width of a cell phone. It doesn't matter whether my cell phone is in Chicago or Florida... I'm not giving up anything with him by moving. This is already built-in to the given circumstances surrounding our quasi-relationship.

That might sound dumb, but it came as a great relief to me today. Knowing that I don't have to worry about the distance ruining things. Because we've already dealt with it. We've dealt with it the whole time. It's not ideal, but it's not insurmountable either.


May you be happy in imperfect times.

~A~


P.S. I'm considering dying my hair something that isn't brown. Suggestions?

P.P.S. I will be holding a giveaway soon. Yes, a giveaway. As in, you can get free stuff from yours truly. I hope to post the details within the next week or so, but it's dependent on someone else... You'll see.