For the past few months, my life feels like it’s been turned upside down with having to deal with my mom’s ongoing health issues. Some of it has resurfaced some old feelings from when Mario’s health was tanking. I think that’s a natural human reaction though. If you’ve been through similar things in the past, the emotions surrounding those events might bubble up to the surface. I guess the upside is that you may be treading down familiar ground. But if the previous experiences led to you losing someone you loved, you could definitely be dealing with some heavy emotions that bring you down.
I’m searching for other upsides lately. One is that I’ve been gaining some ground at being more efficient with work tasks. This is something I’ve struggled with big time, especially over the last 5 or so years. Right now, every minute of my day counts, so I literally can not procrastinate. I have so much stuff to do that there are not enough hours in a day to do it, but what I am doing, I’m at least doing a little more efficiently.
Another upside is I’ve been more diligent these past couple weeks scheduling some appointments for me, such as massage therapy and an isolation float (still can’t believe a place opened up right here in my town that does the floats!), to help mitigate some stress. Next week I’m doing sound bowls therapy and then hopefully acupuncture if I can fit that in. I kind of dropped everything like that over the last couple months and I feel the consequences of that.
I have to see more “active” days as an upside as well. I mean, I guess it’s better than sitting/standing in front of a computer for many hours where some of that time is not being efficiently spent.
I feel like the downsides to the situation outnumber the upsides though. My sleep is seriously suffered. My gym time has seriously suffered. Just all around my body feels the effects of all the things.
So that brings me to the omens …
I come from a long line of people (on both sides of my family) who believed in such things. So I grew up with a family who observed certain occurrences as “signs”. Some could be good, some could be bad, some where up to personal interpretation. This week, I’ve been bombarded by birds.
It started Monday when I showed up to a routine bloodwork appointment and there was a dead woodpecker lying right by the door. A voice in my head said, “just turn around and reschedule this”. But no … I didn’t listen to that. That poor little bird body lying there (I can only imagine it had somehow flown into the glass at high velocity to meet its demise) was an omen of general bad fortune. From the moment I walked past that bird nothing went right for me that entire day.
On Tuesday night (well, actually it was after midnight) I was leaving my mom’s place, driving down the 1 mile dirt road to the main road. An owl chose that moment to fly right over my Jeep. Now to me, owls are special. Owls are like my animal guide. They’re one of those “open to interpretation” omens for me. In this case, what popped into my head was that focus and attention will be needed in the coming days.
On Wednesday evening, I’d actually managed to make it to the gym and I was driving back down a backcountry road to get to my mom’s place. I saw what I thought was an indeterminate, inanimate object laying in the road. I moved the wheel slightly so that it would pass under the middle of my Jeep, but didn’t adjust speed. Suddenly what I thought was an inanimate object sprang to life. In a spilt second I saw a flash of gray and feathers as a poor bird tried to fly up over me. It hit the top of my windshield with a sad thud. My heart sank. I really try to avoid hitting any animals with my vehicle and I really did not think it was a living thing in the middle of the road. It could have been the late day sun and shadows but it honestly looked like a stick or something coming up on it. I pulled off to the side of the road and looked back to see the poor, lifeless thing laying there. I picked it up and placed it in the dried grass on the side of the road. Thankfully, I’ve only ever hit 2 other birds and a chipmunk on the road, but each time, I had to stop, offer their little spirits my sincere condolences and move them off the road.
The rest of the day was a bit somber. It way my mom’s first day back home after being discharged from the nursing facility, but all I could think about was the 2nd dead bird in a matter of days being a bad omen.
Thursday morning I got up and shortly afterwards I received a phone call from the doctor’s office where I was to take my mom for an initial appointment later in the afternoon. They said they were unable to reach my mom on her phone (her landline sucks and is pretty unreliable and she often turns her mobile phone off for no good reason). They explained that a cardiologist reviewed her heart monitor data and it was, “very concerning”… so much so, that we were to head to the ER immediately. That news was not going to go over well with my mom, but I got my stuff together and headed over to her house to break it to her. She was amazingly easy to convince that this was the right course of action, so after she got her stuff together, off we went. Could the incident with the bird the previous night be foretelling what was to come the next day? Perhaps. We made it to the ER and she was back in an ER room and being hooked up to monitors within 10 minutes, so apparently a very concerned cardiologist pre-phoning your info to the ER and giving them instructions to get you in asap is the complete, no b.s. way to go to the ER!
Interestingly enough, when we were headed down that 1 mile dirt road on the way to the ER, a small bird darted right in front of the car but managed to avoid us. I’m going to take that as a reprieve and good omen. My mom will be getting a pacemaker in the morning.
