March has come and gone and I’m sure glad it has. A lot of mixed emotions this month, thinking about it, I’m just grateful I came out in one piece. Let me see, it started off with a take-home midterm exam…yes that says it all, it means stress. On the day we received the assignment, I was glad I had sometime to think it over because I didn’t want to have to do all that thinking at once. I sat on it for a couple days thinking I should do it bit by bit. This is all too wishful thinking for me, but I had a plan. I was looking over the syllabus and somehow misread the due dates for the exam, it was three days past and I only had the coming weekend to get it all down before Friday?
I did what I do best, panicked for an entire 3 minutes. 10 page paper due in 4 days on “stuff”. This was going to be my first paper in eh…7 years and I had 4 days!!! Ok, more like I panicked for a whole afternoon. I quickly dialed my emergency babysitter, a.k.a fiancée and let him know that I needed him the following Saturday to work some magic with lil man-all day. Luckily he does not mind.
I had an early Saturday; I convinced myself that driving to the library would be a waste of time so I planned to have a productive day on the dining table. Lil man was off and I was on.
The trouble with being at home is…many things are a distraction. I like to clean (unluckily). So I figured out I could clean the kitchen first and that would make concentrating easier. Ok, an hour later, I was staring at my comp. I had 5 questions out of 6 to answer. If I tackled 3 today (LOL) I would have 2 to do the next day and Monday to look everything over. Two hours later, I had researched the first two questions and had picked my final 5 questions to answer. This definitely was not going as planned. A quick look at the syllabus at the end of the day(being sidetracked) revealed that I had an extra week to submit this exam! What? After all that panicking….ok good ending to that story.
Class number 2 on Tuesday revealed that I had my midterm the day after my take-home was due, I totally don’t know how I overlooked all these dates. Note to self; calendars are a grand thing.
Ok, so beginning of March, I was being mom as usual (and with all its happy and challenging times) and I had two exams but that was not enough, I started feeling sick the weekend before all this. I thought it was a cold but I was so fatigued all I wanted to do was sleep. I managed to turn in my paper at 8 pm on the due date even though the deadline was midnight. Actually I had it done the Sunday night prior, a crisp 10 pages except I realized that I did not double-space!!! S*** what kind of student I’m I? No wonder I kept filling it with ‘fluff’….. So I had to edit it to half of what I had which is not as bad, I just took out the fluff and left the good stuff stay. At this point I didn’t care, I had an exam to study for the next day and I was feeling crappy. That Monday night, I was too congested, had a headache and went to bed early. My exam was at 3 in the afternoon, I just ignored work the next day and studied, I even considered calling the prof to see if I could take it the next day but decided taking cold meds to keep me awake was a better idea.
Fast forward, a few days later I was feeling even worse and realized I had a full blown sinus infection and had to be on antibiotics. Thank God for a boss=doctor. Mid-March is registration time for summer camp. God heard my prayer that day, the lines are usually long but for some reason, I was in and out that day. Life was looking pretty good.
I got to work ready to tackle all those projects I neglected while I studies. As soon as I sat on my desk, our receptionist dialed my extension sounding desperate; apparently my boss needed my help downstairs because our office manager was feeling sick. Now, our office manager needs a post all by herself, but she was prone to getting her blood sugar so low we would have to put an IV while she was in the office, chocolate bar for breakfast will do that to you.
So I quickly ran downstairs and found that Julie was vomiting and going in and out of consciousness with like 10 medical residents/doctors surrounding her… not doing much just staring. I could hear “code blue” on the hospital speaker system which is when I realized she needed to go to the ER ASAP. So I got to Julie who was being helped onto a wheelchair by my boss, grabbed her handbag and work documents and was to meet them back at the ER. That was the last day that I saw Julie as herself. The ever- vivacious, quirky, whacky for a manager-type of lady who never had a bad day. She usually cursed it away. She called me ‘hon’ and treated me more like her child. She had a funny saying for everything and it made me laugh. I mean who says “I gotta pee so bad my back teeth are hanging loose”? LOL. Most of them never made sense but were funny nonetheless. I survived this work place because of her.
Everything else went so fast, ER, CT scan, brain aneurysm, surgery-she showed signs of recovery for just but one day. We even joked about getting blue eye shadow, which was always her line, that if she had a stroke, we would put blue eye shadow on her just to annoy her. Then more surgeries but the bleed in her brain was too much for her, she died with her family surrounding her. On March 28, I was at the funeral of my manager dear friend. I keep re-playing that scene over and over, that trip to the ER, like I could have done something to prevent it. Then I started hating smokers, Julie had been a life-long smoker, a risk factor for her type of aneurysm. But eventually I’ve gone into some place between denial and acceptance-if there is such a place. I’m so glad I got to know Julie, and every time I think of her, I laugh at her funny sayings and stories. Most times it’s hard to believe she is gone. We are all moving on I guess. Life moves on. I’m glad I have the promise of a better life after death, because then I can be confident that even when I pass on, I will be in a better place.
Lil man had spring break vacation the day after the funeral and the dear Lord was kind enough to give us extraordinarily warm temperatures for which we enjoyed every bit of. 80 degrees in April is like Christmas in July, like a drop of water in the dessert….ok you get the picture. Perfect spring break! I even managed to finish undoing the extension braids on my head-a real pain in the neck-literally.
April, please be kind.
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