The color of infinity inside an empty glass

I had taken the whole Thanksgiving week off work, as per my habit the past few years to use up vacation time, in order to have a nice chill writing staycation. And instead my wife was hospitalized all week following a day in the ER and emergency surgery to repair what turned out to be a hole in her stomach. You know, like you do.

She's back home as of last night, which is good, because hospitals suck. Does mean I'm now her fulltime caregiver through recovery, which, given how escalatingly bad her health has been over the past couple of years, is also just...unfortunately normal. Everything in her body is just going haywire for no discernible or diagnosable reason, basically. We thought she had an MS diagnosis earlier this year; nope! She doesn't actually meet the markers! So back to the drawing board in terms of what the actual fuck is wrong with her. But basically, she's completely physically disabled at this point, I'm the sole income for our household, and everything is stressful and exhausting all the time. When she's not immediately post-surgery, she's still baseline functional in terms of being able to take care of herself physically, so we're not at THAT level of awfulness yet. But she's basically just in a huge amount of pain at all times, and it sucks. Throwing a fucking hole in her stomach - and the doctors have no idea what caused it! - on top of everything she's already going through is just kicking her while she's down at this point.

Also it took the ambulance an hour and forty minutes to get to her when we called 911, in order to take her to the ER that's literally less than a 10-min walk away, where she lay in pain on a stretcher in the hallway for ten hours before the doctors finally did the CT scan that prompted them to immediately rush her into surgery. So like. That was a fun cherry on top of the trauma sundae.

So yeah. That's how we're doing. I am running on fumes at this point. But, y'know, back to work as usual tomorrow morning. At least I fully work from home, which, in addition to health insurance, is why I can never quit my job even though I really hate the org at this point.

I just...don't see how anything is going to get better, after experiencing it all get so much worse over the past few years. And that's really, really hard. Fandom is pretty much the only thing keeping me sane at this point.

Sorry for the downer post. I'm just so fucking tired.