More

Pros:

-All the hugs

-All the love

-Hearing from old friends  

-No appetite = losing weight = all the old clothes I can wear again!  

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I didn't make it into work this week as much as I'd hoped to. Mornings are rough. There are, like, 14 pills I need to take to get to normal, but I can't take them without food. So it's oatmeal and drugs for breakfast (Ha! Just like old times, except replace drugs with whiskey. Nooooo just kidding, mom...I hate oatmeal.) It feels like I eat more pills than food. Some of them are vitamins, so it's not like I'm a walking pharmacy. I just miss pancakes, so I'm whining.  

I'm getting my port put in on Monday. They've been "backed up" but they had a cancellation so they're squeezing me in. I'd love to know how they get backed up on something like that. I guess the cancer business is booming.  

My old college friend came to visit on Thursday. She's been a good friend for a long time. She's one of the first people I met when I moved to NYC 19 years ago. We roomed together for a few semesters. We were roommates in 2 different apartments after we graduated. We even worked at the same company for a little bit. Now she lives in Pennsylvania. She's married to a great man and has two adorable children. It's hard to stay in touch, but lucky for me her company has an office here in the city so I get her all to myself when she has to come for business trips. I'm so happy to have her back in my life. She didn't even know it, but our relationship was a big stepping stone on my way to sobriety. We lost touch for a long time at one point over the years. I remember one day I was in a cab on the way back to the office from a meeting. I was having a bad day, week, month, life. I was definitely hung over. My job was getting really stressful and unmanageable. The relationship I was in felt broken. We had no idea how to fix it but at that point, we'd been together so long, I had no idea how to live without him either. So we just stayed kind of grey and comfortably discontent. So that's where I was- too proud to admit, or possibly even realize, that I was no longer in control of my life, my misery, or my drinking- kinda numb in the back of the cab dully wishing a bus would T-bone us (on the passenger side, so the driver wouldn't get hurt of course. I thought these things through.) and my phone rings. It's my old college friend. She was calling to tell me she had a son and he was three weeks old. I congratulated her and said all the things you're supposed to say and then we hung up.  I put my phone down, looked out the window, and fell to pieces in the back of the car, crying hysterically. This girl is someone I would say is one of my best friends in the world and I was so absent, so self-absorbed, so checked-out that I'd missed her entire pregnancy. My best friend grew a baby, brought him into this world, and I didn't know until three weeks after. I missed the whole thing. What the hell? Where the hell had I been? This isn't me. I wouldn't do that. Except I did do that. I cried for 3 days. I wish I could say that was all I needed to clean up my life, but really it was more fuel for my little self-hatred fire. It was one more seed planted though. I stopped drinking eight months later. Eventually, because of her job, we reconnected and I was able to tell her what she didn't know she did for me, and apologize, and thank her for calling that day when she could have so easily, rightfully written me off. 

So yes, that wonderful, forgiving lady came to visit. Her mother is in the middle of her own cancer treatment so we had lots to talk about. David got to meet her, which is awesome. He hasn't met a lot of my friends and family (or I should say "hadn't" because we've been making an effort to fix that.) Our relationship was pretty "whirlwind" as they say. We started dating in September. He officially moved in in February. We were engaged by July. We'd been friends for about a year and half before that though. So it's not like we were strangers. It was more like a very long first date. Anyway, I love it when everyone gets to meet and they all get along. It was nice to have her here for a little bit. And since she came out to Queens because I wasn't up for going out, I didn't even have to get out of my sweatpants. (See previous post) 

Speaking of the Pro list. Here's one more:  

 -I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about spending a gorgeous Saturday in bed blogging.