Tag: anxiety

Dreaming About a Writing Career — Literally

So I dreamed that I was going on vacation to visit family in rural Indiana. I have have had family girl Indiana. My boss sent work with me, in this case, he required me to take bottles of pills to count while I was gone. Though how that would work, I don’t know.

So I grabbed an armload of bottles to take with me and it turned out one of them had a controlled substance in it. When I went to count that one, something pulled me away before I could count it, and when I returned, the bottle was empty with only the little canisters of dessicant left.

I panicked and retraced my steps, wondering if I’d put the pills down somewhere without noticing, but it never turned up. Meanwhile, my cousin’s daughter became hostile to me, insisting that we weren’t even really related. At this point, I went through the family tree, attributing these cousins to my grandmother’s sister, even though we were mostly close to my grandmother’s brother’s kids in real life.

Eventually the boy who was the older kid, a teenager, came to me and confessed. He admitted that he was a small-time criminal and he had stolen the pills and sold them.

I knew I shouldn’t’ve taken the controlled substances at all, but the fact that I couldn’t bring them back to the pharmacy made it so much worse. I took him aside and told him that I was going to lose my job and that he’d better make it up to me. My suggestion was that we work together on a book blowing the proverbial lid off of the criminal group that he belonged to.

That wasn’t the book we ended up writing, though. The book we ended up with was the story of how I ended up in this situation and how I moved to and adjusted to the small Indiana town. Kind of a fish out of water story with a side order of the development of the fixer-upper house that was all I could afford.

I somehow got in with a traditional publisher for this and when I read the contract, I discovered that the publisher had the right of first refusal for a movie or television show based on the book. This means that if someone wants to make a movie or television show, the publisher gets first crack at it. My cousins and I got stars in our eyes for a moment but thought it’d never happen.

But then it did. The publisher (which turned out to be a subsidiary of Warner Brothers, since Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne showed up in the series) made a television series from it. There was a bit of conflict when my best friend (not someone I really know, btw) showed up convinced that she was going to play the part of my best friend in the series. Which, come to think of it, she actually did. She walked onto the set just before the actress who’d been cast in the role, and the director just let it go. That was odd.

Oh, well. Time for today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link. Let’s see. . . . City of the Plague God, by Sarwat Chadda seems to be up next. I really enjoyed this book, both as a book and in a sort of (insert Twilight Zone theme) kind of way.You see, City of the Plague God is the story of Sikander Aziz, the son of Iraqi immigrants, who runs afoul of Nergal, the titular plague god. Sik’s parents fall prey to a plague that threatens all of New York City and quite possibly the world. And it was just odd to have a book about a plague hitting New York City when Covid had hit New York City so hard and all.

Now, I guess it’s possible that this book went from idea to draft to publication in fewer than two years, but I just find it eerie when a book predicts future events. Another example is the Our Worlds at War Superman comic book storyline event, when an alien comes to Lex Luthor (at the time, President of the United States) and tells him to allow what is going to happen next to happen because, after all, all of the greatest presidents have wars to their name. And while I find it extremely unlikely that anything like that happened to George Bush fils, the fact remains that he was warned that 9/11 was coming, and he didn’t do anything to stop it. It was all very eerie as well, and one of my friends said that the storyline was a commentary on current events, and I had to point out to her that it was the storyline for summer 2001, before 9/11 even happened.

I Have a Biopsy in 14.5 Hours

I chipped a tooth a month or so ago. Evelyn and I were eating curried chickpeas and potatoes over brown rice and some of the rice was a little hard. I bit down on a piece of rice, and felt a stabbing pain in my tooth and jaw.

I gave it some time to see if it was just a temporary pain or if I really chipped my tooth. And a week or so later, a small piece of tooth came out of my mouth. So I made an appointment with my dentist to have her look over the tooth, which was cracked, and so was another tooth on that same side.

While she was in there, I had her look at some pain I was having on the other side of my mouth. I was worried that it was a cavity, because it had been so painful for a while, but it turned out to be a big chunk of plaque that was scraping my gums.

While she was there, though, she said that there was a white mark on the side of my tongue. She gave me a whole list of things it could be, including candidiasis, and, well, I do take inhaled steroids and I’m not perfect about rinsing my mouth out. She agreed that was probably what it was and said she’d give me a prescription for nystatin.

Instead of nystatin, though, she referred me to an oral surgeon for a biopsy just in case it’s leukoplakia, because leukoplakia is potentially precancerous.

So. I called the oral surgeon and made the appointment, and it’s set for 2:30 pm this afternoon.

My anxiety leads me to catastrophize, so I half-expect him to take one look at my tongue and ask if I have my affairs in order because my tongue is going to kill me.

So. 14.5 hours to go. My pharmacist’s mother died from cancer, so she is very supportive of me finding out what it is and tackling it. My son has a vested interest in me getting this taken care of, particularly if it is potentially precancerous. I have an even more important interest in getting this taken care of.

I guess we’ll know what we know when we know it.

Oh, and I am taking care of my affairs. I’m doing housekeeping-type chores more than anything else. I’m knuckling down and getting those blankets unraveled so I can make new blankets from them. I’m shredding old junk mail and looking for memorabilia that might be mixed in with it. I’m reading and weeding my book collection (and then cataloguing the ones I’m keeping). Because the surgeon may decide that the white mark isn’t anything to worry about, but 65 people got killed by stray bullets in 2008 (nationwide) and so maybe there’s a stray bullet out there with my name on it. Maybe I’ll get hit in the head by a meteorite. Or maybe I’ll live to a ripe old age and just have less clutter in my life.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Today we have Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened, by Allie Brosh. I think I’ve posted this one before, but I love it so much that it’s worth posting again.