Friday night after work my husband and I went to IKEA and bought some long-awaited furniture for our apartment. We are now the proud owners of a queen-sized futon. Also, as a thank you for being so great these last seven weeks, I bought my husband his dream desk. I have to admit I’m pretty jealous of it. It is electric and with the push of a button can move up/down to adjust to the perfect height. He sits at it when he’s typing but changes it into a standing desk when he’s working on projects. Since my husband has the new desk now, we moved his old metal desk from the living room to the guest bedroom for me to set up as a home office. Since I’ve been working from home so often, it just made sense. More importantly, though, when I start grad school this fall, I will need a quiet space in which to study and write papers and the guest room was the obvious choice.
We spent Saturday rearranging the guest room furniture, putting together the futon, and setting up the desks. I took my husband’s advice and ordered myself a second monitor. The setup looks great now – dual monitors, a keyboard, & a mouse that all work with my laptop. Also, he made it so that my MacBook can run on iOS or Windows 10! This will certainly make grad school easier – some of the courses require the use of programs that are mostly meant for PCs.
Yesterday morning around 4:30 AM I woke up with a bloody nose. I hadn’t had once since Tuesday so I wasn’t too concerned. I waited for it to stop bleeding and then went back to sleep. My husband and I spent the day cleaning the apartment – mainly the kitchen and bathrooms. Around 2:00 PM my nose started bleeding again. Twice in one day? That can’t be a good sign… At least it stopped fairly quickly! As 3:30 PM rolled around, I could feel my nose dripping again. UGH! A third bloody nose?! Now I know this is DEFINITELY not good. I started to panic, but took solace in the fact that the worst was over. False. Around 12:30 AM as I was getting ready for bed the nose bleed came on strong. It still wasn’t tragic, but it took twice as long to stop as the previous three. If I didn’t already have an appointment scheduled for tomorrow with the hematologist, I would have called his office today asking to be seen. He previously mentioned that the real concern with bloody noses is if you can’t get them to stop. I am thinking, though, that the sheer number of incidents warrants cause for concern.
I keep trying to justify the bloody noses and rationalize them. For instance, my sleep apnea machine (although I always use the humidity setting so I don’t think it dries out my nose much at all) could cause my nose to dry out. Or the fact that I broke my nose Christmas 2014 could play a part. But can an injury that old still be a contributing factor to nose bleeds? Chances are these nose bleeds are solely related to the ITP, but I’ll find out tomorrow.
I got to work early this morning. The commute in wasn’t too terrible or strenuous. I had an appointment with my therapist at 1:00 PM and decided it would be easiest to go straight home after that. I hopped on the train back to NJ and then Ubered home from the PATH Station. Around 5:30 PM I got yet ANOTHER nose bleed. Thankfully, this one didn’t last too horribly long.
Enough about nose bleeds, though! The thing I want to focus on is the advice my therapist gave me today regarding tomorrow’s Echocardiagram. As I had previously mentioned, I am nervous I will blame myself for the results if they show any sort of weight-related damage or problems. My therapist pointed out that guilt and shame keep us focused on the past and prevent us from moving forward. What then followed was the single greatest analogy to date. For some reason after hearing this everything just clicked for me:
There is a cup of coffee spilled all over the kitchen floor. You have two options – you can try to figure out how it spilled or you can simply clean it up and move on. If you try to figure out how it spilled, you start wondering “did I leave it too close to the edge of the table?”, “did I accidentally knock it over?”, “should I have put it by the sink?” and you waste time worrying about what you could have or should have done differently to prevent the spill. All the while, the stain is setting in. Reflecting on how or why the spill happened doesn’t make the spill any better, it doesn’t make it go away any faster, and it certainly doesn’t help the situation. It is wasted time spent pointing fingers instead of addressing the problem. I think I need to approach the results of tomorrow’s echo the same way – the results are what they are – beating myself up over what I could have done differently to prevent a problem (assuming there is one) is only going to cause me more hurt. I need to instead figure out what the next steps are to rectify the problem and prevent future occurrences. I know myself pretty well, though, and I’m going to have to consciously make the decision to not focus on what role I played in this situation – “if I had eaten better…”, “if I had exercised more…”, etc.
Fingers crossed that all goes well tomorrow!