Why Can’t Life Happen at One’s Convenience?

Nice relapse yesterday. Felt amazingly terrible all day. Damn it, this (whatever this is) couldn’t happen at a worse time. We have two projects in house and yesterday a potential new client called to inquire if we could work on his business’s entire opus. Since he’s been around for a while, there’s a lot of it.

This is exactly the kind of customer we’ve been praying for: a business whose needs can occupy us for a long time, and that’s likely to bring in enough revenue to contribute significantly toward our goal of having The Copyeditor’s Desk generate an income that both of us can actually live on.

Yesterday I called Young Dr. Kildare’s office and described the continuing onslaught of symptoms, which are not really helped significantly by large doses of meds. The only thing that helps is not eating, the result of which has been that I’ve lost seven pounds in seven days. That’s nice, since I’ve never been so fat in my life. But I’d kind of like to have more control over the process… He immediately had his underlings refer me to a gastroenterologist for the dreaded endoscopy. So obviously I’m not going to get out of that, and since they have to knock you out for the light-show, it will consume an entire day of my work schedule. And if they find anything significant, of course, it will consume the rest of my (not very lengthy) life.

YDK called last night after working hours, obviously concerned. I observed that one of my complaints is consistently listed as a symptom of gastric cancer and never as either of the two other possible ailments. He asked me to stop reading Internet sites and said indeed that particular part of the bellyache also can manifest itself with GERD and with peptic ulcer. Or a hiatal hernia.

My mother had a hernia. The resulting surgery was not minor. Had her in the hospital the better part of a week (true—that was in the day when we actually took care of surgery patients, which we don’t anymore), and it took about three months for her to recover. She never did fully recover, come to think of it. From that point on, it was pretty much a long, slow, downhill slide.

To complicate matters, the urchins turned in a raft of in-class diagnostic essays that I have to turn around before Monday, and another client sent a wad of copy to read. I don’t even know which one to try to move first. Guess I need to write a to-do list to keep this sh!t under control. As best as anything can be brought under control. Which isn’t very “best.”

Why do we labor under the illusion that life ever is under control?

Hm. I suppose it’s a survival adaptation. If we fully appreciated how random and pointless it all is, we’d go mad. What creature would put out the amount of energy and work required to stay alive if it thought food and mates and shelter came its way more by chance than by its own efforts?

I wonder if an amoeba believes it has some control over the environment it swims through. Probably does.

Well, it’s already after 5:00 a.m. Since I’ve got to arrive at an office halfway to Casa Grande by 9:30, I’d probably better try to work on at least one of those projects before any more time passes.