And another week goes by

 In the blink of an eye. To rehash this week: 

• Hubby had been doing good, slowly getting better
• Then on Wednesday he seemed to suddenly get worse. So bad that I was afraid that the pneumonia was coming back and I was scared.
• Thursday dawned, and as I'm getting ready for work, Hubby comes walking out all bright and cheerful and looking 1,000 times better than he did yesterday. Whew!!!
• Since Thursday he has made progress in leaps and bounds. He hasn't used his oxygen at all in 2 days. Yesterday he did a lot of things - slowly, but he did them. 

So it looks like he might be on the mend. Thank God!!! 

One of the things that I did not even realize until Friday was how scared I actually was. Once Friday got here and he really seemed so much better, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders and that I could finally and truly relax. As that happened I realized a couple of things. 

1. I don't like to ask for help. I say to myself, and people that offer help, I can do it myself, I'm good, things are okay. When they really and truly aren't. These last couple of weeks I would have loved to just sit down and talk with someone. Just talk. But I didn't ask for help and told everyone I was fine and so I didn't get to do that. I realized yesterday that I do that because I don't want to impose on anyone. I don't feel like I can ask for help. I don't want people to tell me no. That comes down to self-worth and I need to fix that. 
2. I set these high expectations for myself in unusual circumstances and then get stressed when I can't keep up. For example, all this time while Hubby has been sick, I've been trying to keep the house up the way it normally is. That is ridiculous since I had to do a lot of stuff for him and do the chores he normally does that needed to be done, like garbage and dog poop. Then I would get to feel resentful which would make me feel like a horrible person. This created a cycle of basically self abuse. I need to work on letting things go when I can. When things get crazy, normality generally goes out the window. I think that by trying to maintain some sense of normality I was trying to shield myself from the how bad I thought things were. 

I view this as a serious learning experience and need to learn and grow from it. We will face serious challenges in our future and I need to keep these things in mind so that I handle them better. 

Also, I have been trying to get our finances in order. They are actually in pretty good shape but we have a lot of credit card bills. I have been trying to get ahead on them but with the high interest rates and the monthly payments it has been difficult. So I decided to try for a personal loan to pay them off. I found a loan that would give us enough money to pay the majority of them off completely and the loan payment would be lower than the current monthly payments. So I applied for that on Wednesday and have been waiting to hear. Well, while waiting to hear I fell into my old habit of living in the future. I started to imagine what it would be like to have zero balances on the majority of the credit cards. I was thinking about how I would manage the one or two that I will use. Then I started checking the loan account all the time and I mean All. The. Time. There is a fine line between looking forward to something and obsessing over it. I spent too many years of my life living in the nebulous future instead of the present. I don't like it and I don't want to live like that. Once I realized what I was doing it was pretty easy to pull back from it. Am I still looking forward to having those credit cards paid off? Absolutely, but it really doesn't matter if it happens today or next week. Just know that it will happen is good enough for me. And, as I explained to myself yesterday, it's not going to change anything in my life. I will still be making payments, just to one place instead of 8. So it's not really going to change anything at all. I've just got the idea in my head that I want our credit score to increase. I want to ultimately see it at 800 but right now I'm shooting for 700. We are so close. But I can't let that control my life or take things over. So I need to put it in it's place and not let it become larger than it really is. 

Writing the above paragraph I think I just had an epiphany of sorts. I applied for that loan on Wednesday. The day Hubby was at his worse and I was most scared that things were going south with him. Could I have been trying to exert some semblance of control over my life? Control is really just an illusion but one I apparently cling to tenaciously. 

Okay, enough for now. I gots things to do.