It's All Just Part of My Charm

[copied from dland]

Given my recent heart attack lunacy, I was going to spare you all this one, but bluesleepy has inspired me to share. Just to give you a nice, well-rounded picture of the wonder that is me.

So I posted yesterday's entry; I think I wrote something about not having heard yet from either R or the Sibs, and that they would probably call at the same time. This is not what happened. I wasn't worried about getting my sister on the phone because her phone doesn't work sometimes, and other times she just doesn't answer the phone, and anyway, she has a husband who sticks to her like velcro so I knew that wherever she was, he was with her.

But R often calls when she's walking home from the train around 6.25, or else a half hour later if she gets the later train. Not every day, but I hadn't talked to her on Thursday because we both had dinner plans, so I figured Friday for sure, since she'd also be telling me when she was coming by this weekend to do her laundry visit with us. Now, she has also said to me in the past, You know, you can call me, too, so at about 7.20, I called.

The phone didn't ring; it went right to the voice mail. Which means that it was turned off. R never turns her phone off.

Before my mind even had the chance to gear up the worry machine on the particulars of this, I felt the adrenaline surge that tells me that my blood pressure is going up. This is something like what you would feel if you knew your child was playing outside in the front yard and you heard a loud squeal of tires and the crash of metal. Your body would switch into super-emergency mode before you even knew if your child was involved, before you knew if it was even necessary.

I felt no chest pain here, btw, and if I was going to have a heart attack this week, that would have done it, so I'm pretty sure I'm okay there. I also realized immediately that this is exactly the situation my blood pressure med is designed to handle, so I knew it would kick in any minute and I would be okay.

This is not an actual panic attack. It's just my body's total over-reaction to something that was in itself not threatening to my child, but that I perceived it to be. This is part of the intense-worrying thing that must have come to me in my DNA. I'm sure I've told this before: when I was a kid, I was forbidden to ride my bicycle when my grandfather was visiting because he could not get past the terrible fear that it would somehow maim or kill me. Nevertheless, I did once, and my mother found him standing in a closet, shifting nervously from foot to foot, waiting until I got home. So this is what I come from.

Anyway, despite my absolute certainty that R had been kidnapped and worse and her cell phone thrown by her captors into the Hudson River and that I would never see her again and I didn't even know her roommate's cell phone number to call and ask if she had heard from her ... breathe ... I decided that she had probably gone out for a drink with some people from work and had to turn her phone off for some reason. Yeah, that's the ticket. She's just coming home late.

She called about 7.50, assuming I might be worried because I hadn't heard from her yet. (Yes, I have extremely perceptive children.) It was the last day for one of the women in her office, so they took her out for a drink. She didn't hear the phone ring or even see a missed call, so there must have been no reception where she was. She was already at Penn Station now, waiting for her train.

So yeah, irrational fear, physical reaction, all that stuff. C'est moi.

(I got my sister after that, too. In case you were wondering.)

R did come by briefly today, got her laundry done, and visited a bit, but mostly she was on the run. Other than the obligatory Saturday morning run to the cleaners/pharmacy/supermarket, I've been home. Got my own laundries all done and put away, bills paid, desk straightened up a bit. Catching up on some TV now.

I recorded She's the Man, which R told me to watch because I've never seen Twelfth Night, which this is a modernized version of. The high school drama club is doing Twelfth Night next fall, and I'm looking forward to it. I love me some good Shakespeare.

And now, time for a little bit of dinner.

WATCHING THE RICHES :: ENTRY #1418