Yesterday I had a bad case of the woe-is-me’s. Perhaps it was part of the Hepatitis C treatment, perhaps it was just me wallowing in my own pity.

I’d had a particularly bad nights sleep. I woke at 1:30 for the usual I’m Drinking My Body Weight In Water loo (get it? Waterloo? get it?) visit and took my injured cat outside to do the same. He’s house trained in so far as he won’t pee inside but he also won’t use a litter box, so to save him feeling uncomfortable I decided to take him out. Wrong move. We both stood outside in the cold for 15 minutes and nothing happened except I became more and more awake. 

Back to bed, to the dulcet tones of my partner snoring. And snoring. And snoring. I lay there wanting to smother him with his own pillow. 

He’s working early at the moment, so his alarm went off at at 3:00am (I was still awake) and he hit snooze twice. By now I was almost beside myself with tiredness. And crankiness. After he left at about 4am I managed 2 hours sleep but I was not in a good frame of mind. 

I dragged myself to work, late after trying to get three lots of tablets down the cat’s throat, seven down mine and taking the cat outside AGAIN. I felt somehow raw and fragile. I cried at something I heard on the radio.

And that’s how I found myself in the office of my 2IC, crying, running nose, makeup everywhere, struggling to breathe.

“I just feel so USELESS!” I wailed. “I’m a complete waste of space. I can’t do anything, I can’t think straight, I may as well not be here for all the use I am.”

The poor guy tried to stem my flood of tears to no avail. I was just picking up momentum.

“And while I’m here feeling so bloody useless everyone around me has to pick up the pieces and keep the show on the road. I’m making extra work for EVERYONE!”

A less charitable person would have started humming “nobody likes me, everybody hates me, think I’ll go eat worms” but my 2IC is a charitable, caring guy.

Clearly too scared to approach a blubbering, unpredictable wreck, he kept the desk between us, trying to talk me down.

“Nobody hates you. Everyone just wants you to get better. We’re on your side. We don’t mind. Do you need more days off?”

“I DON’T KNOW!” I wailed. “I JUST DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ANYMORE!!”

So he made me a nice cup of tea (the Australian solution to all manner of problems) and started to work through the realities of it with me.

Luckily for me, today is my off-work day. I was in bed early last night, had a good night’s sleep and woke up feeling about a hundred times better than yesterday.

So the truths in all this as I see it are:
I actually am a bit useless at the moment. I am a bit of a waste of space. By the end of the week I’m only running on three cylinders, if that. I might need to re-visit my work hours. I’m going to give it another week and see how I go when things are back to normal and the injured cat doesn’t take up all my time. I have to remember the drugs I am taking for Hepatitis C are powerful. They will mess me up sometimes.

The other thing I learnt is that it’s okay to fall apart. The process of putting yourself back together is an an opportunity for self reflection and change.

And finally, a good cuppa really does cure a multitude of problems.