Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Complaint Department

I am not one to complain. (I said that with a straight face and I am hiding from the impending lightening bolt...)

For the last three days I have been fighting a migraine headache. Not just a migraine. The headache came and stayed. For three days I have felt like my brain had separated from my skull and was going to explode at any minute. I found I could not form words into proper sentences. I could not complete a thought. My body felt like it was being slowly and inexorably pushed into the ground that I stood on.

I could not sleep, I could not lay down. But my eyes would shut automatically to try and save my brain from the attacks of light and sound that surrounded me.

And I had to go to work. I had cases that could not be handed off to someone else.

So I stumbled to work on Monday. Hoping against all odds that nothing would go wrong and people would speak gently to me.

HA!

The landlord was putting a new roof on our building. That was not a quiet and gentle thing.

Our office building with the original asbestos tiles.


Big, burly, half-dressed males (happy to have a job and really quite nice) hammered and crow-barred gleefully on the roof over my head. My head responded in kind. I wanted to crawl under my desk.

The odor of the old shingles, the sound of the workers and their tools, the expansion in my head was driving me to new heights of complaint.

Then I went to work. Courthouses are not a great place for compassion. Lawyers and judges try to avoid that human quality. And when faced with a grumpy, mind melting, female who is, in some cases, twice their age, the idea of compassion seems to recede even further from their realm of behavior.

Now I do not blame these folk. They were trying to do their jobs and I was having some difficulty expressing myself in complete, coherent sentences. Come to think of it, I was probably acting like some of my clients on their good days. That is frightening to a District Attorney.

I finally got it all done and went back to the place of hammers and tongs.

For some reason, my daughter thought she should drive me home.

Home, prescription drugs, bed, dogs and cats curled around me.

I finally slept.

I really can't complain. My physical pain goes away in time, I have a job that I created myself, I have a great kid who looks out for me, and I have a spouse who closed all the blinds, put the dogs on the bed and stayed very quiet for a long time.

I think that is very, very good. I am blessed.

No comments:

Post a Comment