Damnit! I just lost my journal entry that I was typing all because my husband has set this thing to update automatically. He suspects, rightly so, that I would never update it. Whenever this happens, I am infuriated. And I am not going to try to rewrite everything.
I am somewhat better. Dale took me to the doctor today. Now we are trying a new thing and if it doesn’t work, I will have another colonoscopy.
I have tongue thrust, which explains some of the reflux. I swallow too much air when I drink things, which makes me burp. They told me to take GAS-EX and it has been helping a lot. And I’ve read that there is a strong link between sleep apnea and reflux disease. Tomorrow I will finally be getting the sleep study done and we will see what we see.
The “Omega” poem is going to be in the summer issue of Georgia Review. And they actually PAY. When I had my story published in New England Review, I got seventy dollars. Now I am getting one hundred for one poem. When the Massachusetts Review comes out in the fall, I will get fifty dollars. And when the Antioch Review comes out, I will get twenty dollars. A long time ago, I won a silly little contest in a very, very small magazine and got twenty-five dollars. In high school I won honorable mention in the Northeast Georgia Writing Contest and I got a ten dollar check. And that is it. You just don’t make a lot of money when you publish poems. That’s why this hundred dollars seems so enormous. This is the largest feather in my cap.
Now that I’ve written five of the love poems, I should get busy on the other twenty. Of course, now that I have a little distance from the poems, they don’t seem so glorious, at least not all of them. I need to give it some time. And once this health stuff is over, I will get back to my old self. I need to prepare for the fall semester. I need to look forward to it, instead of dreading it. I need to WANT to return.
I am losing weight.
I am not depressed and I am on just three psych meds. My new shrink said that I was on too much medication, that I needed a good counselor and that I needed to go on a regular basis. I don’t think he will give me any Xanax when I run out. He just doesn’t want me on a lot of meds which is probably a good thing. Of course, with everything that’s been going on, I have not yet called a counselor.
So that’s an update. I have a lot going on this week, lots of appointments, but it should be okay as I am having much less diarrhea the last few days.
Onward and upward.
~r.
