Another week (mostly) down the tubes and another update on how I’m doing. Physically, anyway. And a little mentally and emotionally, of course. That’s part of it these days, given that the reason I’ve stopped making much progress in physical therapy is that I’m exhausted from work and stressed beyond my ability to easily handle. Turns out that having your entire week knocked off course by someone else’s fuckup really sucks. To put it briefly, since I’m writing this late, one of my coworkers took crucial parts of my testing apparatus without telling me, rendering it incapable of being used for the testing I originally built it for. When I found out and confronted him, I was told to just build up my gear again and fix up the testing setup that he’d dismantled and only barely begun to put back together again in a “nice” way (despite me telling him a couple days prior that I was going to need it that week and that “working” was better than “pretty”). Which means that my plans to leave work “early” to play video games with my friends got thrown to the side so I could spent seven hours fixing what he’d messed up so I could run my goddamn twenty-minute test to verify that the latest version of the software, that the developer had put out that day, was good to go so that we’d have time for fixes and more testing if it WASN’T fine. I spent most of Wednesday apoplectic about that and had the rest of the week completely disrupted by this eight hours of work and software updating I wound up needing to do outside of my already busy plans for the week.

All told, I worked thirty-eight hours from Wednesday to Friday of that week and eventually wound up needing to work on the subsequent Saturday in order to get everything done for the upcoming Monday’s software hand-over. I was not happy about any of that and I was too busy or exhausted to take the time to do all the exercises my physical therapist wanted me to do. I’m doing better on those this week, so I’ll hopefully have another productive physical therapy session since I’ve been doing the work this week, but I’m still so incredibly exhausted and somehow more burned-out than ever. There’s no fixing that with more work, unfortunately. I can’t exhort or labor my way through burnout and fatigue. I can only slowly rest my way through them. And, if this week is any indication, given the Tuesday I’m having as I write this, I will not get that for a long while. Maybe not until I’ve got another job or another employer or something similar. I don’t know. All I know for sure is that the past seven days have been absolute hell in every single possible way they can be and even my acceptance of my own misery isn’t enough to protect me from all this shit. There’s pretty much nothing I can do about it other than keep trying to get my work done and, I don’t know, maybe talk to my boss about what I need to do in order to get him and other people to take me seriously when I bring up problems rather than brush me off until the little problems I’ve noticed graduate into full-on significant problems that have people wandering into our part of the building, wondering what the hell is going on.

But I’ve got my stretches. I’ve got my little workout routines. I’ve even got answers about what to do with neck and shoulder tension (and tension-related pain) I’ve been putting up with for decades. All of which is already paying off. Far slower than I’d like, of course, but it is paying off. I’ve stopped sitting as much at my desk and while I’ve got a whole new set of back and leg pains to go with trying to stand all day for ten to fourteen hour work-days, I’m also noticing that some of my lingering back pain and nerve issues are finally starting to diminish. We’ll have to see how things actually play out, if my condition continues to improve and the nerve problems fully go away, but I’m feeling hopeful that they might. Which, given my distinct lack of hope in pretty much all the other parts of my life, I’ll absolutely take. I’ll take whatever I can get right now, given I was so tired on my one day off last weekend that I couldn’t even push myself to run an hour-long “introduce the new characters” Dungeons and Dragons session (which is why there won’t be any updates about The Rotten next week, unfortunately).

I just hope it’ll be enough, eventually, since I’m not sure I could keep working through a complete breakdown of every part of my life and I can’t really afford to take time away right now. I mean, my boss would let me if I needed it, but I don’t want to be the tall nail on this project and I absolutely have the time I need to do this work if no one else fucks something up for me. Or does something that fills me with a blistering rage and indignation such that I have to spend an hour or more walking around the building, sitting places away from my office and coworkers while I do breathing exercises in order to avoid losing my shit on someone who generally doesn’t deserve it because, while they are frustrating me, they didn’t make me wait at the pharmacy for an hour or force me to wait on hold (on and off) for thirty minutes while I spoke with the least helpful billing department I’ve ever encountered. Which is saying something, given that billing departments are almost never helpful.