Just Stressed

Do you remember that old commercial slogan from the 80's, "stress stinks, Arid works?" I really wish that all I had to do was apply a magical deodorant to wipe my stress away. I realized last night that I am wound incredibly tight right now. I realized this when I honestly came very close to having a nervous breakdown when Heffner started limping last night. I'll give a little back story to better explain the build up.

Things have been pretty stressful at work for me for about the past six months. I normally love my job. While I have tasks that are less thrilling than others, it's an overall pretty great job. There's a fair amount of variety, I work with a lot of really great people who are very supportive, helpful, and hard working. Additionally I have a pretty great boss. Granted that feeling probably isn't very mutual right now, but I understand. We've gone through a fair amount of changes and our work load has just really ramped up. Enough that we just hired someone in May and we're in the process of hiring another person. Things have just been crazy the past six months and I've pretty much been trying to keep my head above water. Every single time that I feel like I'm getting some where and I have things under control, something comes up to just destroy that. It's getting old. It's really wearing on me. And my work performance is most definitely suffering. It's getting more difficult to fully function to the ability I know I have when I'm on this constant roller coaster every day.

Normally, the dogs are my stress relief. There's so many things to do with them! They're not just my pets, not just a hobby, not just a passing fad. They are everything. Lately we've had a run of bad luck specifically with Bess. It is so hard to try to keep my head on straight when I've got a dog that first goes through a very serious and life threatening illness. Then once she's really on her way to recovering, she narrowly misses a life threatening gash. The possibility of losing one of my dogs is not something that I can stand to think about. When that day comes, it will destroy me. Until then, I really can't think about it. I prefer to plan for my dogs to live forever. Being forced to stare their mortality in the face twice within the same month has seriously pushed me to the edge.

When you combine the heavy stress load that I've been trying unsuccessfully to deal with at work, I'm seriously ready to completely shut down if one more thing goes wrong. Which brings us up to last night where I seriously held on to things by a very thin thread.

Heffner got the zoomies in the back yard last night. Nothing new there. On one of his overly enthusiastic turns, he sort of wiped out with his back legs. In the process, he managed to put a small gash on his inner left rear thigh. It was relatively minor and that occasionally happens. While he seemed sore initially, he walked it off. A few hours later, he wasn't putting any weight on that foot. And he was putting weight only on the outside of the back right leg. I seriously freaked out. I had him walking up and down the hallway. As I got more and more agitated, I started yelling at Adam to get in the hallway and watch Heffner walking. I started yelling at Adam about the whole thing. Seriously. Just started yelling at my husband for really no reason, about something that he had no control over. Somehow he managed to get me calmed down after he realized that I wasn't on some random rampage about him. The thought of one of my dogs being injured yet again, just about pushed me over the edge. Having to go through all the thoughts I had with Bess on our two ER trips. All the unpleasant thoughts and emotions that I went through during those times. All the horrible feelings. Thinking that one of my dogs was hurt and I couldn't do a damn thing about it. It was awful.

Once I was calmed down and we were just talking things through. I flat out old Adam that I couldn't handle another thing going wrong. I seriously could not handle it. I'm stressed while I'm at work and I'm stressed while I'm at home. I'm to a point where I can't get away from it. I'm trying to work a balancing act with my sanity and all it will take is one little thing to upset the balance. And I just can't handle it at this point.

I know that this post is less dog related and more me going off on a tangent, but I can't help it. I really enjoy the blog. It's a little therapeutic for me to be able to gush about my dogs and just have with the whole thing in my own little way. And it does feel a little good to be able to just get this off my chest and air it out. So the blog goes silent for any little lengths of time, I'm probably just trying to figure out how to better deal with the stress and need a little break. It's usually not for very long. Or if I seem to be rambling at times, now you'll know why. Bear with me. Eventually it'll get better. It's just incredibly draining and trying right now.

I should also add that Heffner is doing fine today. No limping. I've kept a band-aid on his scratch and he's left it alone. I ended up giving him some buffered aspirin last night so that he could get comfortable and that seemed to help a lot. So thankfully nothing major there.