Thank you so much for nominating my entry, Cold Heartless Bitch for best coverage of a news event.  (I'll love you even more if you to to the Diarist Net voting page and vote for it as well!)   And congratulations to all the other nominees, especially SecraTerri, The Bitter Hag, and Charlene of Are We There Yet?

Thanks to The Real Diary Critic for reviewing this journal. I was very pleased with the review. It is dated May 12 and can be seen here.]

I'M MELTING, MELTING...OH WHAT A WORLD...

14 May 2002

It amazes me how I can go from relaxed and refreshed to overly stressed in a matter of minutes. The weekend was unusual in that I was so busy, running from one part of the state to the next, that I didn't even have time to feel guilty that I wasn't doing any work. Besides it was Mother's Day weekend and I deserved to have some time off.

So I went to the fund raiser for breast cancer, and the lunch in Emeryville, and dinner with my mother, and the 17 mile bike ride, and brunch with Walt's mother.

However, reality hit with a bang when I got home from Sacramento. Even though I have finally given my notice with the psychologist, there are still tapes to be cleared away before he's out of my life forever. But that still leaves the psychiatrist and Dr. G and all had work here for me.

I got up at 4 this morning and finished a short, rush report for the psychiatrist. I should have typed his second report, but I was so tired I just had to sleep for another 40 minutes, so I did.

When I got up, there was just enough time to make coffee and get up to the club (yes, I rode my bike!). I spent the morning trying to finish up some typing I didn't get done the night before, and went off to work, leaving Sunday's dishes undone (so what else is new?)

I don't know if it was busier than usual yesterday or if it just seemed so. I'm suffering from disorganization (like this is news to anyone?). One problem, especially for someone who is disorganized to begin with, is I have no flat surfaces. I have one desk and no shelves so everything goes on my desk. And Dr. G hates to leave "tasks to be done" in his out-box, so whenever I go into his desk, he has another pile of work for me to do.

No matter what I'm doing, he'll come out with a patient and have a list of things he would like me to do--make her a mammogram appointment, send a sample to the lab, give her equipment to do tests at home, etc. While I'm doing that, he'll have a question about money, which means taking out the checkbook and putting it on top of the stack of files, and then a patient will call to make an appointment, which means putting the appointment book on top of the checkbook on top of the stack of files. Dr. G will hand me stuff to copy, which goes on top of the appointment book on top of the checkbook, on top of the stack of files, etc. etc.

As it's all teetering on top of itself, the intercom will buzz, which means it's time for me to go in and take someone's blood pressure and stick around for the examination (male doctors have to have a female present in the room when they are examining a woman).

It's not that any of this is unusual, but someyhow it just all kind of started to get to me yesterday--not in a bad way, just in a bit of a stress way. It seems that I'm always getting things half done and having to put them aside to do something else, which I only get half done before I have to go do something else. And invariably at some point during the day, he'll make a comment, in front of a patient (because he wants to excuse the mess on my desk to the patient) that my desk is "in worse condition than his." I try to straighten it up at the end of the day, but it just seems impossible to ever finish anything.

He's going to be moving in a new cabinet, which will allow me a larger flat surface. I'm hoping that I can at least spread out a bit...have a stack for files, a stack for unsorted mail, a place to put the bookkeeping stuff and maybe clear away a place on my desk to actually write something without trying to write on top of a teetering stack of paperwork.

Last night he asked if I'd finished transcribing the tape he'd given me to take home. I must have looked really pressured because when I said "It's next in the queue," he looked genuinely concerned and said "How are you doing? Are you feeling overwhelmed?" Naturally, as is my wont, I poo-poo'ed it, but really I was.

It's actually kind of flattering, throwing all this work at me. He's reached the point where he just trusts that I'll get it all done, and he no longer hovers over me to make sure I'm doing it right. This is both good and bad--it's good in that it means I've lived up to whatever he expected of me; it's bad because I do feel overwhelmed sometimes.

But hey--if I can ride 17 miles in a day, I can do anything, right?

(But I did give up last night and instead of either writing this journal entry or working, decided to sleep for 6 hours, so now I have the next two hours of rushing to finish the tape I promised I'd have finished for him this morning).