“Stay focused and keep the course.  Keep doing and stop thinking. Especially stop overthinking.”

Today was the meeting with the psychologist.  Actually this is the meeting I dreaded because I don’t know how you can meet with people for one day and drop advice and hope that people take it right.  It was also a meeting we didn’t have to take , but my wife said , “Let’s just go and listen”.  It has actually thrown my wife off kilter.  She hasn’t been able to stay on task at work all day and it has created more worry in her life.  My wife was fine for the most part and now I had to undo what the psychologist did…..and of course, listening to my advice is not what my wife likes to do.

There were some good parts of the visit.  The doctor first encouraged my wife that distraction is good and that what we are doing is right with her continuing her work.  She also told my wife to start some breathing exercises so my wife doesn’t become dependent on Adavan (sp?), a drug my wife has been taking to deal with some anxiety.  They don’t want you to become too dependent upon it.  Then things got worse when she started reminding my wife of things that she didn’t need to remind her of and telling us how to handle other matters that we’ve already taken care of.  What the heck?!!!

I have taken the responsibility of worrying about things for my wife and making sure that she doesn’t dwell on things and throw herself into a depression and suddenly this “Quack” does that. We were definitely in good spirits all the way until this psychologist starts telling my wife of people of longer recoveries than expected, kids who have been traumatized, and other roadblocks that we have discussed in the past, but have agreed to be prepared for, look out for, and deal with them when the time comes.  This psychologist might have been trying to talk to us as if we were unprepared when everyone has told us so far that we were more than prepared. Argghhh!

It took a few hours, but I’ve gotten my wife’s mind focused back on other things.  She’s in a good way.  We spilled our anger over the psychologist’s thoughts and said, here’s what we will listen to…and the rest is “Quackiness”.  We’ve refocused on the good points and are at piece.  We laughed because my wife’s month long cough is finally gone.  Definitely an anxiety cough and something the psychologist did say was likely a product of stress and even possibly the medication.

Today was the first day of school and there was some sadness for us.  Two young families in the school with us lost parents this summer.  One lost a father to an aggressive pancreatic cancer and another lost a mother to breast cancer which had metastasized into her liver.  We had seen her all summer at the pool with her young sons and were saddened to hear of their loss. 

At the same time, we are so grateful to have a wonderful core group of parents that we have told who have already approached us with help, food , etc.   Such amazing people and we are so happy with our school community.  They will watch out for our children to make sure that they seem okay with what is going on at home.

Hey wait…was this more of a distraction? I guess we somehow got distracted by more events and other drama, my wife got a lot of work done, our kids seem pretty psyched about school and soccer practice and our first games this weekend!  5 more days of this!?  Aiyyee!  Somebody needs to distract me!