After a semi hectic day yesterday dealing with the stresses of student loans, I found some peace today when going to the Chinese buffet for dinner with Diego. After we had finished eating, we received our fortune cookies. Now, I don’t truly believe in fortune cookies or that they can or could come true, but I think it’s fun to see what it says inside. Diego chose his first and I was left with the one remaining. He tried to change his mind, but I said fate had already been chosen.

My fortune cookie said something along the lines of, “Your plans you have set into place will succeed.” Diego’s was somewhat similar to mine. I am not sure why since I don’t believe in fortunes anyway, but the idea of my plans being a success brought me a ray of hope. I created my vision board not too long ago with all my plans and goals that are actually likely to happen.

Rewind to this morning, I got up around 10am and went to bed at 5am because my interstitial cystitis pain (my bladder disease) was so severe. Some people with this disease deal with uncontrollable pain all day, every day. I wouldn’t say that my bladder issues are less severe than theirs, but I have better control on pain management and don’t flare nearly that often. To give some insight, my bladder disease affects the bladder, pelvis region, and my kidneys. If I am in a flare up, I feel like I have both a urinary tract infection and a kidney infection at the same time. I have had both and they are not fun, but the pain of this disease feels like that and you can test for an infection and to the untrained eye, could be diagnosed with UTI and given antibiotics when you in fact, don’t have an infection at all. It’s just that your bladder spasms and causes UTI symptoms and kidney pain, flank (back pain), and severe bloating.

So I called Diego at 5am on his way to work and asked him if I should go to urgent care because today is a holiday or if I should wait it out and see my urologist. He said they aren’t going to do anything besides give you antibiotics that make you sick or send you to ER because they don’t know how to treat your disease. He’s right.

Like I was saying, I don’t flare up often, but when I do, it gets bad. Usually it is stress induced and I got to sleep it off, take a hot shower, hydrate and pee to get the demons out (that’s a joke), and yeah. I used to smoke weed to help out with pain on severe days like today, but I don’t want it to trigger my bipolar disorder and trigger manic or depressive episodes.

After I woke up around 10am, I went downstairs and showed my dad a rough schedule of how I anticipate to work and go to school, along with an action plan to keep my parents involved with my grades and achievements in school.

My dad said it was good but wants to see me walk the walk rather than talk the talk. I kind of got frustrated because my mom had the same reaction and I told her that I felt as though they expect me to fail and almost want me to fail. I know with good intentions they want me to succeed, but there is so much negativity around my going to school because this isn’t what they envisioned for me; they wanted me to finish my associate’s at community college, not flunk half of my classes there, and at least transfer the bulk of my credits to university when I was ready.

But life isn’t perfect and I wanted to pursue something different that wasn’t offered at the community college I went to. I originally got almost half of my credits that were non transferable because I wasn’t planning on getting more than a technical associates degree, I planned on getting my paralegal certification and then being done with school.

Since that did not happen and I had my epiphany to become a social worker, I am on track to graduate with my bachelor’s by 2025. My goal is to finish all my schooling by the time I hit 30, which is doable unless I take time off from school. And a lot could happen between now and seven years; I could get pregnant, get married, buy a house, I don’t know. I mean, I’m not planning on any of that happening but we shall see.

I digress. My mom apologized for making me feel like they weren’t on team Dani. I made a to do list for the first of June, which is tomorrow and then went back to sleep until 3pm. I took a shower and got ready to come eat with Diego at the buffet. We got our food and ate and came home and napped until an hour ago. I decided to hop on the blog because I have so many ideas and thoughts storming around through my head that it would be impossible to get more sleep.

I am in less severe pain now which is good because I have no capability of combating the pain because Tylenol doesn’t work for me and I can’t have Ibuprofen. But now I am thinking of all of the things I have to do coming up tomorrow. I got to follow up with my primary care doctor to get the results of my sleep apnea test, I gotta clean my room when I get back home tomorrow, figure out what questions I need to ask my academic advisor for my first semester at university, do an online payment, check on the status of my medical leave of absence and when I’ll get paid. I also need to have my dad to review loan terms before accepting the loan since I can’t do that for him. Not to mention I get my second COVID-19 vaccine tomorrow. I am a little nervous on how I will feel since the second one is the kicker.

But I have hope. Just a sliver of hope that things will go well and I will succeed. Well I have to; failure is not an option. There is so much trust riding on this, so much everything, just raw emotions. I gotta play my heart out and put in 130% or else failure is inevitable.

Much love,

Dani