Life on the Other Side of Done

The big news: I have now finished my written exams!!! As of Friday at about 4:30 pm, I completed my last one--six exams in all! And it feels great to be done!

I have been gradually returning to life over the past few days. After an initial 'high' on Friday evening, boy, did I crash this weekend. I'm glad I hadn't ended up planning a grand celebration. (We considered possibly going away for the weekend, since I had Sunday off from church.) But I don't think I could have possibly done it!

Friday night, about 2:30 in the morning, I woke up in awful pain. I had a pain in my back, just between my shoulder blades, that was just shooting through me, especially down my left arm, but also just all over. I've never felt anything like it before. And I have to admit, I was a little worried it had something to do with my heart--especially since women's symptoms are so different than men's when it comes to heart stuff.

But I decided it couldn't be that, took a couple ibuprofin, got out the heating pad, and managed after a while to get back to sleep. Next morning when I woke up, everything still hurt, though not quite as terribly as it had been. Even so I couldn't turn my head very far in either direction and felt stiff and achey all over. Miserable!

Little by little, in the daylight hours, it dawned on me--the pain was from sitting and typing furiously for four hours straight without even the slightest pause. This was my body in an uproar at all the anxiety as well as no small amount of physical punishment I'd put it through. I crashed on the couch and barely ventured far from it for the next two days. I had truly pushed myself to the edge of exhaustion!

D was not the least bit surprised. And he was wonderful about letting me catch up on sleep. I was surprised, though. I mean, I knew it had been hard work and that I had a lot of stress built up around this stuff, but I was completely unprepared for the physical crash after the experience. I just marvel at that.

Yesterday afternoon, D had a hockey game and cookout with his team. He took Monk with him and left me home to laze about happily and drowsily. I flicked through the channels and came across one of my all-time favorite movies: Same Time Next Year. I can't count the number of times I've watched that movie over the past twenty years or so. But it makes me cry at all the same places, without fail, every time. It was the perfect movie to watch yesterday.

Except I was amazed to realize that the last video montage (there are numerous ones placed between the scenes to mark the passage of time) was from 1977. And everything in it seemed so vividly memorable to me. And that was thirty years ago. In fact, when I first started to watch Same Time Next Year, the video montages from the 1950s which open the film were just about equidistant from me then (in, say, 1986) as the 1970s ones are from me today. That just makes my head spin.

Then I happened on the channel SoapNet (!) and completely indulged in watching a week's worth of General Hospital episodes. (It think it's been about seven years since I've watched GH--the last time was probably when Monk would take his afternoon naps as an infant.) But it was so cool to catch this particular week, for those of you may have loved GH once upon a time, because Laura came out of her four-year coma by the end of that week. In time for Luke and Laura's thirty year anniversary which comes up next month, apparently. :D

They've got a few of the real old timer characters from the late 70s early 80s--including Robert Scorpio, Robin Scorpio, and Luke and Laura. And of course the Quartermaine gang still going strong. A baby named after Lila Quartermaine was also born in the episodes I was watching yesterday. (None of this will make any sense to someone who's never been a fan of the show.)

Well, as you can see, it was a great day. A good, if hazy weekend. And I am trying to take things slowly as I recover from this giant push.

Next steps? Scheduling my oral exam (likely not 'til the end of November/beginning of December, unfortunately.) And working on my dissertation proposal.