Holding On…

I went back to work yesterday.  Last week was just one messed up thing after another, and it had actually started for me on Sunday night.  I don’t know what kind of a bug was roaming around town but just about everyone for the past week has been pretty sick.  I woke up about 2am Monday morning after not feeling too well after dinner Sunday night (last time I saw Lu was dinner).  I wound up throwing up all night long and for most of Monday, I had a pretty high fever so needless to say going to work wasn’t an option for me.  Tuesday I stayed home so my fever could break and I could begin to get moving again.  Wednesday I woke up ready to go to work, took a much needed hot shower but felt a little off as though I was missing something (I later found out it was Lu).   So I left work early on Wednesday, and wasn’t back at all until yesterday (Monday).

Fran told me that it was pretty busy last week but I was not expecting what I saw yesterday.  We were so bombarded with assignments that my inbox literally didn’t stop from when I walked in the door at 9:45 and even after I walked out the door at 7:45 (I’m only scheduled 10-7).

I remember at one point in the day I’d actually gotten away from the desk to take my hour lunch and there were about 2 assignments that I’d just printed and left on the printer due to the fact that Trish was just too busy working on something for our boss that assigning to an appraiser just wasn’t happening.  I then came back from Lunch and I know there were about 20 assigments on the printer in total (including the two I’d printed before I left) but the other departments were over loaded so I didn’t think anything by it.  I look at my inbox and over the course of the hour about 120 assignments came through.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many emails before in this place and it was certainly overwhelming when you think about how many reams of paper it took to print out everything.  On top of that it all requires being stapled and assigned to an appraiser with all (if any) of the corrections.  It’s was definitely a daunting task

As I noted, Franny and I didn’t get to leave until about 7:45 last night.  I was home around 8:10 with the quick cig before I got in the car and the drive home.  I’m hoping that we don’t need to go through it again Today because it’s National Pancake Day at IHOP and we were planning on treating ourselves to some tasty goodness.

I’m really shaken up about an accident on Friday night that I heard about.  On my way home from my mothers there was a nasty accident on Sea Cliff Avenue.  I didn’t personally see it, I just know that my mother called me in a panic because she heard on her radio that there was an accident with a car on fire.  I later found out that it was two kids that I’d know years ago.  They were zipping up the street going faster than they should have been, bounced off of a parked car and flew in the air to the transformer.  The car then landed and the transformer landed on them.  One kid was killed instantly, the other was screaming bloody murder while the car was ablaze.  On top of that, another kid I went to school with drank a little too much after Lucy’s wake and wound up waking up in the E.R. with no recollection of how he got there.  He got into an accident on the L.I.E.

I honestly think all EMT’s in a 10 mile radius of Glen Cove are pretty shaken up by this past weeks events.  I know that I certainly am.

I’m trying hard to get through the day but when you work right down the street from where your best friend worked as a D.A. for the bus company – seeing all of the buses all day long is no longer the comfort it was before.  Her bus, 161, passed me as I was walking down to the court yard up the street from work.  It was a cold day but I needed to clear my head and that certainly didn’t help me at all.

It’s just hard to hold yourself together with constant reminders of someone who was so important to your life.