Worth The Exhaustion

Look at my pretty new tile floor in our kid/guest bathroom!



(Wish I'd taken photos for a before shot, but you'll have to just imagine very boring, neutral vinyl and that's what it looked like.)

Now, I didn't do any of the work, unless you count choosing the tiles from a very poorly lit loading dock where they were on close-out. (They're Italian porcelain, and I'm told high end/high quality. But on close-out, they were $2 per square foot, so they were darn cheap too.)

Since Scott is overloaded beyond belief, he didn't do the physical work either (although he cleaned the bathroom, including the worst of kitty litter box residue, of the old floor so it didn't gross out our tile guy too much). We hired someone to come in and do all the work. We're putting the same tile in our master bath too, which has a mushy floor just outside our shower. (We've fixed the problem that caused the mushy floor, I hope.)

Since I'm almost always home anyway, what's the big deal about handling a workman in the house? It's not like I had to supervise or anything.

But I did have to wake up at what is for me the crack-of-early to let him in at 9 a.m. on Wednesday for the first day. I'd assumed I'd be able to catch a nap, but that was a lot noisier than I anticipated for him to rip out the old floor and move the toilet and such.

He worked six hours that day, getting the bulk of the tiles glued down. And I was feeling like a zombie long before he left a bit after 3 p.m.

He asked if he could come at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, and I said yes while cringing. The occasional early-for-me morning is one thing. That was when it hit me that I'd committed to doing it for several days in a row.

Sigh.

So yesterday, I woke up in time to let him in (then waited for an hour while he was stuck at Home Depot picking up the right color caulk). As soon as he was in, I headed back to bed, where I slept until almost noon. Apparently it was the sound of him leaving that woke me up ...

I posted about it on Facebook in what I thought was poking fun at myself. And now, two days later, I'm still having a back-and-forth with a guy I dated briefly a million years ago (well, nearly 20 years ago) who insists, "I figure any day when you can sleep until noon has to be a good day, no matter the reason why you sleep that late."

Spoken like a person who has never had a debilitating chronic illness or loved someone with one.

But for as much as that statement and attitude irks me, I have to admit that I would have thought that too before finding out firsthand the depth of intensity in chronic fatigue.

And that has me wondering about the best ways to educate the temporarily healthy and able-bodied about what life with a debilitating chronic illness is like. (I keep repeating the word debilitating because until my mystery illness hit in 2007, I technically had several chronic illnesses, but none of them turned my life quite so topsy turvy as this one. Allergies (both food and environmental), mild asthma, mild hypothyroidism affected me, but no where near as drastically.)

Thoughts?

Meanwhile, the kid/guest bathroom is done and work on the master bathroom starts Monday, bright and early. Guess who plans on sleeping all weekend?

C'est moi!