I asked myself that question a lot over the last two days while I was trying to get my work in better shape for my advisor. After 24 hours had gone by without significant improvement, I decided I'd better start putting editorial notes into the draft with my thoughts on everything just as it was -- and hope that that would show my advisor what my intentions for the piece were and where I was having trouble making it do what I wanted.
Sigh.
It was all going so well while I was visiting Almost Dr. Sis -- every day, I camped out with my draft for a few hours, and by bedtime, I'd have measurable progress: maybe a new section of a scene or a much more fleshed-out revision of a previously written part. But once I got back to Seattle, the whole thing bogged down and sentences began to sound labored and I was reading paragraphs over and over without actually remembering a word. That was what told me that I needed to get some space from the piece. So I sent it off.
My advisor sent me her feedback today with reassurances that she thinks it's going well -- the scenes I'm sketching out are not meant to be perfect and we're going to reexamine everything I write this semester when the new term starts in January. That's definitely a relief. I have my doubts about this particular set of pages, though. Sometimes it really is easier to start a piece over from scratch than to try to take apart and reassemble a badly mangled draft. Guess we'll see what happens ...
In other news, my gastroenterologist got back to me yesterday (via his nurse) about my CT results. The good news: on the pancreatic front, there's nothing visibly wrong. We'll still do the endoscopy next week to see what there is to see and then go from there. The not-so-good news: certain lady parts looked abnormal on the film, so now I have to go get all that checked out by yet another specialist.
Where does this end??? I just want to figure out what's wrong so I can do something about it sooner rather than later. It would be nice if new issues didn't keep cropping up.
3 comments:
Good news from the CT scan but frustrating otherwise. Somehow it seems like one thing always leads to another and another and so on. As far as fixing things -- for me it's actually two questions. Not just when is something worth fixing but if so, where to start. Because fixing one thing inevitably means fixing the next related thing, and then the next and so on. Good luck with the further testing. Sending good thoughts your way.
Good - that your advisor is pleased with the progress of your piece
Bad - the test results uncovering unrelated problems.
I know just how you are feeling, wondering if you will ever get to be a 'normal' person again. I'm sure we both will - these are just little stumbles on the way to perfect health
Sherlock -- so true. I think that was the trouble I was running into. Whenever I "fixed" one part of the scene I was working on, other parts that had worked so well before suddenly felt off. It was like I was making things worse as I tried to make them better!
Thanks for the good thoughts.
FF -- you're very right about the wondering. I think I've accepted the diet stuff as my new normal, but I was totally not expecting this extra issue. Fortunately, it's asymptomatic (I would have had no idea there was anything out of the ordinary if I hadn't gone for the CT).
Hope you are still doing well with the massage therapy.
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