If I had to pick one word to describe today, it would be…uncomfortable.

It’s been dark skies and gloom since I woke up this morning. We had a little bit of rain, but not enough to justify these overwhelming aches and pains or the sinus pressure currently building up inside my head.

Then I spent a couple of hours today filling out long-term disability forms for private insurance that I purchased through my most recent employer. It provides about a third of our income (the other two-thirds coming from SSDI) right now. But it doesn’t last forever. In fact, today’s lengthy forms reminded me that this benefit runs out in May.

They also forced me to list my current disabilities and recount my laundry list of symptoms. Clearly a necessary part of the process, but it is physically and emotionally painful to do. It brings all those scary, sad, PTSD feelings bubbling to the surface of my consciousness, and it usually takes a few days to get the anxiety back to a manageable simmer.

Anyway, being jobless with a head full of cancer means living in a perpetual state of financial stress, but today’s reminder was sort of like turning an already super tight screw a quarter-turn to the right. So, even though the loss of income is several months away, I panicked and set up a profile on a freelance jobs website. I took a spelling test there as part of the process and scored “below average.”

This former Spelling Bee Runner up was gutted.

And speaking of gutted. After spending an inordinate amount of time on the porcelain throne this afternoon, I tried to recall what could have caused me to be so sick.

“What did I eat?” I asked Dan, because my go-to is still to blame myself and my food choices for everything that goes wrong in life. (Thank you for your part in that, food-phobic society and fat-shaming doctors.)

So we went through a list of possible causes. “Maybe the cheesecake I made was too rich.”(Even though I have scientific proof that I have no dairy sensitivity, intolerance, or allergy.) “Or maybe those chicken breasts we bought at Meijer were iffy.”

After telling Dan, “but you ate that too” half a dozen times, it finally occurred to me that it’s not my fault. In my case, stress shitting is just secondary to having a brain tumor. I had a rough day and my gut was like, “Woman! Look what I can make!”