Night nurse considers getting healthy

We’re about to celebrate the life of my friend Kathy Park Woolbert, who wrote through the experience of glioblastoma and always spoke to me as if I were still a fellow writer on a long hiatus, not someone who got a degree in 2008 and hasn’t written six things since then. If anyone ever reads this, and hasn’t read her work, go away, buy her books, read that instead. I’m just rambling here.

But I can’t think of any way to honor her life more than resuming the activity we both loved. So here’s my blog that I’ve been promising to start for years. I’ll probably fill it with thoughts about trying to eat healthy and get to a better weight while working night shift when your whole body wants you to store up carbs and go back to bed.

I’ll definitely write about how I went ten years without a cat and am now sharing my home with six, plus two dogs, my aunt with Alzheimer’s and, most surprising of all, my husband of two years. There are also four horses.

I’ll probably write about how I accidentally adopted a Christmas cactus named Clark and didn’t kill him (yet) and floundered into this weird space where I have a ton plants I know hardly anything about, and letting some of them die has become sort of important to my mental health.

I’ll talk about mental health, because it’s tricky. I have thoughts about depression, anxiety, autism and ADHD, and I’m not remotely qualified to talk about any of that except for being on this earth in this body, so that’s the extent of what I’ll say about that, hopefully.

If I’m lucky, it might be fun, or funny, and if not, there are plenty of other people out there who are both. When I went back to college at 26, where I met Kathy, I failed my first quiz, and I’ve never failed ANYTHING. The professor said, kindly, that basically I might be a little out of practice, but I would need to up the standard of my submissions to pass his class. Now I’m 44, and once again, I’m starting the process of stretching the brain and raising the standard. I think Kathy knew I’d get around to it.