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I decided to stay home from work today, still feeling malaise and it is raining out which means my arthritis is acting up.  Or maybe it’s just the fact that I have been sleeping terribly.  I had a nice stretch of sleeping 5hrs at a time but am now back to just about two before I wake up for the inevitable pee break.

I dropped Paul off at work because the poor boy has been quite ill with stomach flu the past few days and I didn’t want him walking to work in the cold/rain, and on the way home I started to feel…well…bad.  Of the emotional/mental sort in addition to my physical ailments.

Maybe it’s just that time of year.  My post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas blues.  Driving by my office I felt bad.  Should I really be staying home when I’m not sick as a dog sick?  Somehow my mind wandered to setting a bad example for the baby and then to whether or not I will be a good/worthy mother.

But lupus has really thrown a wrench in my assessment of how guilty I should feel about things like this.

The truth of the matter is, I no longer know how much I should be pushing myself, how much I can physically handle.  How wise it is to power through the small physical discomforts that everyone occassionally faces.  I used to chalk it up to my lazy ass nature, which let’s face it, I’m pretty damn lazy.  I don’t like to push myself and when I was in school I usually didn’t.  And that was all pre-lupus so it was easy for me to scold myself for being a bum.

In my professional career though, which pretty much has run concurrent with my lupus diagnosis, it’s no longer so clear.  I’ve certainly pushed myself, gone to work many times when I probably shouldn’t have.  Put work ahead of doctors appointments that, in hindsight, could have bordered on life/death importance.  Agreed to be in situations that could have had serious long-term consequences for my health in order to be a “team player.”

This year though, as I became serious about putting my health first and then got pregnant, I’ve taken off a lot of days that have felt questionable to me.  And I haven’t known, what is the right thing to do?  I’m terrified that if I “push through” and end up REALLY sick and somehow hurt my longterm health or the baby, I will never forgive myself.  But on the other hand, I still have my work ethic which sometimes yells at me and calls me lazy.

It’s hard to know which is which anymore.  It’s hard to know where to draw the line.  I guess I’m afraid that if I err to far on the side of caution my lazy nature will let me keep drawing it further and further back and I’ll just become that fat, bon-bon eating, creature on the couch caricature of a mom that my kids will be embarrassed for their friends to see.

Sigh.