I know I’m overwhelmed when I can’t look at my email except for immediate action items.
Everything was dropped for the family member at the hospital. Nothing else mattered in that moment. It was just making sure all the family was okay or as okay as we could be.
This also now involves monitoring Facebook. First, my sister found out via Facebook from the youngest (10 years old) cousin’s status update, since she left her phone upstairs. (It did make her finally call us.) Now, my younger cousins and my younger brother have vaguely referenced said family member being in the hospital. There’s a section of my family that I just became Facebook friends with in the past six months, and we don’t often see each other despite living in the same city. It consists mostly of my dad’s cousins, and they see the random mentions and go, “What? Is that family member alright? What hospital? What happened?”
I sent a detailed FB message to the oldest cousin, since I don’t have her email address, and asked her to let her siblings and families know. It was a rather disjointed message, but I’m pretty sure it got the important details. I’ll send her another update tonight, since at this point it’s “good” news.
It’s really bizarre spreading that information via Facebook. But it’s not like we’ve had some organized means of spreading the information in the first place. It’s also hard deciding what information is appropriate to share, but I figured sending a message is better than no information at all. This also saved the immediate family and parents from dealing with inquiries. At least, hopefully it did anyways. We’ll see what my parents have to say on how I dealt with it. I just know, I’d want to know what the heck was going on.
I think I may bring a print out of the shout outs of thoughts and prayers on said family member’s wall to the hospital. If the family member is asleep, it’ll be for the spouse and kids.
Unfortunately, I already felt behind at work due to time off for the job hunt combined with my upcoming week in LA for PDC. And I’m starving. I was walking to a meeting with frozen food, and I needed to put it in a freezer. A co-worker told me to put it in this fridge on the floor I work on. I did, except that used to just be an employee’s lounge and now doubles as a conference room. So I’ve been waiting for a meeting to finish. I may give up and interrupt, cause my hunger is distracting.