Utterly and Thoroughly Worn Out by "El Chapo" Guzmán

I am utterly exhausted. Physically only a little bit from exertion, but my brain is like tapioca pudding right now. When you have MS, a full day of mental exercise can be just as debilitating as hours of hiking or a reaaaaallllly long run. Don't get me wrong; it has been a thoroughly successful day on both the home front and the work front. But my gas tank emptied out a few hours ago, and I had to keep on going.

Very early this morning, some time between 3:30am and 6:30am (depending on which news report you read), the Mexican military apprehended the most notorious drug lord in the entire Western Hemisphere--Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel. This probably doesn't mean much to most of you, although the name might sound familiar. Suffice it to say that his capture was a REALLY BIG DEAL for those of us who follow events in Mexico's drug war. When stuff like this happens in Mexico, I'm one of the few people who have expertise in this sort of thing for journalists to call to get a comment. On top of that, I'm one of the few experts who has the freedom to give an interview on most occasions when people call. I always know my email and phone are going to start blowing up, so I sent my husband a heads-up text about how my day was probably going to go.

Take this morning. I was at my laptop eating breakfast when I saw the breaking news on Twitter about El Chapo's arrest. Thirty minutes later, I got the first phone call, which was from a friend of mine at KVOA, one of the local TV news stations. He wanted to get me on camera that morning, and he agreed he could work me in between my kids' tae kwon do class from 10:00-10:30am and a baby shower I planned to attend at 1:00pm. True to his word, he and the reporter arrived at 11:30am at our house and we had a great interview on our back patio.

At 12:30pm, I headed to the baby shower with my bluetooth earpiece in. Good thing, because as I was arriving I gave my second interview to the Boston Herald. During the baby shower, I went to use the restroom. While I was in the bathroom (not doing my business, fortunately), the phone rang, and I gave my third interview to CBS News. As I was pulling into our garage after the shower, I gave my fourth interview to Reuters. I had dinner with my family, we went out for ice cream, I gave our boys a bath, and my husband put them to bed. At 9:20pm, I did my fifth interview with BBC World Radio. I'm done. Soooooo done.

My husband sometimes gets upset with me for wearing myself out like this because then it takes me a while to recover--and prevents me from doing some things at home that I should be doing. On the other hand, he also knows what happened today was a historic event, and the support he gave me by just letting me "do my thing" was amazing. But now it's 9:51pm, and as utterly exhausted as I am by this whole El Chapo arrest, I have to decompress. After I finish this post, I'll plop down on the couch and watch a bit of TV before I shuffle my stiff and sore body down to our room to go to bed. And I may get to do this all over again tomorrow. And Monday :).