Preventative Care

I feel like I have been spending much of my free time at doctors' offices, and I'm not even sick.  Preventative care seems to now require a pre-procedure visit, the procedure itself, and then, often a follow up.  And let us not forget the time on the phone, doing pre-procedure intake and checking of information.  In some ways, it makes me feel like I'm getting better care than I once did.  In other ways, it's so exhausting that I just want to forget about it all.

Yesterday I met with the doctor who will do a colonoscopy on me at some point, and this morning, I have a follow up scan to my mammogram, exactly the same as last year.  I don't want to believe it's about getting more money out of insurance companies.  I also know that the quality of the scans is better, which means more might be seen and need to be checked, just to be sure that it's not cancer.

Let me remind myself that I'm also feeling lack of free time because I've been at retreats two week-ends in a row, and they've been nourishing.  For both Wild Women Week-ends at Lutheridge, I've offered an optional afternoon activity, a writing workshop.  Instead of talking in general about writing, but I walked us through several writing exercises designed to get us to a deeper level more quickly (writing letters to ourselves, from the point of view of ourselves 50 years from now and/or from our younger selves) and designed to help us make interesting connections we wouldn't have made otherwise (starting with an object and freewriting).

Saturday's workshop went so well that people who didn't attend came to me and asked for my handout which I was happy to give them.  On Friday night, I went to the opening Bible study and felt so overwhelmed:  all these people, so few of them known to me.   By Saturday, I felt a bit sad to leave.

I knew this would be an intense stretch of the semester, with the two retreats, the fish fry at Faith Lutheran this Friday, and all the commitments which haven't lessened.  Let me take a deep breath and keep working through the things that must be done.