ridiculous things that keep you up at night

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Routine Doctors Appointments

Why have my insurance plan and my annual schedule conspired to make January the month when I have All the Appointments? I was trying to make plans to write with a writing friend and I looked at the calendar and it is PACKED. I feel like January is nearly over and it has only just begun. 

One of my upcoming appointments is with my OB/GYN, and I have been steeling myself to insist a little more forcefully that I believe I am in perimenopause. You will likely not recall that last year, my tentative questions about it were dismissed due to my age. The array of symptoms that seem to be perimenopause-related continues to grow, so I just want to confirm that a) yes, this is happening and b) there is nothing I can really DO about any of it, beyond what I am already doing. (TMI note: I take oral contraceptives which both prevent a period, so I don’t have that to clue me in as to actual menopause, and, according to the OB/GYN, oral contraceptives are supposedly the first line of defense against perimenopause symptoms anyway.) I had also been steeling myself to ask for a physical exam this year, should it be bewilderingly optional as it was last year, but I am pleased I am relieved I see from last year’s post that I should expect a pap test this year so that shouldn’t be an issue.

The other upcoming appointment is with a new-to-me internist. I have been mildly fretting about the appointment for, oh, several months now. I am eager to have a primary care physician again; my last PCP, whom I adored, prescribed me a new medication two Decembers ago, then went on leave until March, then left her practice to become a concierge physician. I love her enough that I strongly considered following her to her new practice, but I did not. Anyway, I have ostensibly been without a PCP since December of 2023. The old practice has been kindly refilling my prescription all this time, but I will be relieved to have a regular doctor again. (Yes, it has taken me since approximately March of 2024 to get in to see a new physician. This is both because I wanted a doctor whose office is closer to where I live now and because I wanted the specific provider my husband recommended.)

The thing I am fretting about is that this appointment is about establishing me as a patient… but I also have A List of things to discuss with the doctor. So I am worrying both about coming across as someone the new doc wants to have as a patient… and about addressing my concerns. 

Is the first fret ridiculous? Yes, yes it is. I can acknowledge that without being able to eliminate it from my worry database. I am sure this doctor sees a thousand middle-aged women just like me; I am not going to be any more or less desirable as a patient. Plus, physician’s job is to deal with the patient in front of them, not reject them based on some sort of Simon Cowellian checklist. (Is Simon Cowell still a contemporary reference?) And in any case, physicians treat patients all the time that they might not otherwise hang out with or befriend; we do not need to be besties. 

STILL. I want to make a good first impression. That’s weird, right? And yet, there it is. 

Let’s move on to the less-ridiculous portion of my frets, which is how to address all the things I want to address without overwhelming the doctor or myself, and without doing that thing where I make a careful list and then get to item three and suddenly feel like I’m overstaying my welcome or talking too much or whatever. I cannot tell you how many times I have gone to see a doctor with Very Specific Things To Discuss, and have decided in the moment that they are silly and I won’t bother the doctor with them. Even when I bring a written list with me, I still do this. 

(You might think that having grown up with a physician for a parent, and then marrying a physician would negate some of the awkwardness I feel when at the doctor. But no.) 

Since three seems to be the magic number, I think I have narrowed my Must Discuss List to three topics: 

  1. Fatigue. I am tired all the time. Like, more tired than in years past. (I feel like I’ve been chronically tired since at least 2012.) So tired that I see the effects of the tiredness in other areas of my life. Is this… The result of a medication I’m taking? A symptom of perimenopause? A deficiency of iron or vitamin D or something else? Because I am terrible at sleeping? Subset of the previous: it is because of my horrifically restless legs? Is the terrible sleeping a result of poor sleep hygiene? Or perimenopause? Or some lifestyle choice I am making? Is the tiredness (and/or terrible sleeping and/or restless legs) fixable? Or is this just my current phase of life (The Tired Phase) and I need to accept and lean into it? 
  2. Medication. I started taking anxiety medication in December 2023 after a series of escalating panic attacks. The medication has been very helpful. I think I am in a less anxious state now than I was then; is it time to try to discontinue the medication? If so, how do I do that? And what happens if I decide it was a terrible plan to discontinue it? Yes, 2023 was a wildly exciting and action-packed year which ended spiking my anxiety to new heights, but it’s not like I was NOT anxious before that. I am not opposed to taking medication when it is helpful, but I also don’t really want to take medication if I don’t need to.
  3. Weight. Due to some fairly significant weight gain over the past year, I am heavier than I have ever been in my life. Aside from not being pleasant in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons, I am wondering if I need to Be Worried. Is my weight gain a side effect of the aforementioned anxiety medication? A symptom of perimenopause? The result of too many nachos? Something else? Is it causing any problems I should be aware of, aside from the expected and unwelcome not-fitting-into-my-clothing and poor-self-esteem issues? (Like perhaps my extreme tiredness?) Beyond trying to eat less and move my body more, is there anything I should be doing?

You may notice that this very tidy list of three contains many, many subtopics. That feels a little like cheating. (I imagine myself telling the new doctor, “I want to discuss three health concerns with you!” and then bombarding her with restless legs! and perimenopause symptoms! and anxiety! and insomnia! as she crumples to the floor under the weight of my hypochondria.) (Yes, I do realize this is not how doctors work.)

You may also notice that “weight” is at the bottom of the list, in case three topics ends up feeling like too many topics with which to burden the doctor. (I know; I cannot stop thinking this way.) I put it at the bottom because it is the topic that, to me, seems to have the most obvious solution (eat less and move your body more), and also because it is the topic that I feel least comfortable bringing up. It’s such an uncomfortable topic! And possibly the doctor will bring it up anyway, without me having to say anything. 

I have a new, third fret: that I will inadvertently turn my New Patient Appointment into a Sick Visit. Why yes, this fret IS brought to you by two weeks of my family being sick plus waking up at four o’clock this morning with a terrible headache and a sore throat that feels worse than yesterday’s mildly scratchy throat and ear pain and a low-grade fever. 

What happens if I AM sick for my appointment? Is that… allowed? I feel like the “rules,” insofar as I (don’t) understand them are that you can’t be treated by a new physician until you have established with them as a patient. This is why I have been scrupulously healthy this year, because I would much rather go see my PCP than visit urgent care. 

If I AM sick for my appointment, then identifying/treating that illness probably jumps to the top of my list of concerns… but can I also address the other less-urgent topics?

Should I perhaps be badgering my husband with these questions instead of fretting about them on the internet? I mean, yes, but what is the internet for if not for airing ridiculous worries.

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Noises

Our old house had its share of irritating and unpleasant and downright unsettling noises. Our old fridge had some sort of short in the electrical panel that regulated the temperature, and would utter random musical trills at odd moments throughout the day. We never really knew what would set it off; sometimes it would be silent for weeks, other times there would be only minutes or seconds between its three-note plaintive bleat. 

The neighbor whose fence backed up against our backyard had a dog who liked to bark every time he went outside. Every afternoon, the neighbor would let him out. And then he would bark persistently until she let him back in, which might be an hour or so. Sometimes his barks would be punctuated by her angry voice yelling at him to knock it off. Poor dog. 

Occasionally, I would hear an ominous buzzing from somewhere in my bedroom walls. I was the only person who ever heard it. Only once did the exterminator find a nest of yellowjackets, but I did call him anxiously MANY times throughout the years. 

It should be no surprise that our new house has its own symphony of noises. I’ve related some of them here – like the attack robin that has been body slamming our window all spring. And our doorbell, which had some sort of short in the wiring and would issue a loud buzzing at odd hours of the day and night. It took a trained electrician an ungodly amount of time to figure out how to fix it, but we did get a replacement doorbell that works and doesn’t wake us up with intermittent buzzing.

What DOES wake us up, however, is the hood fan in our kitchen. The kitchen in this house was one of the things I fell in love with when we first toured the place. It is huge, it has all of these top-of-the-line and beautiful appliances. The stove has a gorgeous vent hood above it. 

However, the vent is suffering some sort of electrical short, and comes on by itself every so often. It did this in the early days when we moved in, but then stopped for several months. Every few months, it seems to recall that it’s broken, and starts up again. Often in the middle of the night. Our house has excellent acoustics, so even though it’s in the kitchen, I wake up immediately when it goes on in the middle of the night. Sometimes it will stay off for a few hours, sometimes only a few minutes. 

Since I only just had the appliance repair person out here (to look at my ovens, which cost me $300 to learn that they heat appropriately even though that is not my experience with them), I am loathe to call him back to tell me it will cost several hundred/thousand dollars to fix the hood vent issue. So I have been trying stopgaps. With my dad’s help via email, I dismantled the components and cleaned them. This seemed to help for a few days and then the fan started coming on with renewed vengeance. The only thing that seems to help is turning off the power source at the breaker box, which “resets” it for awhile. We’ve had silence for more than a week now; how long will it last?

Our furnace also makes very odd noises. I’ve questioned the electrician, the HVAC person, and my dad about the noises and they all seem to think it’s a simple matter of the ducts expanding and contracting with the change in air temperature. I’ve mainly gotten used to the loud metallic rumbling and popping sounds; they do happen less frequently now that we use the air conditioner more than the heater.

Over Memorial Day weekend, during which we had a barbecue with my parents, we noticed a trilling sound coming from the trees. It was very charming and pastoral, a lovely summer sound. My mother thought it might be a tree frog. After my parents left and I went to bed, I noticed that whatever it was had set up camp directly outside my bedroom window. It was calling back and forth with a fellow critter and it was no longer charming – it was an ear-piercing squawk that cut through the silence at arrhythmic intervals so that my brain could not get used to it. At first I thought it was a racoon, because how could such a loud noise come from something as small as a frog? But then, after playing the racoon sounds at it to get it to LEAVE THE VICINITY, I realized the calls weren’t quite the same. I looked again for tree frog sounds and found this video, which is identical in pitch and cadence to the song of the frog who lives in my yard. Playing racoon sounds at it seems to help; apparently, racoons are the frog’s natural enemies. 

The most unpleasant of the sounds is human, however. Our new next door neighbors suffered from a catastrophic house fire shortly before we moved in, and their house has been undergoing a complete renovation for the past year. Aside from the lovely port-a-potty in their driveway, the worst thing (for us) about this renovation is the presence of construction workers. They arrive SO EARLY, even on the weekends. But worst of all: one or more of them have a disturbing problem with either phlegm or morning nausea, and so the mornings are often punctuated by loogie hocking, retching, and vomiting sounds. IT IS A DELIGHT. 

There was one Sunday morning when my husband and I were torn from our sleep at sixish by a noise. We both sat up and looked at each other with sleepy horror, certain that it was the sound of our child barfing in her bed. Fortunately for us, it was just the construction people, exorcising whatever demons they seem to bring to work with them. 

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A Very Silly Thing I Am Angsting Over

Through a combination of targeted approaches over the past six months, I feel like I have effectively reduced my overall anxiety level. I notice some anxieties no longer really bother me at all – they only linger in expectation form, like a phantom anxiety that I expect to bubble up but never does. (Perhaps this is a brand NEW anxiety, although it doesn’t ACT like anxiety.) 

Other anxieties remain. I think it is impossible to live a life 100% free from anxiety; even the most laid-back people in my life, after all, have their Things. But sometimes the things I stress about are so SILLY, worrying about them seems completely inexplicable… and yet I cannot stop bumping up against them, like a ring I twist unconsciously on my finger or a mosquito bite I can’t help but scratch. 

I am going to share the current mosquito bite with you, in hopes that a) putting it into words acts as a sort of soothing salve and b) I am not the only person who angsts over things that are ridiculous yet nonetheless persistently irritating. Please. Please. Tell me all the ridiculous things that keep you awake at night.

A bunch of my loved ones are gathering to celebrate A Momentous Occasion and I cannot join them. Out of some sort of mishmash of FOMO and Wanting To Show I Care, I suggested to the host that maybe I could supply breakfast for one morning when everyone is together. 

The host responded with positivity and gratitude. Yes, my overture would be welcome and appreciated.

Almost immediately, I regretted giving in to this generous impulse. Because I am NOT GOOD AT THIS KIND OF THING. This is a task that requires phone calls and guessing what other people might want in terms of quantity and flavor. This is a task that requires, possibly, using DoorDash or UberEats or one of the many food delivery services I have never once used in my life. This is a task that requires evaluating, based on online information, whether a caterer/restaurant/café is going to provide good food and good value. 

The Occasion is taking place in a state I have never visited. Everyone is staying in an Air BnB together. It seemed, in my head, like it would be fairly easy to order donuts or bagels or breakfast sandwiches for everyone to be delivered to the house. But I was wrong! 

My first thought was to use Goldbelly to order something. I’ve used Goldbelly for various food gifts in the past, and it always seems to work out. (Unless my parents and sibling are shielding me from the awful truth…) But a) I couldn’t find what I wanted for under $250, which was more than I intended to spend, and b) my husband thought I was a huge weirdo for choosing that option when I could just order from someplace local. 

Oh. Okay. Right. 

So I researched some local places. Is it reasonable to put all my faith in online reviews and personal reaction to company websites???? Reasonable or not, that is where I put my faith. 

The first place I called took a message and never returned my call. When I called back, they said they were in the middle of a busy period and could I call back later. The second place I called rang and rang and rang. The third place I called was an on-site caterer, and they apparently only cater to their specific site. The first place, which I called a third time, once again took my information and never called me back. 

I decided I would order from Panera, which has a simple online order form and would deliver the food for me. And also, Panera isn’t, like, special or anything, but it’s decent. However, I mentioned this plan to someone whose opinion I trust. The response was an instantaneous and very firm, “Don’t do that,” and a quick google search to locate a fourth place (well, fifth, if you count Panera, which I am not counting so I’m not sure why I’m typing this parenthetical) for me to call. 

If I could have had this friend call the fourth place for me and place the order, I would have. I was Done, Dee Oh En Ee, with this task, except I wasn’t because the only thing worse than calling yet another breakfast place was telling the host I was reneging on my offer. Don’t think I didn’t strongly consider it. 

The fourth place answered the phone! They could put together a breakfast that sounded good! And they could deliver! They quoted me a price, although they “didn’t have the price sheet in front of them, so they were just estimating” and I said let’s do this. 

I emailed the host of The Occasion and let her know what I was planning, and confirmed the correct date and time and location. She responded with a thumbs up. (Not a literal or emojical thumbs-up, but with an affirmation that I was doing something that worked with her plans.)  

It seems to me that Other People have no problem with tasks like this. Either they would call Panera from the get-go, or they would quickly and easily find the exact perfect place to order breakfast from and order breakfast from that place, or they would tell the host “sorry, it’s not working out, can I contribute another way,” or they wouldn’t offer to provide breakfast in the first place, like a chump. So part of the anxiety stems from feeling like I am making a big messy ordeal out of something that should be SIMPLE and STRAIGHTFORWARD. And the other part of the anxiety stems from fear that I am going to fuck it up somehow. 

Today, the fourth place called me and took my credit card information. The price they charged me was quite a bit higher than the quote, but at that point, what could I do? I was already locked in. The date of The Occasion is too near to go back to the drawing board, and I am too worn out from calling all these places and thinking about this for WEEKS to contemplate doing anything else. 

And now I am waiting, very anxiously, hoping that the delivery goes as planned, and the food I ordered is good, and that I ordered ENOUGH FOOD, I am not even going to TELL YOU how much I ordered or for how many people because I am so stressed about it and so worried you will say OMG SUZANNE THAT IS WAY TOO MUCH/TOO LITTLE FOOD.

I even texted a family member who will be in attendance at this Occasion, and let her know that I’d placed the order and it was all set to be delivered at a specific time and directed to the host… even though this family member did not ask for this information, or volunteer to help in any way, and I do not want to make her feel like it’s now, somehow, HER responsibility. 

Also: let me be clear. I fully realize this is not about me. The Occasion is… A Momentous Occasion for my loved one, and there is a whole big to-do going on that has nothing to do with my measly breakfast contribution, and a crappy breakfast is not going to make or break an entire long weekend of celebrating. I GET THIS. My brain understands. But my body is not on board! It is all riled up. The My Breakfast Contribution aspect of The Occasion is all I can think about! What if the food is terrible? What if it feeds only half of the guests? What if everyone gets food poisoning?! (Food poisoning could break a weekend, I suppose.) Why am I worrying about such a small slice of the overall pie of The Occasion? WHY?????? Whatever it is, it will be a blip at most. (Unless food poisoning.) (Please, God, let there be no food poisoning.)

My husband says, “It’s the thought that counts.” And. Well. Sort of? But also… I don’t want to be The Person Who Sent Shitty Breakfast (or diarrhea, which is an entirely different kind of shitty breakfast).

I should have just kept my dumb mouth shut! I should never have offered to do anything! I should have simply offered to send cash to help fund An Event! 

This is the kind of thing that is itching and ITCHING and I cannot scratch it. I want to moan about it to my husband. I want to text about it to my friends. I want to call the host of The Occasion and triple check that I got all the details right and get her to tell me that it won’t even matter if it’s crap because everyone will be drunk on mimosas, or have her tell me that a third of the guests suddenly can’t make it, or have her assure me that there’s tons of other food in the house just in case I didn’t order the right amount (HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT AMOUNT TO ORDER OMG). I want to call my family member who will be on site and ask her to text me photos. I want to FLY TO THE STATE AND BE AT THE OCCASION AND HANDLE THE WHOLE THING IN PERSON OMG.

At least The Occasion will be over soon and I will no longer be troubled by the possibilities; I will know the outcome (because you know I am going to pester my family member until I get a report), and hopefully the reaction will fall somewhere in the range of “meh, that was okay” to “well, that was a pleasant little breakfast spread!” 

At the very least, I hope no one thinks, “Wow, we should have just gone to Panera.”