Calendar Conundrum

Since I happily left corporate chaos behind eighteen months ago, my calendar, once overflowing with teleconferences, meetings, travel and ‘to-do’ deadlines, is now regularly sprinkled with doctor appointments, diagnostic procedures and preventative check-ups.

It’s not that I hadn’t paid attention to my health when I was a stressed-out corporate exec, but without the business commitments cluttering every hour of every day, the “Fitness and Medical” category, tinted red, seems to jump off the page.  In addition, I now log in those appointments for my husband as well, since we “travel in pairs” these days.  Some of the time I’m actually sick or injured, like last year when I fractured my fibula, or more recently when I underwent a vitrectomy to repair the hole in my macula.  But more often than not, thankfully, these appointments are preventative, rather than curative.

This morning, after a fourteen hour fast, I am doing (yet again) another lipids profile.  Translation: though I am asymptomatic, and my cholesterol appears to be under control, I will sit in a technician’s cubicle, pumping my fist and pondering which arm will present the better vein.  After my dutiful warnings and several failed attempts, he/she will give up and try the other arm, tapping frenetically in the hope that the thin blue line will pop up as a ripe target.

I will ignore the temptation to bloviate on that subject again, having already  expounded on the joys of blood work in my post entitled “The Luck of the Draw”.

I write today, instead, about a conundrum:  I endure tests and prods, mammograms and colonoscopies, hoping – trusting that in so doing I will uncover dastardly disease early; yet secretly fearing that if I keep looking under rocks I will inevitably find a slimy critter lurking.

Still, I embrace this conundrum, and tell myself that I am in control of those things under my control. I’ll plan my days and weeks around the scheduled services, and bemoan the clumsy intrusions into my veins.  

In between,  I will joyously live my life, playing with grandsons, taking long weekends to look at autumn foliage, singing, writing, laughing, loving and treasuring each new, glorious dawn.