Last night I had a surprisingly anxious night and where I used to love spending most of my time alone, the older I get, the more I hate it. Yet when he left for work I could still feel the anxiety stabbing in and out of my chest. My heart was a bit racy, too. The question is if I didn’t skip my meds occasionally like I’m doing today, how much worse would it get while I’m still in perimenopause? Probably bad enough. I don’t know this for sure but I’m guessing my heart would race more and I would end up with the runs regularly.

Another question will be what to do if once I hit menopause it turns out that the meds have been the main culprit all along even though we don’t think so. I guess if worse comes to worst I will skip doses once a week or ask to be lowered to 62 mcgs. Funny too, because 75 is a bit of a low dose as it is. Pretty sure 100-125 is the norm.

As always, it’s several factors fighting with each other. If Tom were suddenly retired we don’t doubt that I would feel better regardless of the physiological aspect of what’s going on with me. If he were home every day I would be tempted not to skip and see how I did and whether or not I would get as bad as I was last June when I didn’t skip right away. As I’ve been saying, I wish to hell I could stand the more severe anxiety because it’s just about the best damn diet one could ever be on, LOL.

But yeah, last night I was doing Stacey’s emotional tapping, drinking chamomile and sipping Sleepytime tea as well, but I could still feel the anxiety sitting in my chest.

Poor Aly was in a car accident but she’s okay. That makes both her and her boyfriend. Someone T-boned her by misjudging the yellow light but she wasn’t hit hard enough to activate the airbag. Her car will be fixed this weekend but the insurance is only going to cover 85%.

Tom was saying how he didn’t think he would be able to retire at 62.

“Then why are we discussing moving to Florida before then? Wouldn’t it be stupid to move if you still need to work?” I asked him.

He shrugged and said, “We’ll always be doing stupid.”

LOL, this is so true for us adventurers, and at 28° I’m definitely ready to do stupid again for the first time in 11 years! Even so, it’s going to take some time and planning. We still have to think about where we want to go, how we want to get there, and what we want to do when we do get there. Having to scramble to get doctors with pre-existing conditions is a little scary, but luckily, we’re not on meds which are an immediate matter of life and death. If we were, I wouldn’t skip my meds every now and then. But still, you know how hard it is to get insurance in this country, and with him being both older and white, it could not only take several months for him to find work, but the insurance could take half a year to kick in as well.

Now for my most interesting news of the day but that didn’t come with some bad news. As suspected, Kathleen was calling about an insurance issue. The insurance company declined to pay for any of my partial crowns so now we have to pay an additional $411. :-(

Really worried about my shittily enameled teeth as insurance companies keep dropping more and more procedures. We can afford crowns now but what happens if we’re broke again? I’m bound to end up needing most if not all of my teeth crowned throughout the rest of my life. So what happens when we can’t afford it? Do I go back to the county quack? In that case, I would rather Tom just pull my damn teeth with a pair of pliers! In this country, I knew they would always prevent everyone from being covered. What I didn’t know was that they would fight to get covered people uncovered. WTF is wrong with this country these days? Should we just go to Spain or Portugal instead of Florida? South America? Hell, I can read both Spanish and Portuguese so maybe we should consider it. I don’t want to keep being told that such and such a procedure is covered just to later find out that it’s not. There should be a law against that shit.

Okay, let me try to check my frustration so I can focus on Kathleen. We ended up chatting for a surprising half an hour! Yes, you read correctly. It was funny, surprising, interesting, and just a very nice conversation overall. She really wiped my anxiety out which meant a lot to me since Tom was at work. I was being stabbed in the chest with anxiety when I returned her call and I hung up smiling happily and feeling calmer. I really appreciated it, too.

I’m going to jump on the skier while I finish this entry. There’s something about being on nights that make me lazier and I don’t want to get diabetes. Tom laughed at that one and said that at this point in my life, he doubts I’ll get it and that I couldn’t be inactive if someone paid me to be for more than a few days at a time. Haha, that’s true. I hate sitting still for long.

Definitely going FO on this one and will drop Tammy a private copy on Facebook. I rarely hear from her and I don’t know if she’ll see it but it will be there. Kathleen is one reason I’ve gotten to be a little more private with my journal. The more friends I make, the more neighbors I meet, the more recognition I gain from writing, the more cautious I am with personal info. Not because I’m shy or care what people think in general, but more out of respect for those I care for. To me, a journal is supposed to be about our lives, including those that affect them. Well, Kathleen has been a little part of my life and probably will become a bigger part of it, and I don’t want her to feel uncomfortable stumbling upon my blog and then reading about herself, even if it’s all good stuff. :-)

When Kathleen came to work for my dentist in the fall of 2015, I knew instantly that she liked me whereas I didn’t know right away with Stacey. I don’t think Stacey liked me right away, though. At first, we were so focused on my anxiety, but the more she got to know me and I improved with EMDR therapy, the more she came to see me in a different light. My point is that my intuition has always been right on. There have been those that I assumed didn’t like me that I later found out actually did, but never have I thought someone liked me that I later learned I got wrong. As they say, trust your gut instinct. It’s usually correct.

Now don’t get me wrong. I trust Kathleen and I don’t expect her to ever do anything I wouldn’t want her to do, and it’s not like I’m looking to do things I shouldn’t be doing. If we were single, sure, why not? Just to make that clear upfront, well, it’s different with women than with guys. It’s harder for a lot of guys to be just friends, but remember, she and I are older. We’re not in our 20s. In fact, she’s a lot older than I thought! Really, I was dumbfounded to learn she’s damn near old enough to be my mother.

At the beginning of the conversation, I thought I was doing a fine job of sounding chipper and you know, just “normal.” But then I told her I had to cancel my checkup for now because I have other appointments which may spawn other appointments and there was only so much I could juggle at once.

Then she comes out and asks if I’m okay. Caught off guard by her amazing perceptiveness, I said that I was but I wasn’t but would still be okay, LOL. Then she asked if it was female-related stuff. For a minute I wondered if she’d been reading around since I do have some content on Blogger and resumed the daily updates there in case of another PB outage. But then I did make jokes with the dentist about wishing the hot flashes would occur when I needed them since she keeps her place as cold as a freezer. So when she came out and told me that her daughter was going through the same thing, I started doing the math in my head and was like, okay, how can a woman who’s about 50 have a daughter around the same age that’s going through this? I then asked her how old she was and she astonished me by saying she was 65 and was going to retire next year! I was like, OMG, OMG, OMG! She told me I didn’t look my age either and looked 32 years old, haha. Well, I don’t know about that, but I’ve always looked younger than I am and lighter than I weigh as well.

So we talked about a lot of things. She told me her daughter is into aromatherapy as I am and recommended that and she also asked if I was on Prozac. As I told her, the stuff made me want to kill myself, so no. I told her I’ve only needed one lorazepam since last July so I am improving but in the meantime, I do what I can to get by whether it’s aromatherapy, tea, breathing techniques, etc. It would be nice if there was a pill I could swallow that would take it all away in just a matter of minutes like an ibuprofen can with pain and without the side effects, but that’s just not a reality for me. Anti-anxiety drugs leave me drowsy, and as Stacey said, they don’t always keep on masking the symptoms as you get used to them. My lorazepam is about to expire and I’m probably not going to request a refill either but we’ll see. My doctor is always just a message away if I feel I need it.

We got to talking about places we’ve lived and she’s originally from Idaho and she even lived in Phoenix for a few years back in the 70s.

She’s had anxiety before too, she said, like when she would have to speak in church and teach and all that. That was the one negative word I did hear from her, LOL. Church. As a liberal agnostic, I’m definitely not eager to hang with the religious/God believers, though Kathleen doesn’t seem like the pushy type.

She and her husband sold their house in Folsom and got one in Roseville so she could be closer to where she works.

When I told her that we were thinking of moving to Florida and that may happen sooner than originally planned, she said she definitely “didn’t want to lose me” and “let’s keep in touch.” So this was when I told her that I had been hoping these last few months that she would contact me on Facebook but figured there was some kind of policy preventing her from doing that since she does kind of work for me even if it’s not the same way the dentist does. Then she told me she didn’t do Facebook which may or may not be true. No problem either way. If she has a Facebook account she wants to keep private for just family and friends, that’s fine. The reason I thought she could be lying about the Facebook account was because of the way I once told her to feel free to look me up on Facebook and she said she would. Why would you say that if you didn’t have a Facebook account? On the other hand, I never could find her on Holly or Shannan’s friend list. Either way, she has my number and email and I would actually prefer that to Facebook these days.

It was funny because she was asking me about my books and telling me how she was just amazed by me and all that. Not sure I consider myself all that accomplished or amazing, LOL, but I appreciate the compliment.

We also talked a little about exercise and she said something about how we tend to walk stiffer with age but that she can tell I take care of myself and that I move with fluid movements. Didn’t know she was studying my movements, LOL, but yeah I get around okay for one who’s getting up there in years.

When I thanked her for making me feel better since Tom was at work, she said she could tell how supportive he was and that he adores me, etc. Very true!

What I don’t get is how did she have a half-hour to chat with me. I’ve been there enough times. That phone is always ringing up a storm.

It was hard to read her when I mentioned my books and being liberal and trying to have a diverse set of characters. When she asked me about what my last book was about, I warned her that some of them contain violence as well as explicit scenes, but she didn’t press for more info and I’m not sure if that’s because she didn’t mind reading that sort of thing or because she doesn’t agree with/like that sort of thing. A part of me hopes she’s not curious enough to buy any, especially the ones with characters based on her physical appearance lest she figures that out. Maybe she would have been flattered if she knew beforehand that I was going to base some characters on her but after the fact?

Then again, she’s not the only tall blue-eyed blonde, and maybe she’s the first one I have all wrong. Maybe the fact that she didn’t have much to say about my liberalness and diverse characters is because she’s actually against that and not for it, much less attracted to me. After all, she did mention the church and the vast majority of churchgoers seem to be pretty prejudiced.

Nonetheless, I think I’m going to pull Kinky Katrina even though people say they’re interested in my books a lot more often than they buy them and Kathleen will likely never buy any. Hell, Stacey knows a character was based on her yet she’s still not interested, so I doubt Kathleen would be curious enough to buy anything. “Flora” in Stepping into Psycho has more of a physical description that’s closer to Kathleen’s, but “Katrina’s” story bears more of a resemblance to reality (town names, working for a doctor with a private practice).