Observation

This morning I went to the doctor's for a four-month checkup.  I've been tense, the last week, about this -- my blood sugar readings are haywire, and I've got the dental surgeon next Monday, which is in itself a triple whammy - he may judge me for how I take care of implants; he will likely want to do a bone graft, which is tedious and takes several months to 'set', and of course the implant itself, which will take months to integrate into my bone, assuming it works at all. (I've found the hard way that my body doesn't seem to like cow bone, for example.)

Immediately, though, the blood sugar thing, coupled with a weight gain after six weeks of going to the gym, had me actively nervous.  She's going to give me major amounts of grief. Whereupon the doc said a) yeah, the increase is something to be thoughtful about, but don't freak - first, treat it with increased drugs, then we'll send you to an endocrinologist to see if anything else is going on, and b) the weight gain actually happens quite often when people go to the gym - the important thing is that you are exercising, and doing good things for your cardiovascular system.  She didn't lecture me at all.

Then this afternoon I heard part of a review on NPR of a book called The Antidote, where a guy tried many self-help ideas on himself, and concluded that most don't work. (Yeah, I'm not too thrilled with how that study was run.) One thing he said, though, intrigued me.  Basically, he said that he was told that people who get really anxious tend to overplay how bad the nervousness will be.  As an exercise for dealing with that, he was told to ride the subway and call out the names of stations as they arrived.  He said that, as expected, he did feel nervous doing it -- but the apprehension was much worse than the actuality.

So I'm thinking guardedly positive thoughts about Monday.