I'm also not particularly good at self-care. Well, not at all of it anyway. I'm very good at vacation - at taking it, booking it, using it all up. Excellent at that. And I'm fairly good at maintaining the old work-life balance (of course this is helped by my having opted to work in a field that generally compensates for its wages with less stress). Where I trip up on self-care is probably where Americans would pin the key definition of the term: anything regarding doctors, dentists, hairdressers, manicurists. Basically anything that involves me making an appointment and risking a situation where I feel out of place or embarrassed or unsure of the proper etiquette.
Hairdressers and Manicurists are easy enough to avoid - I just have appalling nails (not helped by said job involving stupid amounts of magic eraser usage on frequently gross toys) and split ends. Not the end of the world. Doctor avoidance on the other hand could actually result in the end of my world.
I was never very good at visiting the doctor in England. Mostly because they made the system ridiculously complicated and I could not for the life of me figure out at what time of day I had to phone to get an appointment the next day. Or the day of. Don't tell me to book ahead, because some bright spark in the NHS decided at some point that it made lots more sense to stop anyone booking any appointments more than 24 hours ahead in time. I mostly ended up going to their first-come-first-served clinic on a saturday where I had to queue outside at 8am.
Anyway, I digress.
While my doctor avoidance in the UK was primarily linked to laziness and an obscure but essentially navigable-if-prepared-to-wait system, in the US the obscurance (not a word) goes to a whole new level.
I don't know the language - what to ask for or what sort of doctor to get. I have to OK things with my health insurance before I even look for a PCP (That's "Primary Care Provider"... I got that far). And there's that annoying aspect to my character where I really hate looking like I don't know what the heck I'm doing. Oh and in America people mostly do not understand what I say to them over the phone. Jeremy is no help because he has a fancy schmancy health insurance where he just books himself in to see surgeons if he has a twinge in his ankle (I kid you not). My insurance is more along the sensible lines where I see a GP type first before I get to bother the super-doctors (although I'm pretty sure referrals don't take months over here... if you have good insurance, and that's a ridiculously big if).
And then there's my hypochondria. I am forever diagnosing myself with illnesses. Cancers, viruses, parasites. Working with kids has upped the ante on my parasite paranoia actually and I currently own treatment for headlice and ringworm (bought on amazon) just-in-case. I'm not sure what I'd need for scabies, but I'll likely buy it at some point. But I've nowhere to go with these concerns, as I'm too stuck and stupid to find a doctor, so I ask Jeremy, whose response is: "find a doctor" or, occasionally, "you're probably dying" - but I think that's mainly just code for "find a doctor and stop bugging me".
It's a problem.
Anyway, there's news. I actually took steps along the self-care road and made a phone call, talked to a perfectly helpful and nice receptionist who understood my accent and helped me find a PCP and book an appointment and it's all on its way. In about a month but I think that's the new patient wait time, not the normal wait time... I hope.The poor doctor does not know what she's in for because I have at least 2 years of paranoia ready to burst out of me.
Now I need to find a dentist.
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