What I wrote yesterday about feeling better? The feeling didn’t last throughout the day; I had a bit of a rougher time in the evening. Sometimes it’s hard to disentangle physical discomforts of various kinds. Was it something I ate? Did I worsen my back with poor posture? Am I just tired or actually feeling depressed? Too much caffeine or too low blood sugar or neither?
I didn’t make it an official resolution for 2025, but I did make a promise to myself if I felt like I couldn’t handle my anxiety I would get help. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had multiple symptoms showing up, and I just feel like I don’t want to and shouldn’t have to handle it without proper help.
I took an anxiety “risk assessment” questionnaire through my health provider and it says, no surprise here, that I’m high risk. It also offered a little bit of advice on things I can do to help myself but also said, make an appointment immediately.
I contacted my primary care doctor’s office to ask whether it made more sense to make an appointment with her, or to just get a referral to a specialist. The LPN said the former, because I haven’t seen her since 2016 and need to re-establish care. (I have an appointment now during Thanksgiving week, when I already took some time off.) But she also sent along a long list of providers, including a Behavioral Urgent Care that I could go to if I felt I needed it.
On the list I found a practice that has three PMHNPs (*) who seem ideal: they get excellent reviews from their patients, and they specialize in both anxiety and gender identity. While I’m not going for gender-affirming care per se, it reassures me that they’re sympathetic and understand gender issues, and it may be relevant to helping me. (I also searched for someone who’s nonbinary, but all I can find are therapists who can’t prescribe meds, don’t take my insurance and/or aren’t currently accepting new patients.)
I’m trying to decide whether to wait to see how the primary care appointment goes, or to go ahead and make an appointment with one of them now too. And if so, whether to schedule that for after that doctor, or before.
Just deciding to do this at all has been something of a step. Just making medical appointments, figuring out what to say even in a short message, triggers anxiety. But having gone this far I already feel a little bit better about things, at the moment.
(*) Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner. Like a psychiatrist, but rather than “doctors” they are at the top level of nursing, with either master’s or doctorates and a ton of practical work experience and certifications. In 27 states including Missouri, they can practice autonomously, prescribe meds, etc.
Work has been crazy-making this week, and I’m sure that doesn’t help the anxiety situation. I’ve been trying to test some update libraries & legacy Fortran compiler and it’s been throwing the weirdest errors. There’s been entirely too much uninstalling, reinstalling, updating, being unable to download the specific versions of things that we want, reconfiguring, testing, tracking down DLL dependencies, trying stupid things just in case, thinking I finally found it, discovering that the same errors persist on a different machine, etc. And almost none of it is coding. Blech. But hey, the weekend is imminent now.
I’ve got about 40 minutes of music recorded for the next album now, and ideas for at least two more tracks I want to do. So that’s good!