Are you feeling stressed today?

It's worth asking

Two calls and three emails reminded me to pre-register for my upcoming diagnostic tests. Minimize wait times. Save paper. Eliminate the need for clunky clip boards and befouled pens that have 46,000 times more germs than the average toilet seat.

Fine. Medical appointments make me irritable, so it’s probably to everyone’s advantage if I complete as much of the process as possible away from other humans.

The night before the tests, I waded in.

Do you smoke?
No, but I occasionally breathe fire.

Are you pregnant or nursing?
What exactly are you suggesting, Linda?

How many alcoholic beverages do you consume weekly?
Counting the four I need to get through this crap…?

As if the medical history weren’t enough, I also found myself completing an unexpected survey. Maybe there was an opt-out I overlooked. That or Google forced a hostile takeover of HIPAA. Whatever. I’m under no illusions about the integrity of my privacy these days, so I forged ahead through questions about my financial health—the ability to pay bills, count on my next meal, have reliable transportation, and so on.

Interspersed were queries related to my mental state, specifically to my stress levels. Apparently someone in the medical industrial complex was investigating the connection between disease and hardship. I thought surely this subject had been dissected and preserved in white-paper formaldehyde already. The answer is yes, they are absolutely related. Give the research funding to the people in need. Are we done here?

Sigh.

To minimize the chances of bringing my grumpiness with me the next day, I devised a strategy. Including a quick backstory about the survey, I would start a conversation with everyone I encountered, leading with the same question: Are you feeling stressed today?

I was counting on an amusing experience, possibly even interesting. I never expected profound.

There was the cashier at a major retailer. Are you feeling stressed today?

He wasn’t. Not really. Not that day, anyway, though he acknowledged that it might be different the next day. Life was messy, you know, but there was so much to be grateful for that he shouldn’t complain. He asked about me. Was I stressed today? And he thanked me for the question.

There was the cashier at the grocery store. Are you feeling stressed today?

She wasn’t. She refuses. Every morning, she says her prayers and hands it all off. She used to let things get to her, but not anymore.

There was the employee, and the long-time owner of an establishment just up the street. He shrugged, grinned a little, and looked almost embarrassed as he said no.

She was emphatic.

“Yes! Totally! And losing sleep every night because of it,” she announced.

I asked if it was related to the business and was met with another firm yes. Her eyes looked tired.

“I get it,” I offered. “I’ll be thinking about you.”

She gave me a look. She knows my husband also runs a small business.

The diagnostic testing that was the primary focus of my day put me in contact with another eight people.

First was the woman who typed information into her computer from behind a plexiglass screen, and scanned the insurance card I’d scanned and uploaded the night before. Redundancy is not endearing.  

Are you feeling stressed today?

I learned how she grew up nearby, how her father had a big garden and raised chickens and rabbits, how at one time she had just three siblings. But then, there were two “oops babies.” A brother, 18 years her junior, had insisted he was getting the hell out of this place, going as far away as he could. She wanted me to guess where he lived now, but before I could answer, she pointed over her head toward a spot on the wall of that windowless cubicle and explained that he was within walking distance of the woods right over there.

Was she stressed? Not in the least. She’d worked there 26 years. She knew a thing or two.

A second woman walked me down the hall. We weren’t together more than a minute, but I asked, and she answered.

Are you feeling stressed today?

“Stressed? No. No, I’m not stressed,” she said, with a surprised smile.

The technician in conversation number three shook her head and laughed, reminding me, or herself, that the day was still young.

A fourth woman, who escorted me to a new room, acted like she would have walked right out the side exit if she’d thought we could sit and talk a while. She had some things on her mind. She was a little stressed. Sometimes life is like that.

The first four lady-chats were followed by another four, this time between a group of women all bunched together in a tiny suite with too few chairs. Two of us were sporting clinic-issued gowns, the kind you never know quite how, or whether, to tie, made of real cloth in soft florals and faded from incessant laundering.

The woman sitting in the corner wasn’t particularly stressed, except that she was taking care of her husband who recently had a hip replacement. He was doing what he was told and everything like that, but it was still a lot of work. They’d been married 59 years. She chuckled and raised her eyebrows in affirmation when I told her it was okay to admit she’d always taken care of him.

Still wearing all her own clothing, a slightly younger woman chimed in.

“Yeah, I’m a little stressed,” she reported with a warm smile, “but what are you going to do, right?”

Her husband has early-onset dementia. She was there because her 88-year-old mother needed a bone scan. Finding the right balance was impossible anymore, but her mother had taken care of her for 65 years, so now she was doing right by her. I mentioned the Middle American butterfly I’d learned about when my own mother was that age, the one with the 88s on its wings.

Wikipedia: Anna's eighty-eight Butterfly (Diaethria anna). Photo by Charles J. Sharp

Wearing a pink house dress and a pearl-white cardigan that matched her hair, her mom sat near the door, a walker situated in front of her. Mom smiled a lot, but I think most of the conversation was beyond her grasp.

An employee appeared in the doorway and called out a name. The daughter thanked me as she helped her mother to her feet.

The final conversation was with a woman I’ll call Beth. I told her she would be my last test subject, as I launched into my now well-rehearsed spiel.  

“Are you feeling stressed today?” I asked.  

She paused for just a moment before she replied.

“No. No, I’m not,” she said, looking me in the eye. “Nothing really gets me too stressed. I just go with the flow.”

“Have you been like that your whole life?” I quizzed.  

“Pretty much, she said, “but it really started after I had breast cancer. I learned to focus on what really mattered. Now it’s back, and it’s in my bones, but you just have to live one day at a time, you know?

“I took care of my husband for years. He had a stroke. A stroke. When he was just 55, on his birthday. He wasn’t overweight, didn’t have any obvious issues. Well, he was a smoker. And the stroke took the whole left side of his body. I cared for him for a long time after that. We went everywhere we could to stay busy.

“He died in 2019. He loved to fish and hunt, and he died on the opening day of hunting season. I called my sister just a few minutes later, to tell her, and she told me she already knew. She said she was taking a hunting group out to the field and looked over and saw him standing at the edge of the woods, in his camouflage. ‘And Beth, he was smiling,’ she said.

“No, I’m not stressed,” Beth repeated, as she took a tissue from behind her work station and blotted her eyes. “Let’s get you taken care of here.”

~Elizabeth