Heart Reading … Day 35

Karen Willard Ribeiro
2 min readAug 20, 2021

A not so fun way to sing one’s heart out.

I love Adele’s music and if I could remember lyrics I would sing them all with reckless abandon — except during the wee hours of the morning when I’m trying to sleep. Rolling in the Deep over and over and over for hours on end, as awesome as this song is, has not been my fave around 1am for the past few days.

For the past few years sleeplessness has been an issue, and some stretches of time are worse than others. I’m in one of those worse stretches. And sleeplessness affects so many more than the ___% of adults reported in this statistic. Most of us don’t tell our doctors even when it has been an issue for years.

Doctors are people who we give a great amount of authority to. My mother seemed to relinquish all of her inner sovereignty to the doctors in her life — which ended much too young after nearly every health complication imaginable. From her head down to her toes, I struggled to keep track of the issues. And in the end, with three types of cancer raging through her body, she was on 16 different medications contra-indicating each other.

My doctor’s practice has been a revolving door lately, and half the practice (the functional medicine half that made this practice so enviable a few years ago that there was a long waiting list to become a patient) is defecting. You can’t even get an email or speak with someone about deeply concerning lab results because they can’t bill the insurance for emails or phone calls. And when they make a referral for you to a specialist, they leave out all pertinent information so that you can’t be proactive and schedule your own damn appointment.

Anyway. I’m not too thrilled to be rolling in the deep with the medical/insurance industry. I’m not at all comfortable to say they’ve had my heart inside of their hands. And I’m not keen on the beat they play it to. (If Adele is not yet playing in your head, look it up so you can ruminate on it like me)…

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Karen Willard Ribeiro

Beyond Karen: emerging from the depths of an epic epithet is available at innerfortune.com and at your favorite independent bookseller. Thanks for reading.