The Great Sleep Campaign of 2026

Navigating the healthcare system can feel like a full‑time job, especially when long‑ignored symptoms finally get the attention they deserve. This post chronicles Jean’s journey through a growing lineup of medical specialists, a parade of diagnoses, and a few treatments she never imagined discussing with doctors half her age. With humor and honesty, she explores the strange, hopeful path toward a full night’s sleep. It’s a story about persistence, aging with grit, and the small victories that make the whole medical circus feel worth it.  AI….

The past few months I have accumulated a few new doctors—specialists, because apparently our bodies are too complicated for one doctor to learn it all from the tops of our heads to our toes. I now have an ears, nose and throat doctor, a sleep specialist, an urogynecologist, and a gastroenterologist. I shouldn’t complain, because it wasn’t long ago that I didn’t feel like anyone in the medical field was taking me seriously. My internist has been my primary care doctor for 20 years and if I’d been in the medical field as long as he’s been I’d be tired of listening to people complain all day long about stuff that we’ve probably brought on ourselves. “You broke your toe? It’s those extra pounds you’re carrying around.” “You have a hang nail? Loss some weight.” He’s not really that bad, but between the two of us there’s been no follow-through with things like my stage three kidney disease and the lack of sleep I’ve been complaining about for five years. I only see him once a year, so you do the math—I’ve complained five times.

The recent turnaround happened during a visit to my primary care’s PA for a UTI—a young woman who actually listened and immediately sent referrals to both a sleep specialist (with a sub-specialty in general psychiatry) and a urogynecologist. I can’t get in to see the latter until April, but I’ve already seen the sleep doctor, who sent me to an ear, nose and throat doctor, who is now sending me to a gastroenterologist—also booked until nearly April. The end of January I’m set up to do an in-home sleep study to see if I have sleep apnea. 

The Sleep Doctor suspected I have silent acid reflux and the ear, nose and throat doctor confirmed it. The gastroenterologist appointment is to see what is causing it. Silent acid reflux can wake you up at night. The Sleep doctor’s diagnosed was partly based on the fact that I wake up sometimes moving my lips like I’m blowing bubbles. He also prescribed a sleeping pill with the side effect of making a patient hold their urine—which, in my case, is a welcome side effect. Since I started taking that, some pills for acid reflux, and using the below mentioned cream I’m only getting up 3 to 5 times a night instead of 7 to 10.

And since most of my readers are women, I’ll mention the most astonishing treatment for nighttime over‑urination: vaginal estrogen cream! When the young PA mentioned it and put me on it, I couldn’t believe it was a real thing until I got home and Dr. Google confirmed that it’s a common treatment for night time urination. Apparently we get “thin” up there (or down there—take your pick), and the cream helps “restore the health of the tissues, which become thin, dry, and less elastic due to declining natural estrogen levels after menopause.” That wall is close to our bladder and it puts pressure on it. But imagine my embarrassment when my new, very young, cuter-than-Tom-Cruise Sleep Doctor explaining how vaginal estrogen cream can help me get a better night’s sleep. When I checked the MyChart app a few weeks later, I looked at the notes he wrote and I discovered ten pages of my medical history—going all the way back to my tonsils being removed at three months old! AI must have been working overtime to compile our complete histories all in one place. I was shocked. 

On New Year’s Eve I had two glasses of champagne, slept for ten hours without a sleeping pill, and only got up once during the night. How’s that for a heavenly way to start out a new year after dealing with this issue for at least five years. But in case you haven’t figured it out, my next few months are going to be consumed with a hit‑it‑from‑all‑fronts campaign to get me sleeping like that every night—without the champagne. I have a spreadsheet to track my sleep, weight, blood pressure, bowel movements, nighttime urinations, what I drink, when I eat and what combination of sleep meds I’m taking and at what time. He wants me to cut down on over-the-counter Melatonin. And reading my history reminded me that back when I broke my ribs, a doctor who came to see me in Assisted Living told me that if I took an hour every afternoon to lie down with my legs higher than my heart, it would help cut down on how often I get up at night to pee. So I’ve been doing that again while enjoy old West Wing episodes on Netflix. It’s the strangest New Year’s resolution I’ve ever written—working on my sleep issues—but I’m hopeful it’s a resolution I can achieve.

New topic: Our New Year’s Eve celebration here in the CCC started at 5:00 with a plated dinner, a slide show of all our 2025 events and ended at 8:30 with a ball drop. Yup, I know—that’s crazy. Six of us did extend the official party until 10:30 by playing cards, and all but the white snowflake headband pictured up above were won in that card game. The white headband I wore to the party. Everyone else here recycles their old holiday sweaters but I never wore them during my work-for-a-living days, so since moving here I've accumulated dollar store headbands for each of the holidays. 

Below are photos of our plated dinner—all but the first course, which was a roasted beet arancini with a goat-cheese cream sauce. I thought the chefs made up the word “arancini,” but it’s actually a traditional Sicilian fried rice ball, and it was yummy—as were all five courses that followed.  ©

Our second course was a pear-endive salad of port poached pears, braised endive gorgonzota, toasted walnuts, lemon shallot vinaigrette.

Our third course was a pan seared sea bass with roasted red pepper, lemon coulis, wilted greens and vegetable blend. Everyone was looking for a four-leafed clover during this course.

 

Our forth course was mango sorbet in champagne. "A palate cleaner." It was really good!

 

Our fifth course was grilled lamb chops with mint pesto marinate, pomegranate, balsamic sauce, lemon rice pilaf, and blistered tomatoes. I don't normally eat baby lamb or baby beef but I have to admit this very good.

 

I dove into eating our sixth course before I snapped this photo. It was a chocolate lava cake with peppermint stick ice cream and chocolate sauce. Our chefs do a wonderful job with plated meals which they only do twice a year. This one cost $30, a five dollar increase since the last one.  

(I apologize for the poor quality of the photos. I have a new phone and while that's a handy excuse, the truth is I got in a hurry and didn't notice how "yellow" those white plates turned out before I posted the photos. By then it was too late to edit them and still make my dateline for posting.) 

Post Script:  Related to not sleeping well is Dry Mouth which comes from sleeping with your mouth open. I found a product that helps with that, a tablet that sticks to your gum, above your teeth, and it lasts about five hours. I find my tongue touching it when my mouth needs moisture and I can go back to sleep without getting up to rinse my mouth with water.

 

 

Goodbye 2020!

In my entire life I’ve never looked more forward to a New Year’s Eve than I have this year including the years when I had fancy, dress up events to attend. I’ll bet most of us can say that in this year of the World-Wide Pandemic, Mother Nature Gone Wild and our Bat-shit Crazy Politics. 2020 needs to be thrown on the heap of history with the hope of better things to come. 

This time last year I started the year out with an actual Good Things Jar, fully intending to add a note each day of something good that happened that day. That lasted until March when my state got our first covid-19 lock down. By mid-summer I emptied out the jar to repurpose it. I hate admitting that, but facts are facts. Usually I keep my commitments to myself. (Well to others, too, but the point is that the Good Things Jar was another good thing in a long list of good things that went badly in 2020.) Since I was a teenager I’ve faithfully written New Year’s Resolutions. After widowhood my resolutions morphed into the then new fad of having a one word Mantra to live by over the next year. I loved the mantra idea and should have stuck to it. Better yet when the Good Things Jar bombed I should have revived one of my past Mantras. My mantra of ‘courage’ that I used the first year after my husband died would have worked for 2020 because it took courage for me to roll out of bed each morning and stay focused on my move to the continuum care campus while the building project got shutdown due to the virus. Or my past mantra that was inspired by Wood Allen of ‘Just show up’ could been bent to fit the trials and crud that came with 2020.

One way I will celebrate tomorrow night is to watch a movie that has become a tradition on the last day of December since it was first released in 2011. It’s a comedy romance titled New Year’s Eve and it centers around the ball dropping at Times Square on New Year’s Eve. It gets stuck and the woman in charge of the drop steps forward and makes a touching speech that in the shadow of 2020 sounds almost quaint. “…As you all can see, the ball has stopped half way to its perch. it's suspended there to remind us before we pop the champagne and celebrate the new year, to stop and reflect on the year that has gone by, to remember both our triumphs and our missteps, our promises made and broken, the times we opened ourselves up to great adventures... or closed ourselves down for fear of getting hurt, because that's what new year's all about, getting another chance, a chance to forgive. To do better, to do more, to give more, to love more, and to stop worrying about what if... and start embracing what will be. So when that ball drops at midnight, and it will drop, let's remember to be nice to each other, kind to each other, and not just tonight but all year long.” 

I still love that speech but I’ll be the first to admit the ‘what ifs’ of 2020 haunted me, I embraced them in a hug so tight that it felt like I was super-glued to all that went wrong in the political world, with the world-wide pandemic and with acts of God and how all three of those things converged in what felt like I was a small sailboat being dragged down into the Bermuda Triangle. So on New Year's Eve I’m metaphorically going to ER to get that super-glued hug unstuck like the time I super-glued my eye shut and had to go in for emergency eye care. Oh my God, did that hurt! And to this day I still wear safety glasses whenever I use glue. Super gluing your eye shut doesn’t do any permanent damage. If only we could say the same thing about all that went wrong in 2020. But we can’t. Lives and homes were lost to fires, floods and hurricanes. Millions of people have died because of the world-wide pandemic. Jobs and businesses were also lost to the virus. And we can only hope that our very democracy has not been damaged beyond repair from having the most corrupt and self-serving president in our history these past four years. My hope is probably echoed across the world, that we’re leaving all that behind in 2020 and we get a cleaner slate starting out 2021. Note I didn’t say ‘clean slate’ because we still have still have to mop up a few major messes from last year.

Back to what I plan to use for a mantra or New Year’s Resolution for 2021. I’m going with ‘Hope, Health and Moving Forward.’ And that means I’m nurturing the hope that all our lives will improve as we get the virus under control. The ‘health’ in the mantra means I need to step up and be proactive to get my small health issues under control before they mushroom into something bigger---my arm, foot, weight and, of course, avoiding the virus. And the ‘moving forward’ part of my 2021 mantra means every day I need to keep doing what needs doing to facilitate my move to the continuum care campus in August. ©

 HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!

Wrapping up 2018 with Shock and Awe

It’s unusual for Michigan to get all the rain we’re getting now instead of snow in December. It’s also unusual for our Broad-Winged Hawks to hang around this long; they should be well on their way to South America by now but today one of these 14” to 19” birds sat not six feet from my window, on my deck railing eyeballing the ground below my seed cake feeder. I think he was looking to make dinner out of the next small bird that came along. Not wanting to watch the carnage that I sensed was coming I decided it was a good time to run errands. 

The first stop I needed to make was at Pak-Mail to drop off the pet crate I bought for Levi that turned out to be too big. Amazon sure makes returns easy. I printed the label they generated and by the time I got back home I had an e-mail waiting for me from Amazon saying that $79.99 had been refunded to my credit card, and they only deducted $10 off what I originally paid to cover the return shipping. How the heck do they know I didn’t ship them back a box of rocks or an old, worn out crate? At that point in time all Amazon really knew was I slapped the label they generated onto a box and took it to Pak-Mail. They didn’t even weigh or measure it. I was shocked that a company as big as Amazon still trusts society do the right thing and that made me feel good.

The next stop was at Chow Hound to get some pill pockets for Levi. I’m pretty sure I could get the pills down the dog without the pill pocket/treats but who else do I have to spoil except the dust bunnies and I spoil them by letting them live under my bed. I planned my next stop to be at vet’s office to pick up Levi's prescription but I was so close to the Guy Land Cafeteria that I could hear it calling my name and I wondered why because when I first got there, people-watching was as boring as monitoring a shelf of empty canning jars. But it soon picked up when a young woman in skin-tight, capris length yoga pants and a tee-shirt tied just below her breasts came in, her whole midriff showing---35 degrees outside and no winter jacket. She put a baby on the bench seat of a booth across the aisle from a table of six old guys and she bent over to change the baby’s diaper. I was wondering if I was ever that physically fit and trim and the guys were probably wondering what ever they wonder when a woman’s ass is presented in a place where they couldn’t ignore it if they tried. A sense of awe was on a few of their faces.

It was clear she wasn’t wearing underwear, not even that ‘dental floss’ that passes for thongs and her pants came with a patch pocket on her thigh for a cell phone and she was using the pocket for its intended purpose. Can’t young people do an hour’s yoga class without being connected? If I was being charitable I might concede she could have been using the phone to play a guided meditation app. But at the moment I was being surly and thinking if the phone was set on vibrate, and she got a call, her pants were so tight she’s probably get an unintended thrill. And why that doesn't happen just walking around with her "camel toe" showing in the front is a mystery.

My brother and two of his guy friends have been taking Pilates classes for a couple of years and they got a new instructor who is making them want to quit. The problem? She’s been harassing them to get “proper clothing” for classes; they’ve been wearing loose fitting jogging clothes. He says all the women in class wear yoga pants but until I saw this young woman I didn’t understand why the guys were resisting. The day my older brother starts prancing about in yoga leggings is the day I’ll be able to pay him back for all the teasing I took from him growing up.

After lunch I stopped at a grocery store I’m not fond of but I go there when I don’t need many things because it’s small and easy to get in and out of in a hurry. Michigan is due to change back to winter soon and I wanted to pick up some stuff for New Year’s Eve in case I have to stay put until after 2019 arrives. Ms. Yoga-Butt-in-Our-Faces had me feeling guilty about putting ice cream in my shopping cart so I picked up a tray of mixed veggies and vegetable dip too, knowing it would put a hex on ice cream calories. I haven’t bought ice cream since last summer even though it’s my favorite food group so I didn’t feel too guilty about wanting to ring in the New Year with Ben and Jerry’s. Should I choose to munch on the vegetables instead I know I can count on Levi to beg for the cauliflower and I'll gladly hand it over. My niece gave me a bottle Red Moscato for Christmas and I may use it to toast in the New Year...if I don’t make wine floats out of it first. I’ve never done that before but, heck, what better night of the year to do something wild and crazy. ©    

Alexa, are you Listening to me?

I have started out so many new years with written declarations and goals for the coming months, but for some reason known only to The Shadow, this year was different. (If you know who The Shadow was congratulations, you’ve passed the age requirement test for reading this blog entry.) I wrote down nothing for 2018 Resolutions. Nada. But I do believe in having them. And I believe in having all my bills paid by January first and writing those last minute donation checks to charity when I can afford it. Both of those are checked and off the list in my head. I do believe in declaring that I’m going to lose all that weight I gained between Halloween and the last day of the year. Checked and we’ll see how long that promise to myself will last. My track record predicts I’ll make it to my bi-annual doctor’s appointment in April before that goal falls by the wayside. I do believe in setting goals for self-improvement and that we need that January first reset button to kick us in the butt because we humans are slackers when we’re doing stuff for ourselves. At least this human is. 

For the past eight or nine days I thought I’d die of boredom. If I talked to anyone it was one of those foreign scammers trying to get me to go to my computer and give them remote access so they can gobble up all the passwords to my bank accounts while pretending to save me from hackers. I do enjoy acting like Dolly Dumbbell that has them thinking they’ve hooked their fish before I press the button on my phone that cuts them off mid-sentence and blocks their number from calling again. But I’m not sure if those blood suckers count as human contract. 

I did have human contact last week by text, e-mail, Facebook and blog comments. While that’s very nice it’s not the same has hearing a voice or exchanging hugs in person. And I worry. It’s what I do best. I worry that someday I’ll think all the human contact that come through computers and devices aren’t real, with real people sending them. I mean already we find ourselves trying to have two-way conversations with our “intelligent personal assistants"---Siri and Alexa. That tells me we’re getting closer to someone creating a nanny app that keeps old people from getting lonely. (Remember the Saturday Night Live spoof “commercial” for the Echo Silver for the Greatest Generation?) It could/would be so easy to believe “friends” that are Wi-Fi enabled are real or that actual friends who use devices and computers to communicate are not real. 

Have you ever gotten annoyed with Alexa? I do it on a daily basis when she says, “Sorry, I don’t know that one.” Her tone of voice is so dismissive and I have to remind myself that Alexa is not a real person. It’s probably some software engineer with a peach-fuzzy chin that I need to direct my annoyance at when Alexa does something like recommend spinach and salmon sandwiches when I asked her how to fry fish. By the way, I didn’t really want to know how to fry fish; I like testing Alexa’s knowledge base and two times out of three when I asked if the world is round, she knew the correct answer but the last time she said she wasn’t sure. Yup, I managed to badger and bully Alexa into doubting her language processing algorithms. I told you I was bored. But it's kind of scary human-like that you can trick a computer into processing the very same information differently just by repeating it. Moms do that all the time, “Did you break that window?” “No!” “Look at me! Did you break that window?” No, Mom! “Jimmy, don’t lie to me! Did you break that window?” “It was an accident!” I guess that's not exactly the same thing, but humor me anyway.

Back to New Year’s traditions: One of my favorite movies to watch on the last night of the year is a 2011 comedy romance titled New Year’s Eve and it centers around the ball dropping at Times Square on New Year’s Eve. It gets stuck and the woman in charge of the drop steps forward and makes a touching speech and I’ll finish this blog entry by quoting it here. They're words we’d all do well to take into our hearts and try to live by: “…As you all can see, the ball has stopped half way to its perch. it's suspended there to remind us before we pop the champagne and celebrate the new year, to stop and reflect on the year that has gone by, to remember both our triumphs and our missteps, our promises made and broken, the times we opened ourselves up to great adventures... or closed ourselves down for fear of getting hurt, because that's what new year's all about, getting another chance, a chance to forgive. To do better, to do more, to give more, to love more, and to stop worrying about what if... and start embracing what will be. So when that ball drops at midnight, and it will drop, let's remember to be nice to each other, kind to each other, and not just tonight but all year long.”  

With the New Year, we each get a fresh start, a second chance. Are you listening, Alexa? Maybe I’ll start by being nicer to you. © 

 * Above photo: Orson Wells, the radio voice for The Shadow in 1937-38. The video below is the spoof commercial for an Amazon Echo Silver for old people.