Holy cow! Where have I been?!? All these great replies, and I’ve been off…well, the usual here, there, everywhere. 
I suppose the first thing I should do is give an update on the diagnosis attempt: To date, I haven’t been seen or managed to get an appointment. Initially I was quite fired up to get seen…Well, maybe fired up doesn’t have it exactly right. Maybe “anxious” is a better word, as in, I nervously called my primary-care doctor’s office asking for a list of psychiatrists who specialized in adult ADHD, and I could barely get the words out without choking up.
Got a list of several names and numbers, and started making calls…and leaving a lot of messages. I was amazed how rare it was to have my call returned the same day. Once I did hear back, I learned that two were not seeing new patients. One would see me, but doesn’t take my insurance, so I opted not to go to him. One had openings….in August. One had a non-working phone number. Actually, that one’s kind of funny. I dialed the number twice and got “We’re sorry; the number you have dialed is not in service.” Checked the number on the web site: Oh, dopey me! I wrote one of the digits wrong – no WONDER! I will now dial the correct number….We’re sorry; the number you have dialed is not in service.”
I think that was the point that I kind of lost my nerve on the whole deal. After all…why am I jumping through all these hoops when maybe I don’t really have this?….
On the evening of the non-working number call, I did a little frustrated venting to my husband, which resulted in an interesting conversation with my husband. His conclusion was, “Why do you need an ‘official’ diagnosis? Why can’t you just say you have it, and just….drink coffee?” I’m oversimplifying his point, and obviously he’s oversimplifying, but his basic question was, unless you want to go on meds, why see a doctor? And since I wasn’t sure I really needed to be on meds at the time of that chat, I didn’t have a better answer than, “Well, it would make me feel like everything wasn’t all my fault.”
And then he swept me up in his arms and exclaimed, “Imperfections?!? My darling, whatever are you talking about???”
OK, maybe that last part is a bit of fiction. I think, unlike the rest of my family, he can at least see and understand that I flake out a little more than is convenient, and perhaps slightly more than is average. But he didn’t seem to get on board with the basic idea that there is anything inherently different about having a professional decide whether my space-cadet tendencies have a name, versus me deciding by my own self that I could call it ADD, employ some ADD-style strategies to my life, and, sure, drink more coffee on those days when I have to focus more.
So I mulled on that for a while. Still mulling on it, actually, and that’s a whole separate posting, the mulling. Stay tuned.
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