Saturday I took my last blood-pressure pill and my last sleeping pill. It will be about a week before I get the new medications in the mail. While it’s just as well for me not to have the sleeping pills and therefore have to get through the night without them, going without my b.p. meds even for such a short time is certainly not recommended. Why am I in this situation? Because I didn’t make a simple phone call. I’ve had “call Aetna” or “Call Aetna!” or even “**Call Aetna**!”on my to-do list over the last couple of weeks, but I didn’t actually do it until Thursday. We are changing insurance companies at the end of the month and I needed to know what would happen to the refills on my brand-new prescriptions after the switch. Would Aetna send me back my original prescription forms so I could re-submit them to the new carrier? Or would I just lose those refills and have to go back in to the doctor to have them written out again? I didn’t want to mail in my forms until I knew the answer. I have to say that Aetna’s customer service is usually pretty good–it doesn’t take long to get a live human on the line. My general perception, though, is that phone calls do take a long time, much longer than e-mails, but it seemed to me that this was a matter complicated enough to require an actual conversation. The call took less than five minutes. (The answer to my question is that switching the prescriptions is up to the new insurance company; I’ll have to make yet another call, to them, after April 1.)
So the curse of procrastination strikes again. I doubt that there will be any real consequences for my lapse in medications, but it’s ridiculous that I’ve let this happen. I kept looking at the number of pills left and thinking that I had plenty of time. Then, suddenly, I didn’t. Instead of just making the call, I kept thinking about making the call. Now I’m paying the (admittedly pretty small) price. Putting something off never makes things easier; it always complicates them.
Today I told myself that I could not start writing until I made another phone call, this time to our auto insurance company, Liberty Mutual. (I’m not advertising for our insurance companies, but I guess in all fairness I should mention both of them.) Gideon, our 20-year-old son, has been removed from our policy since last May when he was diagnosed with cancer on his spine. (Actually, L.M. let us remove him retroactively when I finally got around to calling them last fall. They were very, very nice about it. And I guess you could say that I had a pretty good excuse for my delay on that particular call, considering what was going on in our lives with Gideon at the time.) Only recently, after getting used to being out of his braces, has he felt comfortable about turning his head to look over his shoulder. He needs to get used to driving again, especially before he heads to Seattle for the summer. Again, the call took less than five minutes; the guy on the other end was courteous and knowledgeable, and the policy change was effective immediately. This time there was no last-minute angst.
How very simple, and yet how very hard, it is to just go ahead and do it.