What, me worry?

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When my children were little, we had a favorite book called Wemberly Worried. We read it so many times that I can still recite a lot of it by heart. The gist of the story is that Wemberly, a cute, well-dressed little mouse, was a natural worrier, but as the day approached for her to attend kindergarten, her worrying took on monumental proportions.

​Throughout the years, my kids and I have often referred to that book or secretly agreed that someone was a “Wemberly.” Recently, though, I have felt myself drifting into Wemberly territory, and today’s post is an attempt to remind myself and hopefully others who need it, that worry is a useless emotion.

The phrase “worried sick” is real. You can absolutely worry yourself into sickness. For this reason alone, you shouldn’t let yourself become a worrier, but I recognize that there are times when it’s tough to get on top of the realistic ‘what ifs’ floating around inside your head.

I’ll give you an example. For the last three months, I’ve been doing my best to ignore pain in my right knee. I’m a person who deals with stress by working out, and I’m a firm believer that if a person were to do some kind of jumping every other day - star jumps, box jumps, jumping rope, hopscotch, or burpees - we could keep our bodies healthy way into our advanced years. (That’s an entire other blog post and one I can’t actually back with any scientific proof.) But because of my knee, I haven’t been able to work out or even take my dogs on their daily walk for longer than I’d like to admit.

When I decided that the pain wasn’t going away, I began the work of getting it fixed. I saw my doctor, had an X-ray, then an MRI, saw a specialist, and eventually had a knee scope scheduled. I also worried. I’m squeamish about bones, ligaments, veins, and needles.

​It’s never just one thing, right?

In the midst of all this, my husband is preparing to retire. While it sounds like the one thing every single person wants to do, the reality of it is quite different. There’s worry that you haven’t registered correctly for Medicare. There’s worry about what you’ll do with your life now that you’re no longer reporting to the same job you’ve had for the last 45 years. And of course, there’s worry that there are only so many regularly scheduled paychecks left.

I’m not a natural worrier. I generally take life one single day at a time, and as my mother has often said, there’s nobody else who can make $5 last longer than I can, and I proved it again and again during my college years.

But the day of my scheduled surgery, I was faced with yet another worry. As I was being checked in, the lady helping me let me know that my health insurance hadn’t yet approved my knee scope. There I was, an hour away from getting my knee fixed, and she was explaining to me that if insurance didn’t come through, I would be responsible for around $20,000 just to pay for the surgical center fee.

Everything hit me at once.

Thankfully, not being used to worrying came in handy. In a moment when it seemed like every little thing was rushing at me with nothing but negative consequences, I took a deep breath and realized a few things.

​Deep breaths…

In every situation that was causing me to worry, I had very little control. I couldn’t control the surgeon’s hands as he worked on my knee. I can’t control the fact that our lives might look completely different very soon. I have zero control over what my insurance decides to cover.

But I did have control over whether or not I decided to have surgery. I couldn’t see a way to continue my daily life without it, so I signed the document saying I would pay the $20,000 if it came down to that. The woman made sure to ask me nicely twice more if I was okay with it. No, absolutely I was not, but I knew that if I had to, I could make payments until it was all taken care of. I couldn’t continue on with more and more pain every day.

It was a great reminder that we all get to choose. Are we going to spend every day heaping one worry on top of another? Or are we going to focus on those things we have control of? There are too many situations in our lives where we could get buried in worry. For myself, I prefer to remain optimistic.

While I haven’t been brave enough to check in with my insurance yet, at not quite a full week, my knee already feels better than it did before the scope. I’m also happy to report that my husband has had several offers from people who would like to partner with him after he retires. The beauty of that is that he’s going to get to choose when and if he works, and what every single day is going to look like. With a little optimism and a whole lot of prayer, choice is going to continue keeping my Wemberly side locked deep within.