Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I woke up before dawn and felt as if a black blanket had settled over me.  I was deeply depressed.  I'm worried about friends and family, and every day brings new health issues for them that I empathize with perhaps too much.  Then the news, though I try to avoid it, and these old, old sadnesses that can't really be erased:  my brother's suicide four years ago, my daughter's cancer struggles, the deaths of friends and a sense of detaching from life.  I finally went back to sleep and woke up late.  I felt as if I've been in a fight.  I made breakfast, thank goodness we had raisin bread, which I love, and marched myself over to my doctor to give him my blood pressure readings from this last week as he'd asked me to do.  The walk did me good, and later he called and said the readings were okay and just to continue until my blood test in three months.  I observe in myself massive anxiety when dealing with my very kind and understanding doctor.  No meditation or deep breathing whisks it away.  I know I share this feeling with many of my friends.  We dread appointments and tests and there seem to be more of them.  At my writing group last night we talked about this fact of this stage of our lives.  As they say, old age is not for sissies.