Huh, wait...did that just happen?

A few months ago on my way out of New York, my doctor said offhand, 'oh, you're 35. It's time for your baseline and I'm going to write you a script.' For the less fair sex reading this entry, that's a baseline mammogram. A pancake test. A true test that you've hit the age to start worrying. Just that casual comment threw me for a loop - for years I'd heard that women don't need a baseline until 40, but here I was getting written up that I needed to have one before my next birthday. For a moment it was sort of exciting - I got to go first, I get to tell the other younger women in my life what it's like, what to expect. But after that excitement faded, the subtext of what she'd ordered set in.

The script has been attached to my fridge for months, curling at the edges next to the Eat Me magnet from Crif Dog. My first mammogram. This is the gateway test, the one that starts it all. From here on out, it's colonoscopies, bone densities, and other miserable exams to prove you're not yet dying but you're on the way.

But when are all of the things that usually happen at this age going to start happening? I didn't freak out when I turned 30 - and given the circumstances I had every right to do so. That first (and as of now only) silver hair? I protected it feverishly, proud to finally have earned a stripe. But it fell out soon thereafter and I've not found another since. And what about the clock? The oh-my-god-please-don't-let-me-fall-victim-to-my-body alarm clock? That's my name for it, the phenomenon that takes perfectly rational women and suddenly makes them hormonal and unpredictable. This, to me, would be like Spock getting Bendii Syndrome (look it up in Wikipedia!) - after a lifetime devoted to study and reason, the ultimate curse is losing one's mind. I have never been able to comprehend how a woman could wake up one day and suddenly decide it was time.

And then I realized it's a slow process, losing one's mind. It doesn't happen overnight, it's not so easy to see. Somewhere along the way while you've been struggling against it, you realize the struggle is the change. And that all of the hallmarks are there, that somehow you've subconsciously made changes in your life that you think will make you happy, but they've been stepping stones on a path your body tricked you into taking. But as soon as you wrote that you think, 'but I don't really feel tricked, I am really happy.' And then you realize it's already happening. It may not be the same for everyone; god forbid I wake up thinking ineedababypleasenowihavetogetpregnant. But there's something, I know it's there.

So here I sit in my kitchen looking at the yellowing script. Mortality is a post-it on my fridge and the tone in my alarm that will never let me sleep again.