The feast or famine nature of freelancing still catches me unprepared every now and then. One day I’m way ahead of the game, ready for the next project, and two days later I’m drowning in work with no time for any of it.

Most freelancers see the feast and the famine in terms of work or money—the abundance of either is a feast, while the lack of the same is a famine. For me, I see it more in terms of time, and there is never truly an abundance for a feast. I get by on malnutrition, or sometimes I simply starve.

This is why it’s taken me so long to schedule another checkup with my doctor—I haven’t had the time.

But I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, as it was way past due. With the new allergies and my revelation that my family has a history of stroke and high cholesterol, I figured I better take the time while I still had any. I’m still young, and I’m healthy for a couch potato, but you never know what Life may deal you. A healthy 35-year-old man in my complex died last year of stroke, brought on by some blood clot in his leg. My neighbor downstairs told me this, right after she told me about the stroke she had one night; lucky for her, she recognized the signs and called for help.

But when she described the signs to me, I started to worry. One of the signs is vertigo, which I suffer every now and then while lying in bed. The whole room just sort of spins, and I feel like I’m Dorothy, and my condo is the Kansas homestead being whipped around in a tornado. Altered breathing and heart rate? Check. Trouble walking? Disorganized thinking and confusion? My daily default position. I could be having a stroke every day and not even know it.

I sound like a hypochondriac, I know, but my grandfather died of a stroke. My mother had a stroke a few years ago. And every now and then I have what look like signs of a stroke.

So, yeah, I’d better get a checkup and find out what my cholesterol level is.

Which leads me back to feast and famine. Starting right now, so I get a clean read on my cholesterol tomorrow, I can’t eat. And I’m starving.

It seems I’m always starving.

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