My original plan for turning 40 had a guest list of 32 names, string lights in the oak tree and a taco truck I had already priced at $14 a person. I wrote it in January on a sticky note that's still on my monitor. Today I'm 40, it's a Tuesday, I'm going into the office, and the party never happened.
What happened instead was a list of four appointments and a dinner for four people. I'm surprisingly happy about both.
Why it got smaller
September filled up before I noticed. My promotion to senior project manager took effect on September 1. Harper started middle school in August, along with band and a rented clarinet. Ben is coaching fall soccer again, so every Saturday has a game. And the fifth career coffee was this past Saturday, with 18 women around the long table on Bank Street. Every weekend in September was already spoken for.
In early August, I looked at the calendar, looked at the sticky note and asked Ben what he thought. His answer was the most Ben thing possible: "You can throw a party any year. Pick the one thing you actually want." What I actually wanted, it turned out, was to stop putting off the boring stuff and then have a nice dinner.
The checkup list
Turning 40 felt like a good deadline for the appointments I'd been pushing back. These four are mine, the ones my doctor and I talked through for me. They're not a checklist for anybody else, and I'm not giving medical advice. Ask your own doctor what's right for you.
I scheduled all of them in one sitting on a Monday in July, from my home office, in about 40 minutes on the phone. We switched to a high-deductible plan with an HSA last November, so for each one I asked the same question before booking: "Will this be billed as preventive on my plan, and is there anything that would change that?" Here's what each one has cost so far:
- Dentist, cleaning and exam (Monday, August 24): $0. Our dental coverage includes two cleanings a year.
- Eye exam (Monday, August 31): a $10 copay through our vision coverage, plus $68 for new glasses after the frame allowance. My old frames were from 2021, so this was overdue anyway.
- Annual physical with routine bloodwork (Friday, September 11): $0 so far, billed as preventive. I'm still watching the mail for the lab statement.
- Mammogram (scheduled for Monday, October 5): expected to be $0 as a preventive screening on our plan. I called both the imaging center and the plan to confirm.
Total so far: $78, paid from our HSA. Our family deductible is $3,400, and nothing on this list came anywhere near it. We put $250 a month into the HSA and my company adds $750 a year, so a routine year like this one is exactly what that account is for.
From the HR side: I answered benefits questions for years, and the most painful surprises almost always came from visits people assumed were free. Asking one question on the phone before booking takes thirty seconds. Everything else about these appointments is between me and my doctor, and I'm keeping it that way.
The practical part that helped most was booking around my schedule. The dentist and eye exam were early mornings on Mondays, my home days. The physical was a Friday at 8 a.m. The mammogram is a Monday. I didn't use a single PTO day, and I didn't move a meeting.
The birthday we actually had
We had dinner on Sunday, two days early, because Tuesday is piano and soccer practice and nobody in this house is at their best on a Tuesday night. It was the four of us: Ben, Harper, me and Carol, who drove up from Hartselle with a card she'd clearly been saving for a while. We went to a small Italian place downtown. The bill was $118 with tip, which is about what the taco truck would have charged for eight people.
Harper ranked the desserts at the table, out loud, from best to worst. The lemon cake won. My parents called from Florence during dessert and sang on speaker, and Harper ranked that above the lemon cake, which I'm choosing to read as love.
Ben's gift was a new pair of walking shoes for my lunch loop, which is either deeply romantic or deeply practical, and with Ben those turn out to be the same thing.
This morning at 6:40, my phone buzzed with a reminder I'd set back in July: "Confirm mammogram, Oct 5." Then a second one, also mine: "40!" I drove the 38 minutes to Huntsville, walked the third of a mile from the far end of the lot and found a card on my keyboard from the new PM on our team. Turning 40 on a Tuesday is mostly just a Tuesday. This year, that's the version I wanted.
