bad dream induced by memory issue/doctor appointment stress

I woke from an annoying bad dream, in which I was participating in some sort of poetry reading contest. I was the first participant and went up to the front to read my two poems. The woman who was MC-ing the event was a woman I knew, so she and I talked for a few minutes, then she introduced me to the crowd. Before we'd started talking, the poems I was going to read were bookmarked in a journal, but suddenly the bookmark was gone and I had to start flipping through the book to find my poems.

I couldn't find them and the dream consisted of me repeatedly flipping though journal after journal and notebook after notebook, while standing in front of a crowd and looking like an unorganized mess and feeling increasingly embarrassed and confused.

I told the woman she could just introduce the next reader, but she said she wanted to keep the reading order the same as it had been listed and so if I couldn't read first, then I couldn't read at all. I couldn't find my own poems, so I couldn't read first, so I couldn't read at all - but it wasn't the not being able to read part that bothered me as much as losing my own poems and having no idea what had happened to them.

***

I know what inspired this dream. In real life, I make tons of lists all the time, largely because of my mental quirks AND my aphasia-induced memory issues. I'm a very organized person or at least I think I am or at least I attempt to keep my brain organized so that I don't go mentally bonkers. But despite all the time and energy I spend organizing things onto lists, I also lose lists a lot, or I have so many lists that I don't know which is which and which is where.

I try my best, but I can't do anything fast. The more time limitations I have, the more stressed out I get.

I hate doctor appointments (way too many bad experiences) and I have one coming up this Friday. Because of my stressed out brain issues, I purposely set the appointment up months in advance. This is my first appointment with this particular doctor, and they said they would send me the paperwork to fill out in advance. Several months went by and I hadn't gotten the paperwork yet. I thought maybe they planned to send it closer to the time of my actual appointment, but just in case they had forgotten to send it, I called the office again on Friday the 15th of this month. The woman on the phone said the paperwork would be mailed the Monday after that. Well it's ten days later now and I STILL haven't received the damned paperwork and my appointment is this Friday and I'm pissed off and I feel like they just don't care.

I hate doctor appointments to begin with, I get extremely overly stressed out about them, and even if I WASN'T stressed out, my brain can't dash off medical paperwork in ten minutes (or 20 minutes or 30 minutes), because I read slow, I think slow, and I have word issues. If I'm writing something like THIS at home, I can take as long as I want and nobody needs to know how slow I am and about my annoying word issues.

But if I'm writing something somewhere else, I can't automatically process what I'm reading, I can't automatically understand what they're asking, I can't dash things out fast, I can't remember stuff like the names of my various doctors (and I sure as hell can't spell them), the name/dosage of my pill, the time frames of other health issues, or doctor appointments, etc.. Anything to do with numbers and time is hard for me to remember. The only numbers that come naturally to this brain or my birth date and my age.

So what this means is that since the doctor's office didn't bother to send me any advance paperwork, I have to spend a few hours GUESSING what their paperwork will ask me and writing notes to take with me - and hoping I don't forget something important and hoping I don't lose my own notes. The thing is, I'm sure I've written these kinds of notes before, but I don't remember where I put them, even though I probably put them somewhere that I thought was a well organized place to put them. Heck, maybe I even scanned and stored them on my computer, but I don't know, because I CAN'T REMEMBER.

I'm stressed out, part of me would rather cancel the appointment then try to handle this stress, and when I get all stressed out and somebody tells me to relax, I feel like punching them.

The other issue about being stressed out at a doctor's appointment and having to spend a lot of my time and mental energy transferring paperwork I wrote at home onto paperwork they hand me in the office, shortly before the appointment, is that my brain will get so stress-focused on that stuff, I won't even be able to focus on the details of the actual appointment.