Stress

Or the day my brain split in twain…

Let us look at my laundry list issues that I had been dealing with this past couple of weeks, shall we?

1. An overabundance of work
2. An overabundance of school work
3. My daughter’s first ever surgical procedure
4. The feeling that my happy pills aren’t working.
5. A bombshell (in my mind) announcement from a dear and close friend.

I do NOT at all in any capacity handle stress very well… like at all! It’s just not hardwired into my mainframe. So when stresses in my life compound like they did recently a meltdown ensues.

What’s unfortunate about me is that I have a set schedule on how my days should be going and if the said schedule is interrupted in any way, I lose my shit. My main job responsibility at work is to send out documentation to our patients’ primary care doctors and specialists. This is such an easy and thoughtless job but the issue is that I have to wait for our doctors to sign off on the documentation before I can send it out. So, what happens when a doctor sits on these documents for weeks at a time and sign all of their 100 documents at one time? Oh, wait! Here’s a better question for you: what happens when three or four of our doctors sign off on their documents at once?

Yeah, that!

This stress filters down into my school work. This situation is all of my own doing. I get home from a stressful day and I just want to spend time with my girls. I do not want to do any of my thousands of pages of homework. So, that falls behind.

One of my daughters was found to have a pilonidal cyst last month which requires surgery. She is totally anxious about this which in turn makes me stressed. She has zero pain tolerance. No, I take that back… she has negative 5,000-percent pain tolerance. She doesn’t even have pain tolerance when she thinks of pain. She goes into surgery this week and I must say I am so very anxious about how she is going to deal with this all.

With all of this, I feel that my happy pills are not exactly doing their job. Luckily, I have an appointment with my doctor in a couple weeks for this.

What just put a cherry on top of this crapfest cake, was an announcement one of my dearest and closest friends made. I was distraught at this development so I went to my only source of calmness and solidity I have on this planet – my gorgeous and loving fiancee whose uterus was currently being visited by the red devil. Her response was not one that I wanted to hear and that’s when my brain just cracked.

Queue meltdown city in three… two… ONE!

Within this meltdown, I imagined God up there saying “Dude, you’re acting like you’ve lost. You’ve got Me. I don’t lose.” That’s when I threw my hands my hands in the air and claimed victory in the name of Jesus Christ. I can’t do this alone and I was never created to go about this alone.

None of us were created to do this alone.

Hey, do you know what happened the next day? Miracles upon blessings. In the morning, I did my daily check of my daughter’s cyst to make sure it wasn’t getting infected or increasing in size. It had shriveled up like a little raisin. Which gave me hope that the surgery wasn’t going to be all that bad. I was able to catch up on my work by Friday. I got all my schoolwork done Friday night. I felt better about my friend’s announcement. On top of that, my girl and I had a talk and I feel like our love and relationship is stronger than ever.

All of my life, I have been taught the tools of living a stress-free and blessed life through the teachings I received at church. Why am I calling myself a Christian if I can’t even apply these lessons to my life?

Here’s the moral of the story: In all of the chaos and blinding uncertainty, God will be glorified. Sometimes, hitting rock bottom in your own life, makes you take stock. It makes you see all the wonderful things in your life that you are blessed with.

I have a lot of learning to do when it comes to handling stress. I may not have been hardwired to handle it but I do believe I can be upgraded – and not in the creepy Cyberman type way – to handle these situations a lot better.

Pray for me. Pray for my daughter. Pray for strength. Pray for wisdom.