I used to thrive on the stuff.   Back in high-school and college, in the early days of my career, I lived for the rush of the deadline.  The unbeatable odds.  The change request that would save the company a client who was gonna walk if it wasn’t in place tomorrow.  Hero syndrome.  Stress was my high.  It was my drug of choice, and I was hooked.

I also used to pull all-nighters with gusto.  3 straight days of code/caffeine/cigarettes, and maybe some food.  That was what drove me.

Somewhere along the line I got old.  I already discovered that I can’t do the all-nighters much anymore.  I’ve been cutting back on my caffeine too, because I have been having trouble sleeping.  I used to be a 2 pot a day and 2 trips to starbucks kinda guy.  Now, I have a latte and a green tea at most.

I told you all I quit smoking last year, and it’s almost a year now.  Since that time, i’ve gained a bunch of wait…40 pounds.  I had decided to get a start on that.

Then Monday something happened.

It started after my morning latte.  I felt jittery, with a strange pulsating in my chest.  I thought maybe I was just having a reacion to drinking a bunch of coffee with no breakfast.  Lunch came around and I ate about half of my chicken sandwich before I felt kinda nauseous.  I put the sandwich down, went back to work.  Shortly after we returned from lunch, my chest tightened up, I was having trouble breathing, and my arms were tingling.  Like any former athlete would, I tried to walk it off.  I breathed deeply.  I analyzed it.  I ruled out heart attack becuae my pulse was normal and I wasn’t in “pain”.  But I was a little freaked out.  It felt like a panic attack, which I’d had before, but without any of the mental state that comes with a panic attack.  So I was pretty confused.  It got worse when I sat down, and walking seemed to mitigate it, so I paced the office.  Mostly people thought I was weird.  By about 3:00 I was able to sit back down, and I actually took a little nap in my office, and felt a little better.  But when I woke back up, it was back.  More walking around.

I had my roommate drive me home, decided to just relax in the night, and play someWoW, and get to bed early.  I hadn’t been sleeping enough, so I figured a good night’s sleep would do me some good.  When I tried to go to bed however, the feeling was back with gusto, and when I laid down, the chest sensations became full on chest pains, and I was scared.  I sat up a while, watched some TV, looked up shit on WebMD (what a damn nerd).  My roommate went to bed and told me to wake him up if I wanted a ride to the hospital.  So about 2:30am I knocked on his door and said “I think I’ll take that ride”.

The ride to the hostpital I was a wreck, wondering if something is really wrong, and if so, how did it go 12 hours and not kill me, and what kind of asshole I am that I didn’t go to the doctor earlier, and then again what if nothing is wrong with me and this is all psychosomatic and I’m wasting everyone’s time…let’s just say my mind was not quiet.  We get there, I sign in, the admit nurse checks my vitals (pulse fine, resps fine, good breath sounds)…and then I sit in a chair from 3:00am until my name was called at 7:30.  Emergency Room.  Jumbo Shrimp.  Plastic Silverware.  Army Intelligence.  Oxymorons are fun.

They put me in a bed.  I had to wear the gown.  The gown was too small.  Cute nurse came to do EKG.  Attaching about a billion leads to my legs, arms, and chest.  Embarrassed about my fat gut and flabby pecs.  She gets the EKG and moves on.  Hooks me up to the monitor.  More leads on the chest for the heart monitor.  Later I would curse them as I pulled them and many hairs from my chest and legs.  Finger thing for pulse and pulse O2.  BP cuff.  Doctor will see you soon.  Relax.  Here’s the TV remote.

Let me take a minute to describe the TV remote.  It had 2 buttons and a knob.  Button 1 served to turn the TV on, and change the channel.  The channel changing option?  channel++.  Fox news, which I watch in the morning, is channel 59.  Tv starts at 2.  And the button was this big plastic thing that didn’t always click…it was a chore.  Also the channel++ became ever so much more annoying later when i wanted to hit up channel 48 from channel 59…/sigh.  The other button was the nurse call button.  The knob was for volume.  The sound came out of the remote like a drive-in.

Anyway, after having been up all night, I finally dozed off to sleep.  This of course is when the tech came to take me for chest x-rays.  I hemmed and hawed.  I made platitudes about my cell phone and should I leave it or take it.  If you have ever smoked, you know why I didn’t want to get the chest x-ray.  I started to get very scared.  She put me in a wheelchair.  I told her i could walk, was the wheelchair necessary, she says yes, it is, and it will be fun.  It’s not fun.

We did the x-rays, (2 from the front, 2 from the left), and I tried to watch her develop them to get a hint of what was there, but I had a bad angle.  I tried to get her to give me some info “How do they look?” I said.  “They came out fine” she said.  She knew what I wanted, but she was smart because she’s not legally qualified to tell me.  So I continued to bug out about it.

On the way back, I had to piss.  I asked her if I could, and she said yes.  As I was going in, my nurse, a cute Indian girl whom I would later call Vampira and Nurse Ratchet, said if I was going in to give a sample.  I asked if she really needed one, she said you never know.  So I stood there expecting her to bring a cup.  She didn’t.  I went back to my bed.  I learned later that the cups were in the bathroom…but by thing I was hooked up to all kinds of shit and just holding it.

So when I get back to bed, the doc comes over and talks to me, checks vitals, listens to breathing, and so on.  I felt almost like a defendant on cross.  I was not answering the questions right I was sure.  I told him I had a feeling not of pain, but almost like the kind you have with an anxiety attack, but that it was way long (like 18 hours now).  He says do I have a history of panic attacks, I say no.  We talk about something else.  He asks why I described it as a panic attack.  I said I’d had them before.  He said but you said you didn’t have a history, I said well I’ve had one or two…here and there…not like…a history of them.  Stressfull.  He says my EKG was good, has to look at the xray, and will need to do some bloodwork.  Just relax.

Now is a good time to say how much I hate needles.  I can watch people get sliced in half by horror monsters, but I can’t watch blood being drawn in a needle.  I could never, ever, ever, do heroin.

So Nurse Ratchet comes and says she has to take blood.  I’m thinking it’s the old way.  I haven’t been to a doctor in…20 years roughly.  I thought, needle in, blood out, go away.  I prepared myself.  But no, she put in the IV thing, rubber-banded my arm to get the blood thing going, and then sucked my blood out.  Very quickly.  I could hear if gurgle in the tube.  I felt sick.  “all done” she says.  Big tube of blood.  small tube of blood hanging from right arm.  “I feel pretty nauseous right now” I said.  “Take deep breaths” she said and walked away.  I took some deep breaths.  I broke out in a sweat.  I felt cold all over.  I was tingling in my fingers and toes.  My monitor’s red light was blinking and beeping.  My blood pressure and heart rate fell through the floor.  I thought I was dying.  Nurses were walking by me.  Nurse Ratchet was nowhere to be seen.  I thought “this is it.  I’m dying.  Here it goes.”.  Another nurse comes in, tells me to breathe, starts tapping my chest, lays me flat back, and gets me a washcloth for my forehead.  Within a few seconds, I felt normal again.  What I had was a Vasovagal Syncope and is apparrently not that serious…but to me, it was deathly serious.  Folks I really thought it was over.

Having recovered from that, I tried to watch the West Wing a bit, but really was obsessively watching my monitor.  I was willing my heart rate to stay between 65 and 75.  If it fell out of the range, I altered my breathing and moviements to bring it back.  Thinking about it now it was an interesting exercise in controlling the heart rate.  It worked very well when I kept on top of it, I could move the numbers almost exactly.  But that was tiring, and I was exhausted from no sleep and the trauma of being in a hospital.  I didn’t want to sleep though, because I was afraid that I might have another issue and that Nurse Ratchet wouldn’t come help.  I called my ex wife, who works on the 4th floor of the same hospital, hoping to have someone near me that wasn’t trying to kill me, and who I trusted, but she didn’t get the message.  And so for the first time in a long time I really felt like I was alone.  And that I couldn’t sleep.  And that I was really laying there trying not to die.

A little later, Vampira came back and said “I have to take another draw in about 15 minutes ok?”.  I managed a half joking, half “stay the fuck away” rendition of “you’ve got to be kidding”.  She smiled.  When she came back, she said “you aren’t going to pass out on me are you?  No needles, i’ll just take it out of your IV”.  See, she knew I was in no real danger, but I still didn’t know.  If only someone had explained to me what happened you know?  So I sat there, turned away, very methodically breathing, and praying for it to be over soon.  When she left, I monitored my monitor obsessively for about 20 minutes.  It was all good.

So now my mind turned to happier things.  What was in my xray?  That had been done for hours, why hadn’t he said anything about it?  What about my blood tests?  Why did they need a second draw?  What disease did I have?  And I was left alone with these thoughts, scared, for the next hour.  Then the doc came by and said “well, as I expected, I can’t find anything wrong.  EKG normal, xray was fine (thank God), nothing in the blood work, breaths fine, heart rate fine, BP fine, Pulse O2 perfect…if you were 50 I’d say maybe we should look for a serious heart problem or something of that nature, but as a 28 year old in decent health with a lot of stress on his mind, I think we are looking at stress related problems”.  He told me to find a regular doctor that can help me, maybe a shrink, evaluate my health and fitness and my stressors and how I handle them, gave me a scrip for Ativan, and sent me packing.

I was releived, beyond belief, that the chest x-ray was clear.  I was releived it wasn’t a heart attack.  1 week before my 29th birthday…what a bitch that woulda been huh?  The Ativan is helping me cool out for now, and he ordered me to take a couple days off.

The message, however, is clear.  This was a warning sign.  A speed bump on a long road to worse problems that will end with hitting a brick wall.  So I have to make some changes.

Basically I’m treating this as a chance to reformat my life, and only install a few essential things at a time, while I learn how to manage my time and stress better, and while I get into better shape physically.  My day job is providing stress enough for 3 people so since I can’t cut that, I’m having to cut extra work-related stuff, like, for now, Project FAZR.  I hope to rejoin those guys at some point, what an awesome group of talent.  But for now, I need to keep it simple.  I’m going to be managing my work life better, and doing more of the things that relax me at home.  Reading and writing are two of those things.  I love to read and write and learn new things.  To that end, expect to see more in this space, as this is a nice writing outlet for me.  Also I need to concentrate on spending much better quality time with my son when I have him.  He’s having issues with math.  No boy of mine is going to have issues with math. 

Aside from that, I’m just going to take things a step at a time.  Start enjoying myself more.  Eating better.  Looking better, Feeling better.  I’ve been in a funk for a while now, and it manifests itself here and there.  I neglect thing.  Projects, work, finances, my son, my health…I take on more and more only to end up accomplishing less and less.  I want to accomplish a lot.  I’m not content to sit still.  But if I’m going to do that, i need to learn how to manage it.  Part of me learning that will be chronicled here so you can see how I’m doing, and maybe someone else can benefit.

Boys and girls, you gotta watch your stress.  You get to a point where it beats you.  Wrestles you to the ground, and says “what now bitch”.  That happened to me this week.  It was scary.  Don’t let it happen to you.  Take some time to relax, get yoru priorities in order, and manage your stress so it doesn’t end up managing you.

Peace out.