So I was in the hospital.  Again.  Apparently, it was stress and anxiety.  Again.  I’ll give the Reader’s Digest version and then jump to the real point.

So Sunday afternoon I’m in my office humming along, making a bunch of bug fixes, and adding some new functionality to the piece of software I’m working on.  All of a sudden I get this pain shooting into my chest on the left side.  I get up, take a walk, take some deep breaths, and it seems to subside.  I sit back down, there it is again.  So I pack it up, go home.  I decide I’m going to get some sleep, kind of sleep it off.  No dice.  Laying down makes it worse, and it’s spread to my neck and jaw.  This is a MAJOR red flag.  Heart attack red flag.  I walk around some more.  I call my ex-wife, who is a nurse, seeking advice.  No answer.  I start to really stress about the heart attack thing, and I decide to drive to the hospital.

When I get there, I stand in the parking lot, wondering if I really need to go in.  Is it stress?  Is it something worse?  After several minutes, I decide to walk in.  Honestly, I’m pretty fuckin’ scared at this point.  I go in there, tell the volunteer at the desk what my issue is, and sit down.

From here it proceeds basically like the last time.  I notice that this hospital is much nicer than the last one.  They get me pretty much right in.  Every time someone comes to stick me I point out that I’m bad with needles.  It seems you get better with practice.  By the end of my stay, I was barely flinching when it was needle time.

So, they did some tests, admitted me overnight for observation, came in every 4 hours for vitals, sometimes for blood.  I got basically no sleep.  I half-watched a lot of TV.  I had a chest x-ray, a CT, a stress test, untold EKGs, an echo, a lot of blood work, a couple urine tests, and a 24/7 monitor strapped to my chest.  Everything was negative.  Everything was fine.  My triglycerol  level was a little high, but my overall cholesterol wasn’t bad.  Anything wrong with my heart, the cardiologist said, could be fixed with a little bit of diet and exercise.  In short, I had not had a heart attack, nor was I in danger of one, and it was probably stress related.  They let me go Monday evening.

So.  I don’t know.  This stress thing.  I thought I was dealing with it pretty well, but I guess not.  I’m working on it though.  A friend of mine going through similar (but a few months ahead of me) things passed on the advice he’s been working with from his doctor.  Basically you have to face it head-on.  Accept the stress for what it is, and don’t let it beat you.  Manage your time and tasks appropriately, set yourself up to succeed, and deal with the stress as it comes.  In theory, it sounds right.  In practice, it’s hard work.  Talking yourself down from an impending anxiety attack (or blogging yourself down from it, as I’m doing right now) is tough, because you have to stay vigilant.  I’m working on it.

I said before when this happened that I was going to make some changes.  Time management, commitment management, diet, exercise, all kinds of stuff.  Some of that I did, some I didn’t.  I’m happy to say I’ve been eating better, and even getting some more exercise, and I’m down about 20 pounds from my high point shortly after the last hospital visit.  I attribute my doing so well on all the heart tests partially to that, and I intend to continue.  I haven’t been blogging like I said I would.  That needs to change.  Blogging is a nice outlet.  I haven’t been managing my time the way I wanted to.  I did reduce a lot of my other commitments, but that wasn’t really the issue at core.  The issue was allowing myself to think that everything had to be done right away.  That everything was one lump sum of code or writing or some other action.  It isn’t.  Everything is, in fact, the sum of all of its tasks.  Each task can be done in some amount of manageable time.  Each task is more or less important than the other individual tasks that need to be accomplished.  In short, all that I have to do is a manageable list of tasks.  Sounds GTDish maybe, but it is, in fact, reality.  The trick, I think, is that after you recognize how to deal with all of it intellectually, you need to internalize that so that your subconscious won’t be pitching you curve balls like anxiety attacks.  That’s the part I’m working on.

So, anyway, I don’t know.  Saying it helps.  I can come back to this and look at it and remind myself that I don’t have to let the stress beat me. 

How do you deal with stress?