Whenever I go to the doctor, no matter the reason,
one of the first things they ask me is, “Have you been under any stress lately?”
I have always had a great deal of difficulty answering that question. The fact
is that I don’t know what stress feels like,
or more accurately I don’t know what the absence of stress feels like. As a
business owner, I have never worked for a guaranteed paycheck in my entire adult
life. What I earn is always a direct reflection of how successful or unsuccessful
I have been at doing my job, which means that I never know what it’s going to
be until I get it. That’s the sort of “stress” that most people couldn’t
tolerate, which explains why there are so many more employees than there are
owners. But since it is the only life I have ever known, I simply accept it as
the price I pay for being my own boss. So, how do you answer that stress question? I usually end up saying, “Why,
sure. Isn’t everybody?”
A couple of mornings ago I woke up coughing, a dry,
hacking cough which produced nothing. It began as a tickle in the middle of my
chest, and it brought back a flood of truly horrible memories of a time eleven
years ago when the exact same type of cough ended up being the canary in the
coal mine for open heart surgery. I must admit that I panicked and before the
day was out I had had an echocardiogram done to make sure there was nothing
wrong with my heart. Thankfully, the ticker is in great shape, but the cough persists
and yesterday was joined by body aches and a sore throat. Lovely.
But, with the aid of Ambien, healthy doses of
Ibuprofen and Zyrtec, I wake up this morning with less body aches, much subdued
but still frustrating coughing, and zero voice. That’s not actually true, since
I do have a voice, it just sounds like that guy who sang bass for the
Temptations.
My doctor suggested that all of this was brought on
by “excessive stress.” But how does that work? I suppose with the addition of
dealing with my Dad’s issues over the last weeks, my stress quotient has risen
over normal levels, but why does that mean that I am suddenly more susceptible
to body aches and coughing? My two sisters have been equally stressed out over
Dad and they haven’t started coughing their insides out. Why me? I can think of
plenty of times when I was under huge amounts of stress but never got sick…like
the time me and my buddies got caught trying to fly “Tiny” Lipscomb’s pants and
underwear up the flagpole during gym class at Liberty Junior High, or the time
my 11th grade English teacher called my name to give my oral report
on Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, and I realized that I had read The Birth
Mark instead. Talk about high levels of stress!
But I was younger then and didn’t know any better.
Perhaps there is a level of acceptable stress over which we aren’t allowed to
cross without negative health consequences. If so, I have apparently reached
it.
Too many hospital visits with too little hand-washing, perhaps? Feel better, sweetheart.
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