While in college, I ran into a succession of incredibly stressful events. These events caused my body to freak out in a way that I didn't realize was possible... My hair started falling out. When I went to the campus doctor, they told me they thought I had ringworm. When those tests came back negative, it continued to become worse. After about 6 months, all my hair from my head to my toes had fallen out. Going to a dermatologist after that, they told me that under certain conditions that stressful situations can actually lead to your hair falling out and is called Alopecia Universalis... And I had about a 20% chance of my hair growing back. Fuck me, I looked like Powder. Eventually, I managed to deal with all my stress and finally grew my hair back. But, during that time I figured out how to deal with stress, and made me appreciative of my life. Focus: When has your body freaked out in a way when you didn't expect it? Alt Focus: What do you do to deal with stress? Edit: Mods, if you need proof of this actually happening, I can scan in my old license... It has the same info on my current and old license.
Besides the birth defects I was "awarded" upon entering this world, my body has been pretty good to me. The only thing I can think of recently when I fractured my foot (first broken bone ever) it didn't heal right. I was still walking with a limp three months after the doctor said I should be walking normally. I was toughing through it and was playing a bit of soccer with some friends when I kicked the ball and heard a pop from my foot...and the pain magically disappeared. I've been painfree the last three weeks since. The only thing I could think of was that it regrew funny, and kicking the soccer ball snapped the regrowth and now it's growing back correctly. I am accepting the mystery without questioning it. I'm easy going like that. ALT FOCUS: I'm rather a stress free guy...which I believe is because of my ability to live in complete denial. Right now I would consider myself quite stressed since I have to be in court tomorrow morning representing myself and I have little to no knowledge of how the law/court system works, but I all I've managed to do about it is watch three+ hours of food network, pick out what I'm going to wear, and masturbate. When I'm stressed I just play video games or read a book, and within an hour tops I feel fine. Magic.
I have no idea what the "normal" way for my body to react to anything is, apparently it has always been fucked up. Aside from constant tiredness despite chugging amphetamines (prescribed) twice a day and more vitamin B than most people take in a week, and the constant background of chronic aches and pains, I get random acute pains with no warning. These can appear anywhere at any time. Sometimes it's a burning feeling, sometimes it's ripping, sometimes it's crushing. Sometimes it feels like someone's trying to sever a toe or remove a kneecap with a railway spike. My body loves me. Stress is a major undercurrent in this, in that it tends to amp it up. Unfortunately, I live a decidedly stressful life. A component of my tiredness is apparently impending adrenal function collapse. That should be fun if or when it happens. How I deal with stress is not let it get on top of me. I work through it, at an increasing pace the more stressful the situation is. Sometimes I have to consciously slow my speech down because my system is so cranked up. I have no way of lessening my stress, so my only option is to grin and bear it.
I deal with stress by reading, something about a good book will take my focus away from my bullshit problems and relax me. Its pretty much been my savior these last few years. The only problem is finding books i enjoy reading. Also as a side note... Trying to type when you are drunk as hell is a motherfucker.
Spoilered for TMI. Spoiler Raise your hands those of you that have had your testicles cut open. Don't be shy. So, I'm 16, and I come home from school with a slight pain in my balls. Odd, but whatever, maybe I pulled a muscle playing football. By 6pm that night, it feels like I've been kicked, albeit not too hard, in that most sensitive of places. I reluctantly tell my parents, and Mum drives me to our local GP. Dr. McFuckknuckle says don't worry about, it will probably go away on it's own. Fine. I go home. About 10pm that night, I start to feel as if Scootah has been given my balls, a flogger, and an audience. I whinge to my folks, Mum decides to take me to the hospital, probably mostly to shut me the fuck up. We tell the nurse what the problem is, and suddenly I'm lying on a table with a young, blonde nurse rubbing gel on the boys for an ultrasound. Did I mention I'm 16? Yeeeah. Fuck my life. Next thing I know, I have the sweet bliss of nitrous dulling my embarrassment, and it's lights out time. I wake up and am in blinding agony, sick from the anesthetic, with some bizarre blow up cushion under my ass and a new ridge of stitches dividing my balls. Why the rush? Coincidentally, this is the last time I trusted a GP for anything more important than a sick note. Fuck I hate GP's. Anyway, this all happened maybe 2 weeks before I went to Europe for the first time. I was a fair way from recovery, and we were staying in a tiny Italian village on an olive farm. Somehow the farm owners got it into their heads that I was dying, and this was a holiday my folks had set up as a final goodbye. Consequently, this entire house of Italian women doted on me - bringing me fresh baked pastries every morning, drinks at night, it was just totally bizarre. Anyway, I still have both my testicles, and a ridge of scar tissue between them. And I'm grateful for it. Alt Focus: A glass of good scotch, a dark room, some blues on my speakers, and a j. All is right with the world.
FOCUS: I don't handle stress well when it comes to testing. Despite always putting in hours of learning before an exam, I'd be guaranteed to be ass-pissing on the day of the paper, no matter how well I'd prepared beforehand. Fuck standardised testing. Also, asthma. It creeps up out of nowhere. I'll be sitting eating lunch and oops, sorry body, my lungs have decided to shit the bed, so I have the fine options of: 1) spitting out my food, usually with no accuracy due to being unable to fucking breathe. 2) choking. This happens to me at least once a week. Fuck asthma too. As far as other things go, I find shouting and using too many expletives helps with my stress. ALT. FOCUS: TV usually helps, but reality shows have the opposite effect.
FOCUS: I guess I'm the type of person who bottles stress up until it almost kills me....and then I don't really learn from that. Its manifested itself in some different ways. Most of the time, it just causes my heart to go haywire. I could be sitting down, having a normal conversation, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, and suddenly my heart will explode and beat as if I've been working out for the past two hours. At that point, you can't stop it, you just hope it goes away. Usually does, within 15-30 seconds. Other times, my heart will just hiccup (palpitate). I'll feel it skip a beat then come back with a really hard one that makes it feel like its hiccuped. When my stress/anxiety was REALLY bad, I had to deal with that shit about 40-50 times an hour. I thought I was losing my damned mind. Recently, it turned down the volume on the heart and affected something else. Randomly, I just wouldn't be able to swallow. I'd be eating something, regardless of the size, texture, etc. and I just couldn't choke it down. It would sit at the back of my mouth...and do nothing. I'd freak out about it. At one point, it got so bad that there were points where I couldn't swallow my own spit. I gave in and am now medicated to lessen these issues. All I've heard is its something you manage, not something that always goes away. It changes everything, though. I mean, how can one live a normal, healthy life and participate in things like working out, etc. if they're never sure if randomly their heart is going to stop working or go haywire mid bench?
FOCUS Not me, but I have a friend who has lost total feeling on the top of his thumb. Fell asleep on it (or so he thinks. It was after a heavy night of drinking), woke up the next morning, and it just feels like pins and needles. He just presumes the feeling will go away. Cut to 2 months later, and it's still happening. He went to a doctor to try and figure it out, and the doctor said he'd never seen or heard of anything like this happening. I guess he could have SuperThumb for the rest of his life. ALT FOCUS Playstation. Specifically Call of Duty. Nothing alleviates stress more than shooting someone in the face with a shotgun during online gameplay.
After my car accident, the newspaper said I was taken to the hospital but "uninjured" in the crash. When a newspaper says you're "uninjured" what that means is you have a concussion (my sixth), instantly developing hip arthritis (most of the time you see me I walk with a visible limp), daily migraine headaches for almost a decade, no longer having feeling in the webbing of my right hand (from it being impaled by the wiring in the the car seat in front of me), Iritis (bright lights produce crushing bolts of pain behind my eyes) and post-traumatic stress in a way that if I'm anything but a driver in a car, my palms sweat waterfalls and I shake like a leaf (still do to this day). The driver of the accident actually was uninjured. Completely. And drunk. And he killed his best friend and the girl that was with me. Alt. Focus: To take away the mental and physical pain, there can be only one: Spoiler ...I usually only touched the stuff MAYBE once a week before my accident. However, my use of it had deterred my use of any dangerous garbage like Oxy and the like. It keeps my chronic pain at bay like nothing else I know (that, and I admit I love the stuff but you already know that), but that's me.
A few years ago I had mono but didnt know it, and ended up going to the Preakness race. My buddies were concerned that I kept falling asleep in the middle of the day, I had lost 20 lbs in 2 weeks, and had a big growth on my neck. In the evening before the race, I started having a seizure (not a normal side effect of mono) and was taken to the ER. I had an MRI and everything and spent the day of the race in some random hospital before my dad flew down to take me home. I got home and had another seizure and was again, rushed to the hospital and spent the next week there. The growth on my neck was biopsied as well, which was determined to be just an inflamed lymph node. The docs were puzzled as to why I tested positive for mono but had two seizures also, which still hasnt been determined to this day. Oddly enough, 3 years later my sister had the same symptoms I did (except the seizures) and it was determined she had Hodgkins Lymphoma. After she was diagnosed, I was immediately brought in for a PET scan to see if I had any growths (as siblings are 3X as likely to get it), which were negative. Its still very puzzling.
*Raises Hand* Spoiler Mine happened when I was staying over at a friend's house, about the time I was 14 or 15. I ended up falling down a hill and landing in a thorn bush. One thorn landed in just the right position that it sliced up through my jeans and cut open the left side of my sack. I didn't realize at the time that anything major had happened, probably due to the adrenaline of falling down a hill. Later, it started feeling like every time I took a step, I was getting hit in the balls. Needless to say, this was very painful. I decided to check out what was going on in the bathroom, and discovered the gash; I could even see my testicle sitting in there (they look like small white balls of muscle.) After initially freaking out and preparing to call my mom and tell her to come get me, I decided not to, due to my intense fear/disliking of hospitals and doctors. Instead, I stayed the night there, sleeping very little because I was afraid that if I rolled over onto my left side, my nut would fall out and I'd find it lying next to me in the morning. I never went to the doctor or told any of my friends. Instead, for the next month, I kept putting band aids on it, cleaning it out, and waiting for it to heal. If you've ever wondered, keeping a bandaid on your sack is very difficult, as the skin moves a lot. I ended up using liquid band-aid most of the time. I also had to walk around with my hands in my pockets like a dumbass the whole time, cupping my balls so that they wouldn't scrape against my leg; every time they scraped, it felt like I was getting hit in the nuts. Eventually the wound healed small enough that I could walk normally, and now you can't tell anything ever happened at all (not even a scar, which is bullshit; I should at least get that for my troubles.) I have never been checked out by a doctor for it, and have only ever told one of my exes and my freshman roommate in college. At least now I can be thankful I didn't have the above poster's potential trouble with gangrene and everything else. That would have really sucked. Alt Focus: As for dealing with stress, I'll echo what others have been saying about reading books. I also like to just sit down and think things through, it helps me imagine different scenarios and calm down when I realize they aren't so bad.
Stress has led my beard to have a few white and copper hairs. At 23. There's not enough to have a badass salt-and-pepper look, it's just weird. I was born with astigmatism and a lazy eye. I had surgery three times to deal with the latter but they didn't really do shit. I wear glasses partly to keep my eyes straight, and I almost entirely use my left eye (which makes catching a baseball really, really hard) Also I damaged all the ligaments in my neck going down on a girl aggressively. I'm sure there's some radio contest I could potentially win with this, but it just makes my neck sound like a drumroll when I turn it, and its harder to turn all the way left than it is to turn all the way right. Also combined with the aforementioned eye issue it sometimes feels like my head isn't totally level, so I check mirrors a lot.
When I was 17 I woke up in the hospital. It made sense to me at first. I suppose some part of my subconscious remembered being taken there, and was trying to reassure me that there was a rationale for all of this. Like a kindly farmer's wife trying to soothe a coked up raccoon, my limbic brain tried to gently fill in the gaps of my experience. We all know raccoons can't handle their cocaine. My conscious brain flipped out, and I tried doing three things at the same time: demanding an explanation for my current predicament, untangling myself from the mess of wires that wrapped around my body, and rushing to the bathroom, because I seriously had to pee. I guess I wasn't all the way up to speed on hospital protocol; it is apparently frowned upon for patients to start unhooking machines willy-nilly, and you're really not supposed to grab medical personal by the lapels and hiss into their faces, "who did this to me? Was it the Ukrainians? ARE YOU WORKING WITH THEM?" Once it was established that I was not in fact trying to escape, a few things were made clear to me. One, I'd been in the hospital for the better part of a week. Two, I really, REALLY shouldn't touch the wires. Three, one of the aforementioned tendrils was handling my urination needs for me. And finally, my Ukranian theory would only be taken seriously if I could accurately point out the former Soviet Republic on a map. I narrowed my eyes and dropped the subject. They went on to explain that I had a near-drowning experience. Further inquiry yielded that I was not in fact surfing a 30 foot wave, or saving a bushel of kittens from a waterfall, but in fact had been in a pool. Sober. With two lifeguards and maybe fifty other students. In the shallow end. This combination of circumstances were so suspicious and unlike pretty much anything they'd seen -- what healthy 17 year old drowns in water shallow enough to stand in? -- that I had groups of medical students coming by and excitedly telling me that they were studying my case, and asking if they could prod and poke me. "Only if you buy me dinner first!" I would chortle, before vomiting or shitting myself. While there are more interesting details to the story, the rub is ultimately this: they never figured out what happened, I wound up spending two weeks in the hospital and having to take a train 3,000 miles home because I wasn't allowed to fly.
Alt Focus: I can't deal with stress by distracting myself from it with books or booze or what have you, otherwise the thought that I hadn't actually done anything to resolve the problem would always be chewing at me. I have to take some step or action, no matter how small, to fix the problem before I can sit down with a book or a beer or I'll just feel agitated. For example, let's say it's financial stress, and I'm short of my budget. Something as simple as bagging up $2 of cans and bottles to take to the depot will give me a feeling that I'm making at least some progress on the problem, and then let me relax.
Focus: When has your body freaked out in a way when you didn't expect it? I had mono a few years ago. I've never experienced anything like that before. It was strange because it seemed random to me. For weeks I was incredibly tired, sleepy, and irritable. I felt like I was going through school and work with 30 lb weights strapped to each limb. All I wanted to do was sleep. I think I could've gone 12 hours straight every night if I had the opportunity. And, I looked like ass. I was so tired that I didn't put any effort into putting on makeup or taking care of myself. It was too much work. I finally broke down, thought that maybe I had The SuperAIDS, and went to the doc. It was actually a really big relief to find out that it wasn't all in my head and I wasn't just being a pussy. Alt Focus: What do you do to deal with stress? I do lots of HIIT and/or clean.
Count me in. I've talked before about how I was really wound up in high school. That never really went away. I just keep bottling it up and subliming it. I get the heart flutters too - last one was a couple of days ago at work, apropos of nothing - and a panic attack once or twice in high school. You'd never know it by looking at or talking to me, though - I'm really good at appearing laid-back and nonchalant. My immediate family drives me especially insane, to the point that I avoid them as much as possible. The main difference is that in this environment I don't bother hiding shit. I have a little bit of a reputation among my immediate family members because of this: super passionate, super hotheaded, talks a mile a minute, and leave him the fuck alone when he's stressed out. I imagine my other acquaintances wouldn't believe it unless they saw it. Alt-Focus: Whiskey. And, for a short time in Egypt, Xanax. I have never tried anything that relieved all my stress better than that drug. I should really get a script. But really, whatever's bugging me is going to gnaw and gnaw at me until I actually take some concrete steps. But oftentimes the problem seems so daunting that it's hard even to get started.
I also have a couple of gray hairs (at 22). They're not that obvious, and I like them. Everything seems to be okay now, but for two years I had all these weird health things happening. I started fainting out of nowhere, usually for easily explained reasons like I was overheated/dehydrated or I had the flu, but one time I fainted because I was too cold (and a couple more times came close to it) which is apparently not a normal reaction. There was also a couple of months where I would randomly have these ridiculous nosebleeds. Like, not a little trickle but gushing blood for a couple of minutes completely out of nowhere. It was disgusting. And, when I ended up going to the doctors to try and see what was going on with the fainting, I discovered I had an incredibly abnormal heartbeat all of a sudden. The doctors and nurses that listened in would always react with a shooting back of the head in that "Whatchoo talking about Willis?" way as they furrowed their eyebrows and gave my chest a weird look. I was in and out of the hospital for a couple of months doing tests, and even had a monitor strapped to me for a couple of days and no one would come up with an explanation. I was getting tired of it, so I just stopped going. In the past couple of months I've felt much healthier in a lot of ways, and everything - including the heartbeat - seems to have kind of just sorted itself out...? Pretty strange.
When I moved to China my body went all wonky. It seemed everyone gets the travelers diarrhea and you spend a month shitting fire and losing 20 lbs (sure you could drink only bottled water and eat at western restaurants the whole time, where's the fun in that?). I also think their antiquated water system helped fuck me up as well. The water isn't softened and they don't filter out a lot of heavy metals we do here in the West. My gums flared up and bled like crazy for the first month or so. I got sun burned on the first day of softball and after two weeks it hadn't gone away and turned into puffy rashes. I had to find some prescription strength cream to get them under control. The same day I was out playing softball in 100+ weather I went home to an AC'd apartment and immediately wound up with a sinus infection.
Well, apparently my body shuts down, and a night of drinking and music turns into a terrifying (for him) trip to the ER where I'm completely unconscious and unresponsive. I internalize as much as I can and then I fall apart.