Dear Body, You're Not Supposed To Do That!

When I was in middle school, I had this constant pain in my knee whenever I took a step. It wasn't excruciating, but it hurt enough that I got it checked out after it didn't go away after a week or two. The orthopedist looked at the x-ray, and told me that a small part of the bone at the end of my femur had died and that was the reason for the pain. Nothing was chipped or broken, but for some reason blood just stopped flowing to that area and the bone tissue was dead.

They had no explanation for it and told me that if I went on crutches for a month, it would come back on its own. I haven't had a problem with it since, but still can't figure out how something like that happened.

The x-ray was cool though. The majority of the bone was normal and bright white, but at the end the dead section was grey and much fainter.

 

Focus: When I get stressed to the gills, I get muscle tremors. A week ago, a muscle right above my left elbow started to involuntarily twitch and didn't stop for the entire time I was at work. The shitty thing is that it'll be a random muscle. Another episode involved my lower eyelid twitching for a couple of hours. The great thing about that is everybody left me alone. And count me among those with way too much gray hair. I'm 29.

Alt Focus: I come here and read posts until I feel like murdering people less.

 

This probably seems strange, but I just spend a lot of time reflecting on the source of my stress, and breaking the problem down until it feels reasonable. This can take hours of quietly reflecting on the circumstances that put me in this position, the state required to get out of that situation, and the steps I can take to achieve it.

I got better at dealing with stress in this fashion by reading two books: First, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. The book taught me two things: first, to look at my own problems from a distance, separating the fundamental concepts from the details. Second, to accept my suffering for what it is, without letting it slow me down. It is okay to be miserable while I sort out my problems—it's not okay to be paralyzed with fear and pain. I read this book my first year of college and probably would have dropped out if I hadn't.

The second book was 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. This book taught me to recognize the fluidity of our circumstances. One minute we're down, the next we're up. We need to prepare our emotions for this inevitability, and recognize that the problems we are stressing over now will be insignificant and long-forgotten soon enough. We need to take the long view and stay focused on goals that are years away, without letting our immediate needs distract us from that path.

Fuck, I think it is time to reread these books.

 

When I get stressed, I have mainly psychological reactions, but the main physical effect is exhaustion. The way most people feel the day after hardly sleeping is how I feel when stressed. Eyes feel heavy, energy level drops to zero, and concentration jumps right out the window. Also, occasional panic attacks.

To deal with it, well, I don't know how to. Never really learned. Sitting back and reading TiB or playing video games helps a bit, but nothing really makes it go away. "Stress-free" for me is being incredibly tense and high-strung, and just not really noticing it as much because that's my baseline. Sometimes, though, I find my power animal, and slide. That works too.

The only time my body has really done anything that scared me was about a year ago. I went to bed sober, no drugs or anything strange in my system, and woke up on my back. Normal occurrence, right? Except for the part where I was completely paralyzed for at least a minute. Fully awake, fully conscious, eyes able to move, but I couldn't move anything else. I guess my sphincter was paralyzed as well, because I can't think of any other reason I didn't shit myself out of terror. It only happened the once, so I never go it checked out.

 

I've had a couple of experiences where either my head or a limb freaked out or suffered serious damage for no real good reason.

The first was when I was in 8th grade and I whacked my elbow on my chair and the next thing I know I'm on the floor and people are shaking me. I was told that if you hit certain parts of your body it freaks out and shuts down which I didn't believe and was convinced something was really wrong with me. Later I learned about pressure points and whatnot so it doesn't seem like much of a stretch.

The second was in my early 30's and one minute I was doing the white boy dance of jumping up and down and the next I was on the floor with my leg bent beneath me. It was very painful trying to straighten my leg and then I noticed that my knee was concave due to a missing knee cap. Turns out I ruptured my patellar tendon below the knee and when the surgeon told me that the next 9-12 months were going to suck he was right.

One thing that has been educational about not drinking or using drugs anymore is how I now deal with stress. I'd like to say that my life is less stressful now that I'm sober but that isn't completely true but at least I can deal with adversity in my life. Since I can't have a wobbly-pop, a bong hit, or some xanax to chill out I now I find some exercise followed by controlled breathing helps. Not to get all AA up in here but I find talking to others & sharing whats bothering me helps the most with stress & depression.

 

I forgot to add this and it's too late to edit my last post, but I also wanted to mention that the book The Unthinkable is fucking excellent, and deals with the way people act in disasters.

A lot of that book is relevant to this thread, in its explanation of the psychological and physiological responses to stress.

 

In preparation for law school, I took a summer course of two classes (basically it was like a weed-out, last chance boot camp for applicants to make it in, but being already accepted, I got to basically audit it). It was so stressful that my left eye developed a twitch. It's been a month and a half, and it still twitches a few times an hour and is annoying as fuck.

This doesn't bode well for the next three years.

C'est la vie.

 

I'd take tremors, heart murmurs, twitchy eyelids, and a full head of gray hair willingly, if only I could somehow not cry when I'm stressed. It's just...it makes you look like you can't handle your shit. Even if you are, in fact, handling your shit. People start talking to you like you're a wounded animal and it's just so, so horrible.

Just picture this: It's Friday afternoon. You've had less than 8 hours (total) of sleep all week. You've been working balls-to-the-wall every day, forgetting to eat unless you quickly scarf down some vending machine grossness while you're also using the restroom, because you're just that fucking busy. People are screaming at you, you're barely making deadline after deadline, actively trading excellent workmanship for the cheap relief of just getting that project/report/issue off your desk and out your door in whatever subpar state of completion it's in. There's coffee stains on the shirt you're wearing, your hose is ripped, you're not sure how you're going to make rent this month, you're worried about that thumping noise coming from your car, and you're in the middle of the worst breakout ever. So when you're carrying a massive stack of papers down the hallway and the heel to your shoe breaks, sending you face-first into carpet and scattering your carefully-organized papers everywhere...you're utterly shocked when big fat tears start falling onto the papers you're trying to quickly gather and reshuffle. What the fuck is that!? You're crying...over a broken heel?

And then if someone else sees you, it's over. Forever. Then you're the big baby who cried when her heel broke. Fuck that noise.

Focus: Aside from crying, I get adolescent-style breakouts and stress rashes. I absolutely love taking off my clothes and looking like I've been rolling naked in poison ivy. It's sooo hot.

 

Crying is the ultimate betrayal. I'm alllllll good...unless I'm crying. I don't cry often so when it happens I'm shamed and embarrassed. At the point of tears for me means I'm also at the point of. Breakdown.

 

Focus Ever since I can remember, my left knee has sounded like Velcro. It isn't a very special set of circumstances that brings this about, all I have to do is crouch all the way down, then stand up. I asked my athletic trainer about this and she replied "If it doesn't hurt, then don't worry about it." And it doesn't hurt, it is just incredibly disturbing to hear that sound coming from a knee.

 

Another great stress reliever comes in two words: heavy bag. Beat the shit out of your stress, and get a heckuva workout to boot. Maybe tape a picture of Nick Cannon to it so you have a REAL reason to throw hard shots.

 

One night my freshman year I was in a fight, and I got hit in the face pretty hard a few times. Was completely fine after, but woke up every morning for the next few weeks with a nosebleed.

Didn't tell anyone about it, and it stopped happening after a few weeks. I'm sure it had something to do with a damaged blood vessel and how loudly I snore or something, but damn was it annoying. Ruined a great pillowcase.

 

I'm not sure how on-focus this is, but: Remember when you a kid, pre-puberty, if you were in a quiet room you could hear a high pitched tone? That's from the Brownian motion in the air's molecules. After your inner ear bone hardens at puberty, you're supposed to lose this range of your hearing; presumably, most of you did.

I read that explanation in Presumed Innocent, when I was 15. Problem: I was still hearing it at that point. I turned 36 yesterday; I still hear it. It's not tinnitus; it goes away when there's other sounds around (such as Motley Crue's "Sticky Sweet", playing now on the Sunday morning hair metal radio show).

My body's not supposed to do this, is it? I presume it won't change until I'm much older, or am subjected to the sound of a gunshot indoors or something.

 

I don't really get stressed out. When I have a lot of shit going on at once, I take it slowly, and methodically, and it all works out in the end. Or maybe my stress relief methods are just super effective enough that I don't notice it.


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I get acid reflux and kidney stones. The reflux is awful, and when it is at it's worst, most medications can't completely get rid of it. I have to try to sleep sitting up after taking 4 tums and a Zantac. The kidney stones are just evil, make me piss blood, and make my back hurt like someone is constantly punching me in the kidneys. The doctor says both are related to my stress and weight. I've since lost 45 lbs, but the stress is still going.

I also grind my teeth when stressed. My two back teeth were ground down to almost nothing and had to be pulled (my wisdom teeth actually grew in to replace them). When it is really bad, I have to wear a mouth guard to sleep, which sucks as much as you think it does.

To deal with stress, I use video games. Really any games, as just escaping into a game world and playing for an hour or so will relax me. My wife totally understood when I explained that it was the same reason she reads when stressed, so I get very little crap for playing video games, unless it is excessive.

 

In 2008 I had a bout of Bell's Palsy on the right side of my face. I was sitting at home watching Law and Order and as I was mentally cheering for Jack McCoy, without warning, it felt like the right side of my face weighed 200 pounds.

I panicked, thinking I was having a stroke, but this panic quickly dissolved when I realized I had no headache, I could walk and talk normally and I felt fine, albeit with a face that felt like someone attached a weight to it.

One ER visit later to rule out brain issues (aside from the psychiatric ones), I was sent home with a script for Valtrex and Prednisone. Apparently the herps can go haywire and somehow cause the nerves to become enflamed in the cranium. Let me just go on record and say that Prednisone is the fucking devil. I know it's a steroid and I expected some side effects, but not the batshit crazy want to run up my street simultaneously screaming gibberish and laughing like a hyena side effect.

My face recovered quickly and it wasn't a bad case, so, that's good. But still, what a bitch that was to deal with. The doc said it can be brought on by stress, because the immune system is suppressed it can't fight off the face herpes. It explained a lot; I was out of work, my marriage was on the rocks and I was living in an atmosphere that was destroying my soul.

The only ways I deal with stress these days are either to: cook something, read, listen to brain-pummeling heavy metal or give my service weapon a workout at the range. The last one is a new way to deal...never knew how much your stress level goes down when you fire a gun.

 

Oddly enough, I also had a stress induced run in with Alopecia. I had Alopecia Areota, the difference betwen the two being that my hair loss was more patchy and only occurred on my head. I grew it all back within a couple months but it was scary as hell. The weird part was that it happened when I was in 7th grade. What the hell does a 7th grader worry about so much that his hair falls out? The shitty part was the treatment. I had to go in several times a month to receive 100+ shots of some medicine. Shots that were applied....you guessed it, right on top of my skull. Not fun.