Stress for Less

Really, I need to stress less.

Life is stress.

It just is. Shit just happens.

Sometimes the well good out and we need thanks of dollars to fix it. Sometimes we get suck and have to be hospitalized. Sometimes chemical imbalances hit our kid particularly hard. Sometimes all of these things happen at once.

March of 2019 was one of those times.

Our well went out to the tune of $2,400.00.

My husband had to be taken by ambulance to the hospital where he had a 3 day stay to the tune of $29,000.00. He is uninsured. I had to do a LOT of paperwork. And still owe money.

Our son intentionally overdosed on his dad's prescription medication. I had to go teaching home from work. Keith stayed home from work. Nathan puked and cried all day. A week later he had to be hospitalized. More paperwork. More chasing after his bio-mom because she didn't report his moving in with us, nor her moving out of state and, on paper, he was still receiving benefits in Nevada.

I took care of all of it while worrying about my son. While advocating for him with doctor's and social workers. While my own PTSD from my own past was being triggered. While keeping our little family from falling apart. While working as a caregiver for minimum wage. While finding therapists and psychiatrists for the entire family and figuring out a way for them to get paid.

I was also undergoing my own mystery illness at the time. I couldn't hold down any food. I was living on Nutrition drinks and saltine crackers. I had to go get so many tests. Often traveling 4 hours away, staying in a motel so I could make my 7am appointment and traveling 4 hours back home afterwards.

On August 13, 2019 I had surgery to remove a skin cancer under my eye. That was another 4 hour trip, motel, surgery, 4 hours home with my face throbbing painfully. I'm grateful they were able to remove all of the cancer there. I'm also grateful my local clinic was able to remove the stitches.

My Medicaid insurance coverage paid for most of the doctors and tests, but it didn't pay for the motel. It didn't pay for the gas. I didn't have the emotional or mental capacity to deal with insurance company bureaucracy to figure out payment, anyway.

My mystery illness was sending me to oncologists, to endocrinologists, to gastroenterologists, to proctologists. I was X-rayed, scoped, poked, and prodded.

I had to eat an irradiated egg so they could watch how I digested it. I had to hold very still with a giant box x-ray machine over my stomach and intestines for an hour.

I had to drink dye and get a CT scan.

I had to fast (easy because I couldn't hold anything down, anyway) have a scope shoved down my throat.

I had to drink a gallon of laxative, spend all day and night on the toilet so a different doctor could shove a scope up the other end. Turned out I had a precancerous polyp which has been removed. I have to go back in 2024 to have all of that looked at again.

The oncologist took 18 vitals of blood. I also had to get in touch with family members to find out what types of cancer my aunts and uncles had. There's a lot of cancer on both sides of my family! Leukemia, bone cancer, best cancer. This visit was not related to my skin cancer. It took months for those test results to come back with nothing significant.

In September, 2019 I quit my job. It was all just too much. It was too hard to have all of this stress and go clean someone else's literal shit out of the bathroom while her family was treating me like a maid and built in babysitter for her great grandchildren who were toddlers. I quit for "health reasons."

The stressors were piling up higher and higher, one on top of the other.

Somehow I made out through to 2020 with all of my family alive if not 100%. The strain of everything was putting a strain on my marriage, too. Our son was resisting therapy and treatment. He had several other suicide attempts and hospitalizations. I finally got him into a 30 day program. This was in 2020 already, so there was no visitation because COVID-19. It was about 6 hours away at any rate.

Around February or March of 2020, my doctor told me I had IBS, but that didn't explain all the vomiting. In 2018, she has prescribed a medication called Lisinopril to protect me from diabetic kidney disease. Since there was no apparent physical cause for my inability to hold down food, my primary doctor told me to stop taking the Lisinopril. Because "it can cause vomiting in some patients, even after taking it for over a year."

So, why didn't we try that first??

Removing that one medication removed the vomiting. I had lost about 30 pounds.

But the stress was still there and I turned to food, especially chocolate. I gained all the weight back. My A1C went up. My bag cholesterol went up. My thyroid gland quit working.

My husband and I were fighting about morning and everything.

In March 2020, I developed a severe cough with fever. They ran all the tests, but it was early days for Covid, so that particular test took over 4 weeks to come back as negative. I was also negative for flu and for strep.

They threw all the medication at me including a nebulizer for my cough.

It took a few weeks but I recovered.

Just in time for my son to start self medicating again. He would overdosed on Robitussin (called robotripping) and wander all over the house in the wee hours. He was drinking and smoking pot.

He "ran away" from home but we were told he was old enough to be considered an adult. (I think this actually happened in 2019 - it all blurs together).

He would get a job and quit after a few weeks. Hey another job and quit after a few weeks. He had already dropped out of high school.

Finally, FINALLY, he took his GED (general equivalency diploma). He turned 18 on December 31, 2020 and couldn't move out fast enough. He was in Washington by January 7 to live with his bio-mom.

It took a few months for Keith and I to breathe a sigh of relief. It sounds kind of horrible, I know, but it is exhausting being hypervigilant over another person's every mood, thought, action. We were just as relieved as our son was when he moved. He wanted to be in a real city instead out in the middle of nowhere.

All of the stresses of 2019 and 2020 were incredible caustic to me physically. I was pumping out cortisol like nobody's business. I think, even if additional stressors hadn't made themselves apparent in 2021 I would still be recovering, physically.

But, NO!

In February Texas decided it was going to have record breaking, freezing temperatures. We were fortunate in that we are on a different electrical grid than most of Texas and we never lost electricity. We had just filled out propane tank so we never lost heat. We lost hot water for a few days, but we're more hardy than city folks and know how to prep and survive. It wasn't too much bother.

Outside, though. . .

I had a geriatric goat and a very pregnant goat. On February 14, 2021 - the coldest day of the year, JJ, my mama goat, gave birth 2 two beautiful babies.

These babies got frostbite moments after they were born. Both sets of ears and 1 hind leg each.

JJ also got frostbite. On the worst place imaginable, her teat.

I had to bring the babies inside. Which, I did. But I also had to train JJ to be milked. She'd never been milked by a human. She was decidedly against the whole endeavor.

But the babies had to eat. For the first few days, I milked her one handed, holding onto one of her legs. I got kicked. A lot. I got knocked off the milk stool. A lot.

I was feeding the babies every 4 hours, changing their bedding, and worrying about the swelling on their legs.

The male never could walk properly. We named him Ivar the Boneless. Eventually, he sloughed off his entire foot and we had him put down.

I still had a house goat to care for and a mama goat to argue with every morning. I had to tie up her leg so she wouldn't kick me.

I still had to feed the baby and change the bedding. I had to clean her ears when they fell off and do a couple of months of wound care when she lost the bottom part of her leg.

Spring brought allergies and migraines.

By the summer of 2021, my subconscious decided I could focus on all of my shit now and brought forth flashbacks and nightmares of all of the sexual abuse I suffered as a child and as an adult.

The therapy for these PTSD flashbacks is almost as brutal as the flashbacks themselves.

And all of you know about the most recent event with my son.

Before you think all I do is complain, I need to say throughout it all they're were spots of joy, love, and humor. As a family we grew stronger. And I'm incredibly grateful.

I am sharing all of this stress with you because I'm hoping just writing it out so help reduce some of the physical inflammation.

I'm also soliciting ideas on stress reduction. I already try to incorporate meditation to my morning exercise regime. I also take walks, though as the temperature rose in July, I curtailed some of those.

I'm really not supposed to be out in the sun between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. without long sleeves or sunscreen because skin cancer.

I sweat the sunscreen right off and I can't tolerate long sleeves or long pants, for that matter. Even wearing a sun hat makes me feel too hot because my head can't cool off.

Our garden is played out but for the kale.

My stress relief comes in the form of cooking, but not the cleaning part! That part is double stressful. I'm a messy chef!

With the possiblity of losing my SSI and health insurance looming over my head, I'm searching for ways to monetize whatever talents I have.

I'm having a flash sale! I'm sell you all my Stress for Less!

I'll sell it to you for free, actually.

Till next time!

Lead and first image: "Mood" Barney the Barn Cat photo by Jonica Bradley