Let it be Noted
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We all have stress from various angles. When you catch the
flu, your body reacts to the virus and grounds you immediately until it fights
off the virus. Other illnesses have the same effect. Unfortunately, so do some
life events.
Due to circumstances beyond your control, an event triggers
a massive amount of stress to infuse your life. It comes from all directions
and impacts your family on an uprooting level. For a temporary period, your
life is altered significantly. You have to take action or drown. You don’t have
the resources; time, money, or motivation to deal but must. What do you do?
You push forward and do everything in your power to survive.
What’s the cost if you push too far?
You wake up one morning and your body’s immune system
rejects your eyeballs. They blister. It’s a side effect of Lupus, an immune
deficiency disease where your body attacks its organs; lungs, brain, eyes,
skin, kidneys, heart. Your fingers turn white and get really cold. They look
dead when you’re extremely stressed out or very cold. You shake so bad
sometimes that your teeth chatter.
Then the migraine hits. You lay in bed and search for a
place where the pounding is not so bad. When you find it, the ache dies down
until you cannot tolerate even that level of pain and move. The slight shift
toward a happier place causes a flair in pain so bad that you remember the
level of relief your former position offered. You wondering if your eyes are
bleeding. And now you must find that place again.
Grit your teeth and bare it.
This goes on for days on end until you think there has to be
a death around the corner. When’s it going to happen? Time stretches to a month.
There are very few times that you can even crawl out of bed.
You force yourself to get up on the good days and build up
the amount of time little by little that you attempt to write. The third day,
you wake up with your skull on fire and your brain throbbing. Everything is too
bright. Nausea hits.
You clench your eyes shut and your orbs feel gritty. Another
symptom of Lupus is dry eyes. Someone is pounding a nail above your left brow.
Each heartbeat, the hammer strikes. Both eyes are blistered and your face has
broken out in a rash.
You pushed yourself too hard. Now, your body is forcing you
to rest.
Two days later (equaling five in all), you have done little
on a $6,000, 3-month trilogy contract which needs an outline and the invention
of sci/fi characters and world. You drag yourself out of bed and try to do it
again.
Impossible— Back to bed.
You do this several times over the next two days until on
the seventh day; you think you just might die. What do you have? Is it a brain
tumor? Because this much extended pain is ridiculous. No pain meds help.
A full day at that level passes before the headache starts to
ease. You don’t dare move. Another two days go by (making it nine) of barely
doing anything. Your client contacts you and says, “I’ve seen nothing so I’m
going to have to drop you.”
One event that drives you into survival mode can park your
ass into bed in an instant.
