My Stress Story

I am a very strong willed person. I feel as though I am very good at handling anything that will come my way and I am very good at hiding anything that really does bother me. This past year has been a game changer for me. My first year of college I had gone through everything a first year should: The full time schedule, bad roommates, full time job, finding time to hang out with friends and go on adventures with them. I was fortune enough to have my parents fund my first year of college. That right there is a blessing in itself and should have made my first year very easy right, wrong. I was very careless with my spending and really wasn’t thinking about anything on what it would be like in the next year or so. Summer hit, and I had just started a new job, which I love, I met a guy, and I started hanging out with my best friend again, I even got to take a few road trips. However, in the mix of summer reality started to hit me hard. I got sick multiple times, both times I had to go on a liquid diet because of how swollen and in pain my throat was.  So even then I couldn’t eat much, which wasn’t a problem because I wasn’t even hungry. I would eat at lunchtime, and even then it was only a couple of bites of a cracker and I would be full. I would feel sick anytime I did eat something and want to throw it up. I would get dizzy and I was constantly tired. I started to begin to think of new living quarters because I had moved in with my sister and her husband. I love living with them, I just didn’t know how long they would want me to stay with them. My new job has some challenges to it, and many rules, I mess up one thing and I could be fired. I began to think of school and how much it would cost, if I could get on the payment plan, I needed to apply for residency that way tuition wouldn’t be more than $6,000.00 a semester, and see if I could apply for financial aid, the cost of textbooks. Also how I was going to make my relationship work since he lived in Cedar City UT and I was in St George UT. Seeing him during the summer was easy, we would take turns traveling down to see each other, it was easier since his best friend is dating my best friend, so we can carpool. However, with school now starting it was going to be harder to see him.  At some point in the summer and even the previous school year, I had felt lonely and felt, as though I had no one there for me. Even though I had family and great friends always around me. At one point I had stopped going to church simply because I had no one to go with and I didn’t want to look like that one loser that sits by themselves, I became careless with everything and I simple became depressed for about three months. People around me began to notice and ask if I was okay. I would ask them if there seemed like there was something wrong, again because I was good at hiding how I was generally feeling, and they would simply just tell me that I wasn’t as happy anymore, or id go straight to my room without saying hello to them first, or I wasn’t even smiling when I walked in the door. I began to have anxiety attacks throughout the last semester of freshman year. Over the time I had about twelve of them or so, and they didn’t stop. My longest anxiety attack lasted about 2 hours. It got to the point to where my breathing became very shallow and it felt as though there was an elephant just chilling on my chest. I couldn’t escape them no matter how hard I tried. I felt as though once the semester ended I was in the clear for a little while but then summer hit and every day something stressful affected my body. It could be something really simple that will not stress most people out, or something really big that will just linger in my life for a while. It got so bad that I eventually started getting really bad chest pains and I wasn’t eating much. I had lost about 6 pounds in 2 days simply because I wasn’t eating anything. I started getting the sharp-shooting pains more and more often to the point to where I would just sit down and curl up in a ball and cry because they wouldn’t go away. When ever I stood up to at least try and go drink something I would get a really bad headache that would block out my vision for about 5 seconds, and I couldn’t take the pain so I would just lay back down. My right arm eventually started going numb and have a slight pain in it. Of course I told my parents how much pain I was in, and my mom said it could just be stress, but I told her I wasn’t stressed about anything at the moment. The pain and tears continued, and eventually it was so bad that my mom told my sister to take me to the hospital. I Spent about 5 hours in the ER just for them to tell me what I already knew, which was that I have Dyspnea which is a fancy word for shortness of breath. I was instructed to take 3 IBProphen 3 times a day because of the pain. I was told to change my diet, but at the time I was thinking, “what diet? I don’t even eat now, and if I do it’s a cracker or two sips of some Dole Juice.” Eventually I made it back home to California to visit my primary doctor and get another opinion on why the pains were occurring.  Now my doctor has been in practice for a very long time, but he was stumped. After a while of thinking he said I believe you have Costochondritis, which means my breast bone and my rib cage bone come to close together and don’t create all the movement it should which would explain the pains. So he bumped me up to 4 IBProphen to help the pain. I was in so much pain that I was constantly popping those pills and I felt like it didn’t help. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many pills I had taken in a week. I thought it wasn’t going to end. And at one point on my way to work, I drive by Dixie Rock, which is a rock you can view the whole city from and I thought, “I just want this to end, how bad would it be if I just walked off that edge?” And at that moment I knew, that I needed to change, I needed to try and get rid of or forget everything that was causing me pain and stress. I deleted people from social media and deleted their numbers, or completely just stopped talking to them, of course that helped to some degree. I started going back to church and doing everything I was supposed to, my Dyspnea has almost gone away completely but I still get it when ever I do physical activity or if I think too hard about something that would worry me. However, I still get my chest pains often. I could just be laying down watching a movie, or sitting in class and a sharp pain will come out of nowhere. All I can do about it is sit there in pain and put pressure where it hurts on my chest and hopes it goes away fast. I am grateful for my boyfriend because when I’m with him and the pains appear ill just grab his hand and squeeze it and he just tells me to squeeze as hard as I need to until the pain goes away, that also helps, it seems like the time in which the pain is there dis cut in half. I decided to reach out to some people and ask for help. My bishop’s wife was willing to talk to me and let me rant to her about everything that would be causing me stress and see if there was a way I could make it stop. My cousin was always there by my side the whole time helping me and giving me advice as well. Now even though I still get my pains and shortness of breath its not as bad, simply because I’m trying to fix it, I got help that way the sun could shine in my life again. I didn’t want to continue on with my life taking pills whenever I was in pain and wanting a way out for a short period of time. I had people surround me with care and love. Stress has a huge impact on some peoples lives and some are lucky and only have it for a short period of time, and some people, like me, are not so lucky to where it just builds up over time and starts to effect your health. If you or a loved one are experiencing serious stress levels, talk to them and let them know you’re there for them. Being able to talk to someone has helped me in an extreme way, and I wouldn’t give that up for the world. I am still going through stress but now I know how to handle it, and get through every source of pain.