Stop your worrying, live life!!

"We're all susceptible to it, the dread and anxiety of not knowing what's coming. It's pointless in the end, because all the worrying and the making of plans for things that could or could not happen, it only makes things worse. So walk your dog or take a nap. Just whatever you do, stop worrying. Because the only cure for paranoia is to be here, just as you are." Meredith, Grey's Anatomy

You will come to see that I use a lot of quotes from Grey's Anatomy. I am a worrier. I have this thing where at any given time if I am not on my one medication~ klonopin~ I have a million and one thoughts going on in my mind and I can't stop worrying over the smallest little things and it has in the past interfered with being able to sleep. I would have problems getting my mind to turn off for lack of a better term, and then sometimes I would be woke up having a horrible nightmare~ related to health issues mostly~ and then not be able to get back to sleep.

I have gone through periods where I have been awake for 24 to 36 hours without sleep in the past and even though I was exhausted I would not be able to fall sound enough to sleep and the littlest things bothered me. Being a woman I know that there is a lot of responsibility that we shoulder in our lives, being the primary health care manager in our families, being a wife, being a mother, tackling college after having kids, a chauffeur for our children, trying to work, being a maid and cook... the list goes on and on. Sometimes we forget the most important person in that equation is ourselves! I am one that has gone through forgetting to take care of myself to the point that I got seriously ill and ended up in the hospital on two separate occasions but for the same thing~ my liver started acting up and decided that it was time for me to rest.

I found out with the last hospitalization that I have a fatty liver which is the term that is commonly used for NASH~ non-alcoholic staetheohepatitis. Yeah~ not a nice thing to hear when you first learn about it, but knowing that you can make changes in your life to fix it before it gets worse is good to know. There is no "quick fix" for it. Something that I have grown to accept. I wish that there was a quick fix, but I have to change my diet and exercise, which means taking better care of myself. I have added in some supplements~ Milk Thistle for increasing the functioning of my liver and L-Caratine to help with fat metabolism. I have seen a small decrease in my weight over the past couple of weeks that I have been taking the new supplements with my multi-vitamin.

I also have Neurocardiogenic syncope. A long bunch of words that means I pass out and my brain and heart don't talk to each other properly to put in layman terms. I am on medication and wear TEDs, drink Gatorade and have slightly increased my sodium intake to compensate for the condition and have seen a marked inprovement, but there are still some days where if I don't drink gatorade, or if I have a cold or the flu I will feel dizzy and have an episode. It is something that I have grown accustom too and have adjust my life accordingly to deal with it. I was an intended nursing major when I first started at UB. I started working as a CNA and found out I had this. I look at the short time that I was a CNA as a way for me to find out that I wanted to work in the mental health field (I worked the dementia unit at a local nursing home) and I found out that I was not going to be able to go into the nursing field. This was a big blow to me because I LOVED my nursing clinicals when I was in the nursing curriculum at NCCC. I was rather torn and it took me almost a whole semester to accept the diagnosis and to change my major to interdisciplinary social sciences~ mental health and moving into the accelerated social work masters program.

I will be the first to say that sitting and worrying about every little thing eats up a big majority of time and then you are left with a very miserable existance and you realize that you haven't really been living your life, but just going through the motions when you have nothing to show for it really. I have raised my grades, I am no longer stressed out over the fact that I have to raise my GPA so high just to get consideration for the program I intend to go into. Sometimes I look at the syncope diagnosis as a 400 pound elephant being removed off my chest and I am able to breathe again.

I sometimes though still feel a tinge of disappointment because I loved nursing. I loved the fast pace always changing of it. Some days could be slow and some days could be running around like a chicken with your head cut off, I loved that. I loved the fact that one of my patients I took care of during my med-surg rotation was a retired RN, did not tell me this fact until I sat and talked to her 3 hours after I started to care for her. She said that I had a bedside manner that most nurses today are missing but I also had the skills necessary and that I would make a wonderful nurse. That was one of the best complements that I had ever gotten while being a nursing student, the other was after giving a shot being asked if I had given it yet because the woman was afraid of needles.

I have learned to deal with my anxiety and stress to an extent I will say I do a pretty good job taking care of it and have not really had any major problems the past couple months related to it. I am sleeping better, I am eating better, and feel generally better overall, plus I have seen my weight drop some since I have started taking better care of myself.