stress

The stress surrounding Chloe's allergies was unbelieveable. Do you ever get into a situation where your stress is caused by something you don't know for sure, so you don't know how to handle it, but which you could easily find out about but are too worried that what you will find out will be dire?

That was the situation I was in right after Chloe's 1-year checkup. I didn't know the extent of her allergies and exactly how to handle them. We had been referred to an allergy specialist, but I hadn't made the call yet.

How dumb is that. But that's how you think when you're that stressed out, you're paralyzed. In the meantime, we were still giving her meat, fruits, veggies, and oatmeal, whatever she would eat. Thanksgiving was coming up and we had an invitation from Chloe's grandma, my father-in-law's wife, whose cooking is deliciously rich and full of butter and cream.

I was so stressed out that a couple of weeks of school went by in a blur. I rehearsed my students and dealt with small problems, I'm sure, I just don't remember any of it.

On about the last Friday of October my foot started tingling as I lay in bed that night. The next morning the tingling had gotten worse, and by Monday, I had tingling all up and down the right side of my body. I didn't know what to do. Every time I thought about it the tingling would get worse, my face would flush, my heart would race. Classic stress symptoms.

I mentioned this to Andrew's preschool director at the end of that Monday, and she looked at me in horror.

"WHAT?!" she screeched. "You've been having STROKE symptoms ALL DAY and you haven't done anything about it???" She then hauled me off to the doctor, the little clinic right by our school.

The first thing they did was hook me up to an EKG machine. I lay there thinking, am I dying? Am I really having a stroke? The EKG came back normal.

When I finally saw the doc, he was a younger man with a sweet face and a calm demeanor. He asked me what was happening, and I let loose a torrent of symptoms, which I won't go into in gory detail, but all of which had to do with extreme stress.

I told him about the biggest stress, which was Chloe's allergies, and as I talked he watched the redness suffuse my chest and neck all the way up to the roots of my hair. I hunched over the bench and clenched the sides with my hands.

I could see him thinking calmly. Calm. That's what I needed. Some information. He told me when people are under extreme stress sometimes they hyperventilate; and I wasn't doing the panting kind but the shallow breathing kind, and that meant that certain parts of my body weren't getting enough oxygen.

I immediately straightened up and breathed deeply. All the rest of the symptoms, he said, were superficial and would go away. Not knowing about Chloe would continue to cause stress until I dealt with it. He prescribed Prozac but I and especially my husband are skeptical of mood-enhancing drugs.

I then realized that my stress was not going to go away until I called the allergist--what I should have done in the first place.

I made the appointment for a Friday, and while my stress did not exactly subside, the tingling did go away when I made a conscious effort to breathe and think of something else. I felt stupidly foolish for letting the stress get out of control instead of dealing with it, but all I could think about--then and now--is my dear tiny little daughter losing her life because of poor nutrition or a badly handled allergic reaction.

It freaks you out as a mother. Other mothers I personally know have gone through much much worse, but to think of someone well-meaning giving her milk...or a peanut-candy or something...those little careless things of daily life were what could cause Chloe's demise and that was what made me so stressed that all rational thought was absent.