How Did This Happen?

Ever wonder what happens when you ignore all the signs that your body is trying to give you?

When you adopt a "push-through" mentality because you don't believe you can allow yourself the trappings of self-care, such as sleep, lowered stress levels, saying no, and normal work hours?

Shit gets really real really quick, friend.

In 2013, I was doing just a little too much.

I had a job that was not my passion, in which I was doing a job that should have probably been being done by multiple people. I was behind, my stress levels were up, and I was working as much as I could trying to stay on top of things.

My husband had just started a Master's program, so I was also holding down the fort while he was working full-time and going to school at night.

I had also started a side gig in hopes that I may be able to quit said job I didn't love.

All of this was in addition to the stressors and problems of being a human in post-recession America.

My body was trying really hard to tell me that things weren't great, and I was just missing the signs.

I wasn't sleeping that well, but during the day I was falling asleep sitting up. I felt tired all the time.

My increasing anxiety and irritability cause conflict with my family and husband. Mostly I didn't feel like anyone could understand how I felt, which made me feel very lonely.

I was eating what I could, when I could, and often stress eating. I was also drinking a lot, which increased my anxiety even more. I had very little energy, so I was always functioning basically on adrenaline.

Those small moments when I enjoyed myself honestly just underscored how bad things were most of the time. I cried a lot.

The worst part was I had no idea how to change any of it. I felt like nothing could change, no matter what, so I had to just keep going. Which meant I was going to feel this way for the foreseeable future.

Overwhelmed doesn't cover it.

Definitely Not The Flu

One night I came home, not feeling that great. I went to sleep, and woke up the next morning with what I thought was the flu.

Remember, I have a little bit different body. I was born with a congenital heart defect, and no spleen, so I have lived as a cardiac patient with a compromised immune system my entire life.

Sometimes, things that hit other people without much trouble hit me really hard.

So, I stayed in bed for a couple days, pretty dang sure I had a really bad case of the flu.

Later that week, I went to bed, running a fever, generally feeling like shit, and completely exhausted even though I'd done nothing all day.

I didn't wake up for 3 days.

It turned out that I did not, in fact, have the flu.

I had sepsis, an often fatal blood infection. To this day, we have no idea where it came from.

Since I was a heart patient, doctors insisted on ruling out all sorts of heart related things when I first got to the hospital, and they realized it was sepsis quite late in the game.

This is one hazard of being a cardiac patient. Most doctors go straight to your heart being the problem, even if it isn't.

At one point, they told my family they didn't know if anything could be done. It was a waiting game.

Thankfully, the waiting paid off and the medications they gave me worked, and slowly but surely I got to a point where they were confident I could go home.

3 WEEKS later, when I finally came home from the hospital, things didn't really get that much better.

I had spent so much time in a hospital bed that my back had decided it didn't know how work anymore. I had a ton of fluid on me, and I didn't have the ability to function for very long at one time for MONTHS.

It took roughly four months for me to get back on my feet, and functioning at about 80%. It took about a year for me to feel completely back to normal.

The (Fantastic) Fallout

It was during the time immediately following my discharge from the hospital that I started looking into self-care. I actually Googled "how to reduce stress and be happy." Ha! Self-care kept coming up in my search results.

A lot of fantastic change was borne out of my illness and the discovery of self-care I made afterward.

At the time I got sick, I was engaged with my health and actively trying to not let it get worse, but I was not invested in making it BETTER. The members of my medical team were authorities, instead of allies and partners.

I was merely trying to hang on, instead of trying to discover how to improve my situation.

I was also spending a lot of time looking at external factors, instead of looking internally.

Doing the deep work to transform through developing a self-care routine, implementing my own self-care boundaries, and working to understand what got me to a point in which my body was so overwrought has been life-changing.

Today, I am the healthiest I have ever been. I am still a chronically-ill person, but I am so much more in control of my health. I work with my medical team to stay on top of things, and I LISTEN to my body.

It's amazing to me how much better I know my own body today than I did all those years ago.

I also sleep better. My eating habits are so much better than they used to be. I don't drink anymore. That's helped my anxiety, as well as having a positive impact on my health.

I have a great therapist. I make time for therapy - I know, what a concept! My mental health is also better today than I would have ever thought possible back then.

Even when hard things happen - and hard things DO HAPPEN - I am much better equipped now to move through it and around it, and maintain my mental and physical health as I do. Self-care can help you through hard situations. They are still always going to be hard, but self-care makes them easier to handle.

One Last Thing

I have told this story dozens of times. I have the narrative down to a very clean, very streamlined version of "this happened, then this happened, and now everything is fine." I leave so many tiny details left out of this experience in the retelling.

Just because I can retell it in a simple and easy way doesn't mean that I feel simple and easy about it when I talk about it. It was hell, and there are still certain aspects of it that affect my life as it is today, even though I have fully processed it.

Also, even though I have moved past that incident, and found and implemented self-care in my everyday life, everything is most definitely NOT fine. Things are way, way, way, way better than they were 8 years ago. WAY better. SO MUCH better. In general, my life, my physical health and my day-to-day mental health are pretty great.

My life is still hard. I still deal with doctors, anxiety, medication, low-grade burnout and stress quite a bit.

Surviving this health crisis, finding self-care, and being in a much better place today does not mean that everything is perfect for me today. It never will be.

Self-care can make things easier to move through. It does not automatically make things easy.

For those of you who have made it through hard shit, I am so so proud of you.

If you are in the middle of hard shit right now, I am with you.

For ideas of how to begin to implement self-care if you're currently trying to dig out from some hard shit, click here to download my free Beginner Self-Care Workshop.