I’ve been feeling like a broken record these last few months when it comes to stress. It’s been punching me from all sides.

I spent Saturday with Dad working on his website for his Real Estate business and finally got some good opportunities to be a daughter again. Things have been a bit awkward lately.

He took me out for lunch afterwards and we got to talking… and before I knew it, I was just spilling out my guts to him like I hadn’t ever before of how I was desperately trying to keep everything together, calm, cool and collected. I’m not pompous enough to say that the pressure I deal with is more than the pressure anyone else deals with but I was lucky enough to have found a healthy outlet to allow me to peacefully escape from pressure and find serenity in my life where I can calmly find solutions to problems or accept those problems and move on… all on two wheels.

And that’s when he stopped me… “Your neck is breaking out in a rash again.” I had been talking about all that had been stressing me out how I was trying not to make matters worse but I just didn’t know… I don’t know how to be like Momma. She would have known how to deal. She would know. She would have been able to stop things before they go to this level.

My Momma’s neck would break out in hives when she had high blood pressure and got excited, angry, scared, etc.

I had indigestion at night for weeks. I was gaining weight. I wasn’t working out like I had the year before. My close friends and family and breakfast club that I had leaned on for years were gone or scattered all over the globe with problems of their own. I was surrounded by people who insist on keeping troubles to yourself. And so I did.

And it’s backfired.

KABOOM

When I went running last week, I felt myself compensating on my right side. That night, I couldn’t sleep because my hip would send shock waves from my toes to my head. My indigestion was making me nauseous and I was thirsty, so thirsty! And so tired but couldn’t sleep. I’d go to the bathroom and just a trickle of dark urine would escape and I was so constipated and bloated that laying any which way on the bed would be agonizingly uncomfortable. My ankles were always swollen and this sounds funny… but I actually feel the water under my skin all over my body! And my headaches… oh my headaches made me so dizzy that I didn’t even want to read books or skim through pinterest, watch TV or keep my eyes open!

Those are a lot of symptoms!!!

After squirming on the couch, it was suggested that I see a chiropractor and that may be the reason I was compensating on my run. Hmmmm

Made sense.  I guess I better start checking these symptoms off and see a doc about them.

So I went to Dr. Martin Chiropractors – just ONE of the doctors I made appointments to visit. I did NOT expect what happened to happen. You know the first thing you do when you go into a Docs office, right? They give you tons of paper work, weigh you and get your blood pressure.

My blood pressure was through the roof!!!! The look that the nurse gave me was all the instruction I needed. I am normally a person with very LOW blood pressure – which is not healthy either but to be this high was extremely unlike me. SOMETHING’S WRONG.SOMETHING’S VERY VERY WRONG.

I took tons of exams and x rays while I was there and Doc comes in with the results and discusses options for continuing my goal towards Ironman.

I have two curvatures in my spine that had been creating these problems in my stride. I have high cholesterol and high blood pressure again. With all that I had been doing… my doomed body returned bigger and badder than ever.

Here we go now!!! Adding another team of doctors to my list of guardian angels.

You can eat all the right things. You can do all the right things. And sometimes genes and heredity still give you a good fight. Now, let me be clear about this… I’m not saying give up, we all die anyway… I’m saying do it right – live life the best way possible – because everyone dies but only those of us lucky enough for it to click get to really live life to it’s fullest. I can smile as I look back on all I have done, all I have learned, all I have met, all I have befriended, all I have inspired and all that is yet to come.

The nurse didn’t believe that I had squiggly veins. After a few tries she was able to capture a few vials of my fatty blood.

And then the thought flutters through my mind… if I had not started exercising and eating better, how far back ago would high cholesterol and high blood pressure have taken my life? I look back at the Myssie of 2011 and how horrible she felt inside and out. There’s no way that Myssie experienced the happiness that Myssie of 2012-2014 felt.

I suddenly felt like the world came to a screeching halt. But my world doesn’t stop for me. It stops for my family and my loved ones.

I got two phone calls… one that said my uncle was at the hospital. He had a stroke. The other phone call was that another dear friend of mine was just diagnosed with breast cancer.

My heart is broken. My arteries are clogged. My mind is scrambling. My muscles are strained. And my back is bent.. but not broken.  The fight to be healthy and cancer free keeps punching the lights outta me. God, I don’t know what you’re trying to do and don’t know where you’re leading me but I’m not sure I’m strong enough to do this again.