Let the Games Begin...

Hi Everyone! I guess you could say that I have been taking a blogging sabbatical, lol - there's been too much going on lately in my personal life, and I simply haven't been able to bring myself to blog about it. Not that things have been bad - things have just been stressful. We'll start with a few weeks ago when I had my third anxiety attack...

I'm pretty sure I mentioned in a previous post that Hubby has orders to go to Iraq for a year. We found this out several weeks ago, and since that time, things have just been stressful here at home. With all the information we have been receiving about his leaving, and everything he has had to do to get ready, it has put our life in a state of chaos. Well, between knowing that Hubby was going to be leaving, and everything else that has happened over the last several months, like Grandma passing away, and my Son's heart attack, I guess it was just too much for me. Actually, I thought I was handling it all pretty good, until I started feeling chest pains.

For about two weeks I had been feeling like I was having problems breathing, and I could feel my heart, like it was going to pound out of my chest. Since I have had two anxiety attacks in the past, I had a feeling that's what was happening again, so I let it go with the decision that I just needed to find a way to relax. Unfortunately, there was too much going on at home to really get to a state of true relaxation, and one evening my boss calls me to ask me to work for her the next day. I needed the extra money, so I agreed. When I got to work that morning, my chest started to feel like someone was sitting on top of me - my breathing got more difficult, I was getting really dizzy when I would stand up, and my left arm started to hurt. Within an hour of being there, I started to feel over-all like shit, and thought maybe I was having a heart attack. I ended up calling my boss, Hubby, and an ambulance, in that order. When they started to put me on the stretcher, I actually collapsed. Talk about scary.

It turns out that I was having a severe anxiety attack. These things suck. Honestly, for the most part, I'm probably one of the most laid-back people you could ever meet. I am so frustrated by these anxiety attacks that I have, because I don't understand why I have them. They come on like a freight train, and I have no control over what's happening. It's almost like my body says, "Girlfriend, you've had enough stress building up, and now its time to blow off some steam." And the worst part is that each one has shown more than one symptom of a heart attack. On the way to the hospital that day, they had to give me 4 aspirin and 3 shots of nitroglycerin under my tongue before the chest pains started to subside. And let me just tell you, both of them are nasty as hell even one time - yuck! Then they get me to the emergency room and start running all kinds of tests - I hate this process. Needles... I HATE needles. But in the end, the blood test showed no signs of the enzyme your body releases during a heart attack, so that was ruled out. They even did an x-ray of my chest to make sure I didn't have some kind of blood clot in my lungs, which is something I experienced many years ago, because I had pneumonia. That's some scary shit too! After the x-ray results came back, they determined that it was another anxiety attack, then they prescribed me the strongest Valium they had and sent me home.

Since that day, I have tried really hard to relax and find ways to reduce my stress levels. Taking the Valium is not an option unless I'm prepared to sleep for 7 hours. It's been difficult. While I am trying to "relax", Hubby was still swirling around me in a whirlwind, trying to get ready to deploy, with constant stories of his frustration about the whole thing, not to mention sharing stories with me that he has heard from other people about the "Iraq Experience", which I really didn't need, nor want to hear. It finally got to the point that, as wrong as this is going to sound, I was ready for Hubby to leave. I needed him to just go, so that I could settle into a routine for myself, and start trying to handle the time alone. Again, this is going to sound wrong, but I got to a point where I couldn't wait for him to leave, and I pretty much told him that. Thankfully, he understood. Was I looking forward to his leaving? Not really - only so much in that I knew once he was gone, we could both start dealing with this, and we both knew that it also meant we could start working on getting him back home again. The waiting for the inevitable was hard on both of us.

Now he's gone. He left early Sunday morning. He hasn't actually left for Iraq just yet, because he's got some survival training to go through before he goes over there. So right now, he's doing that training at another base. He'll be home Friday evening, and we'll get one day together before he leaves again for more training at yet another base, to which he'll be gone for a month. Then he'll come home for a week, and after that he'll leave for a year in Iraq. Yes, it sucks. No, I'm not looking forward to a year without him. I'm not looking forward to worrying about his happy ass being in a combat zone either. But as a wife of a military member for nearly 20 years, I know that we do what we must. *sighs*

There is good news at the end of all this, however. We finally have our hard copy orders out of this crappy place we've been stationed at, and we're heading South when he gets back. We won't be going back to Texas just yet, but we'll be about two hours from where we intended to retire, so it's close enough for the moment. If I can just remain positive, and keep myself focused on our move next year, then I'm hoping to get through this with flying colors. Time will tell.

xoxo