I have survived what my wife and I can only describe as The Summer From Hell, which consisted of a cross continental move in tandem with purchasing our first home. The plan was sound enough: both of us had arrangements with work and I had parents in my home state where we could stay until the home-buying process was complete. Both of us would be living rent free for a while, which would let us rack up some funds to survive the fall out of making the biggest purchase of our lives. We would have to be apart for a month or so at times, but I had cared for our daughter by myself before and would even have help from my parents. I couldn't imagine where our plan could go wrong.
As you can guess, I must have a terrible imagination because most everything went wrong. Almost immediately after having arrived at my parents place, my wife and I discovered they had a bed bug infestation in the works. My parents have never seen a bed bug and thought they were flees. Thankfully, Susan has lived through some rough times in Chicago and knew what they were right away. Unfortunately, we didn't find out until after we had moved every single one of our suitcases inside. You see, you get free bags with South West. And when you're moving across state, you really want to capitalize on those extra bags. Bringing every single article of clothing with us seemed like a great way to save precious space in our moving pod. It also just happens to be the best way to ensure some kind of unwanted hitchhiker will come along with you in a house full of bed bugs.
Consider the following scenario: Every article of clothing you now posses is now potentially infected with bed bugs. Where will you go? Who will you call? More importantly, what will you say to them? "Hi friend, I was just wondering if I could come over with about 5 suitcases of clothing and disinfect them for bed bugs at your place? Also, can I sleep at your house? I don't have a place to stay right now." Add in details such as house hunting was supposed to happen an hour south and anyone who could help is an additional hour north, and you suddenly find yourself doing things you would openly shame someone for.
For the next several days we hotel hopped. Susan would find us the best deal possible and we would spend our time disinfecting early in the morning and then leaving in the early afternoon to run around with a realtor all over our chosen city. On weekdays, I logged into my office remotely and worked out of the hotel to the tune of my frustrated toddler who desperately wanted to be anywhere else than stuck in a hotel room with Dad, who needs her to be extra extra quiet while he's on the phone. To be clear, we did not hotel hop necessarily to avoid bed bugs. We did it to avoid having to potentially spread them to another friends home.
We would spend the day inflaming our lungs by spraying rubbing alcohol on everything that could not stand to go through boiling water and high dryer heat, which if you're a skinny guy encompasses about 90% of what you own. Many shirts were accidentally shrunk that day. We ended up buying "known good" outfits and keeping them in a separate bag while we cleaned. We we would then have to attempt to repack what was otherwise neatly vacuum sealed away back up and into our rental car as fast as possible in order to make it to our appointments with the realtor on time. We were often late, showing up scrubby, exhausted and wearing whatever was on sale at target to house shop.
Perhaps it was our disheveled appearance which seemed to drive our realtor to essentially disregard everything we said to her. We would have honest, heartfelt conversations about school districts, proximity to urban locations, even possible bus access, because we are city people who have to compromise for the sake of their child. On our first outing, we were shown a home 40 minutes away from the city, in the middle of a forest, which was gutted from top to bottom. There was no sink or refrigerator present. The walls had been stripped. Random cables and other debris were scattered everywhere. I thought to myself "she must not think we're actually serious and is trying to get rid of us". For the rest of the house hunt, I would earnestly consider getting rid of her and finding someone else. I still think I should have. If it wasn't for the 24/7 bug cleansing nightmare coupled with trying to live my life on the go, I probably would have. Instead, I just convinced myself that everything bad she showed us was just a fluke. A random happenstance. We would find something eventually, for sure.
It went on like this for several days, until finally Susan, my canary in the coal mine, could sleep through the night without seeing or experiencing a bite. Susan, as a side note, is extremely allergic to bed bug bites where and my daughter and I are not. However rough things felt for me, they were magnified for my poor wife, who lost hours of sleep due to itching throughout the night.
A small light appeared at the end of the tunnel, however. Our realtor eventually did show us a place that the both of us instantly fell in love with. We then immediately lost that place to a person who paid the entire asking price down in cash. Our realtor showed us a second place I frantically dug up from the internet trying to find something, anything that could possibly work for us. The market was hot, she said. So hot people were overpaying and she warned us not to overpay ourselves. I can trust my realtor, I thought. My realtor is thinking about me and my finances and wants to help me make the best decision I can. She is there to help me. When this second place turned into something my wife and I really liked, we decided to put an offer in. There was only one other offer, a "strong" offer according to the seller's agent. I had to act fast, I thought. I went ahead and talked to my realtor about offering 5K over the asking. Then I second guessed myself and asked her if she thought 10K over asking was too much for this house. I specifically asked my realtor for her opinion, if she thought 10K was over and if I would be in good shape knowing our budget and what we had to work with. She assured me this was fine, gave me lines about "Comps" and threw some realtor jargon at me that I didn't understand. My realtor is here to help me, I thought. So I went for it.
While everything turned out okay as far as the sale of the home goes, I spent the next 3 weeks panicking over realizing that I would have to pay the difference in cash if the home did not appraise at our offer price. I would potentially have to negotiate for the appraised value or possibly lose out entirely. When the negotiations did start, the seller's agent was a bear. My home inspector pointed out a number of things that had clearly been neglected and needed to be addressed. Most importantly, an aging roof and some significant masonry damage to the chimney. The agent responded saying they would give us a few grand off the price and leave us to fund the repairs ourselves. This one point of debate created two Remedy extensions and had me in serious talks with my wife over calling the entire thing off and just renting.
I was ready to give up. I think I did, on some level. It was right around this time that I began to lose my ability to cope with stress. Complaints about my work started coming in, which maddeningly coincided with calls from my Realtor and Loan agents wanting paperwork, approvals, and updates. My daughter could not be contained. She had to be with me, where ever I was. Disciplining her became difficult. I couldn't keep her in the corner without her melting down and melting down inevitably blasted whoever I was on the phone with and I was always on the phone. She ended up watching at least 2 seasons of My Little Pony back to back. Throat tightness ensued. Strange boughts of stomach acid arrived. My IBS reared its ugly head and I became so constipated that when I finally had a movement, it was hard as stone and caused be to bleed.
And then my best friend's wedding happened. I wrote a speech. I danced. My brand new phone broke. I went to cedar point only to find out that at 35 roller coasters make me partially black out for some reason. Maybe I was low on calories, maybe my blood sugar was low. I don't know. It deeply pains me to say that it was almost a collateral incident. Between the hotels, the bugs, the home buying insanity, my friends wedding passed like the wind. I apparently gave a very, very good speech. I wrote something on the back of a napkin 24 hours prior and I remember none of it.
It wasn't more than a few days afterwards that I found out my best friends wife was pregnant during the wedding but had suddenly miscarried and lost twin boys. It was to be her second miscarriage. When I read the news on Facebook, I instantaneously broke into tears. Joy. Death. Life. Pain. Wealth. Suffering. What did any of these things mean when they all happened viscerally. simultaneously with a rapaciousness that wilted the senses?
My parents place being treated for bugs, I stayed there for a while. With everything clean and stored, I stayed with my wife's friends parents because at this stage we were reaching and we knew it. They were close to where our new home was to be and it made the closing process easier. I will always be indebted to their kindness to my daughter and for their general leaving me alone while I sorted out my life.
Eventually came the move. We closed. My daughter and I moved into our home as soon as we could with our luggage, waiting for our moving pod to arrive.
The pod did not arrive for another two weeks. I spent the first weeks in our home without furniture, my daughter sleeping on a cot and I sleeping on the floor with pillows and blankets from Good Will. It was rough, but we got through it. At least I didn't feel guilty sticking anyone with watching Vera, which is hard for anyone but sometimes I had to give her to someone else whether they liked it or not for my own sanity, what little of it remained.
When our things did arrive, I invited my family down for a visit/house warming/ please for the love of the gods help me move this stuff in kind of thing. Near constant badgering won me free movers with the moving company, whose staff couldn't have cared less about me until I made it a point to go on a rant on the BBB about them.
They came, things were moved, and they left.
The next morning, Vera was overjoyed to show me the bug she found on the couch.
It was a bed bug.
If I don't die of lung disease, it will be a miracle. I spent the next week treating our entire home with amorphous silica, which in small amounts is completely harmless. I dusted heavily enough that I eventually had to throw open windows, put a box fan in, and vent rooms for a few days while the dust settled, because I dusted everything. Our brand new expensive mattress...our couch. The nightmare which I had envisioned for 75% of the move had finally, in my mind, come to fruition. My brand new home, with all my belongings, were about to be terribly infested with bed bugs.
As a side note, A 4oz container of dust later and a LOT of washing/vaccuming later, and it appears we're still bug free. It's the little things, I guess.
I started contemplating suicide. I realize that's pretty dead pan delivery, but there's no other way to say it. I was so miserable that the idea of sending my daughter off with my parents while I sat in my car breathing exhaust was starting to sound like it might be preferable. These thoughts were quickly dismissed for a time, but they came back when my wife arrived and reality set in. This was home now. This is where I would be living. Suddenly every home-improvement project was sounding a 5 bell alarm in my head. After a little bit of reading, killing myself started to sound like a lot of work though. Oh and a break down! I eventually sequestered myself away in a room, called the suicide help hotline, sat on hold for about 20 minutes before being discovered by my wife wondering what on earth I was up to. I then went to the other end of the house and cried. Hard. Cried staring at my phone wanting to call someone and not being able to muster up the gall to do so any longer.
I decided to throw myself into a project: My office. My office was going to be my safe place, my happy place, my go away and let me heal from the world place. I would paint it a happy vibrant green color so I would always have green, even in the winter. All I had to do was fill in the gaps in the wood paneling and then I could paint it.
Turns out sanding joint compound is dusty. I did come prepared for this and wore a dust mask. I vacuumed up the mess and painted.
At the hardware store a day later, I gradually became aware that my breathing felt constricted slightly. How I avoided my hypochondria so long, I don't know. This time, however, I decided to google my symptoms.
I immediately diagnosed myself with acute silicosis and had one month to live. I also had a panic attack that made driving home from the hardware store feel like trying to land the space shuttle.
My temperature was 100.8 and my heart beat was out of control. I asked Susan whether she would take me to the ER later if I asked her to and she said she would. I tried to lay down. Nope, still can't breathe normally. Took one of my wife's Adavan. Still did not feel right.
I spent at least the next 3 days on google trying to figure out if I was going to die. I say at least because I'm honestly not sure how many days I spent like that. I could have Pleurisy, I could have Silicosis, I could have COPD. I imagined tiny shards of silica cutting my lungs to ribbons and slowly losing my lung function and dying. The damage wouldn't be seen on an X ray. No one would believe me. I was going to die. I was going to die and there was no cure. Throat tightness was back. Stomach acid was back. I spent hours trying to calculate how much silica I might have breathed in. I read horror stories of people who had been exposed to massive amounts of silica and suffered catastrophic damage to their lungs just days later.
My wife tolerated me for a few days before urging me to a Walgreen's Wellness Clinic. They won't find anything, I told her. Also, they won't believe me. So I go in, paid 200 something dollars for a nurse to listen to my self diagnosis. She then checked my oxygen levels and my breathing and said everything was good. Gave me an inhaler for "chest tightness" and sent me on my way.
And that about covers it up until today.
I can tell you that just recounting these things at this point has sent my pulse upwards. My chest is tight and I have a knot in my stomach.
I wish I could say "but it all turned out right in the end", but I can't because I'm still waiting. Funny thing about anxiety: It will give you all kinds of symptoms and then turn around and make you doubt what is actually wrong with you is anxiety. There is more than one account online people who have spent thousands on every test imaginable only to find out that they are actually suffering from hypocondria, GAD, or some other form of anxiety and that there is physically nothing wrong with them other than that. Yet still, the symptoms persist. They will persist even if you feel "normal" because people living under the crushing weight of their anxiety normalize the state they are in.
For the last 2 weeks, I have been experiencing throat tightness, chest tightness, random chest burning, unusual mouth waterings, and a near persistent muscle-like tightness in my stomach. I don't get hungry any more. I only eat because I know I have to. Although I've come away from the part of this where I feel like death is eminent, I am still largely in a state of discomfort. I get around but there's something going on. That "somthing" is likely, very likely, almost 100% likely to be Anxiety. And yet there is that 1% of me that insists: You have an ulcer. You have a hiatal hernia. You have GERD. You need treatment. You need a doctor.
It's sometimes difficult to focus on what is going on around me because of my symptoms and the thoughts that accompany them.
Yet, I've been through this before. I should know better. I went through a terrible divorce where I could not eat or sleep properly for months. I was 100% convinced I was about to have a psychological break. I must be Schizophrenic. I must be about to go insane with no hope of recovery. I was braced every day for it.
And it never came. I got therapy. I lived in the city. I carved out a new life. Things got good.
And then I promptly forgot that things were ever bad.
When Buddhists teach Mindfulness, it sounds like an incredibly small thing. When you talk to other people about it, it sounds like the most trivial peice of information you could bestow upon them. Most people go "Oh yeah, well, I do that." the moment you mention it.
Mindfulness is a radically massive practice and concept. It lets you soak in more experience in the experience of your life. It's absurdly easy to blow past life until the bad stuff slows you down and makes the days feel like weeks and the weeks feel like months.
If we consciously slowed down and did the same for the joyous, peaceful, health-full moments of life, would it make the bad times not as bad? Perhaps. At the very least, we would enter them mindfully, knowing they will pass.
As much as I'm still convinced that I have a hernia, and let's face it, after the summer I've had, it would not be a surprise that stress hand done me over like that, I still hold on to the fact that it's probably just anxiety. And thankfully, that means that there's a good chance this will all pass.
Even if I see a doctor. Even if I something is wrong. That too, will pass. These thoughts at least give me hope that normal, healthy days will come again as well.
And when they do, remind me to sit on my new front porch with an iced tea.
And to be mindful of it.
