Anxiety and a broken foot

I took a step forward in taking care of my physical health, and I ended up wearing a new boot.

In my last post, I wrote about the need I had to take care of my physical health. One of the problems I’d been experiencing was ongoing pain in my right foot.

I finally called my family doctor’s office Friday. They are in a temporary office location while a new facility is being built, so they are without on-site x-ray services. They suggested I go to a related practice that sees walk-in patients.

I went there Sunday and after they did x-rays, they told me that I had fractured the fifth metatarsal in my foot. They think it’s a stress fracture.

They outfitted me with a boot to keep the foot immobilized and will call me, probably today, with a referral to an orthopedic doctor.

As I sat in the exam room at the doctor’s office, waiting for them to finish all the paperwork, I could feel anxiety start building up. I admit that I let the anxiety take over for a while.

*It’s not safe to drive while wearing the boot. I drive fairly often for my job. I don’t want Larry to have to drive me everywhere I need to go for work. If I drive, I have to take the boot off. Will that hurt my foot more? How can I balance out the driving?

*How will I keep the boot clean? I thought immediately of the public bathroom at work. The floor doesn’t always look clean. How will I deal with that?

*What if I have to have a cast? How will I manage showering?

*The weather forecasters are calling for rain, sleet and snow on Wednesday. If I have my orthopedic doctor’s appointment on Wednesday, will I be able to get there?

*I did some Internet research on foot fractures. The need for surgery seems very unlikely. But what if I do need it? How will I work that out with my job?

Of course, these worries are based on fear of the unknown, fear of what might happen, on what ifs.

When I managed to push off the anxiety long enough to really think about my fears, I realized that I was worrying about things that might not happen.

If they did happen, I would adapt. I’ve adapted before. I can do it again.

*The orthopedic doctor can advise me on driving. I’ll work it out.

*Many years ago, I had bunion surgery and had to wear a light boot. I wore it everywhere I needed to, even in public places. I adapted.

*Several years ago, I had to wear a bandage on my hand for weeks to protect a bad cut. I had to cover it to take a shower. I adapted.

*I can reschedule a doctor’s appointment if that’s necessary. I’ve done it before.

*The orthopedic doctor will know what needs to be done to help the foot heal. I’ll adapt to the treatment he or she recommends.

I’m looking forward to healing and getting back to normal. If I have to adapt along the way, then that’s what I’ll do.

When have you had to adapt to changing circumstances? How did you manage to do it?

More on values: Taking care of physical health

Do you ever feel like you’re falling apart? Not mentally, but physically? In small ways, but ways that affect how you feel each day?

I’m feeling like that. And I’m also thinking about values.

First, the falling apart part:

*My right foot is hurting. For weeks—actually, months—it’s been hurting on the side of the foot. I don’t remember injuring it. I just noticed it hurting when I was walking at the Y before Christmas.

I figured it would just get better. Then it got a little worse, and I thought I might have a stress fracture, which I’ve had before.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I twisted the foot sideways as I was trying to move fast while wearing clogs, and since then, I’ve been in a lot of pain.

*My allergies have been kicking up lately. My eyes itch, I alternate between being stopped up and having a runny nose. My sinuses get tight. The dry winter air doesn’t help.

*I’ve had some bouts of trouble with irritable bowel syndrome.

*I’ve started with a bad cough.

Nothing life threatening, nothing serious. But enough wrong that I feel run down.

I haven’t been able to walk for exercise because of my foot. I’ve been sleeping more (too much) and lying around too much. I’ve been accomplishing less.

But I have some confessions:

*I still haven’t gone to the doctor about my foot. I keep thinking it will feel better “soon.” But soon has come and gone. It probably needs a doctor’s exam.

*I haven’t been eating the best of diets. I eat foods that know will have a good chance of bothering my digestive system and my energy level.

*I haven’t been diligent about using my long-acting asthma inhaler.

I’ve made vows before to take better care of myself. I have set goals that I never accomplished. But I’m not trying to go on a guilt trip in public by telling you these things. I’m leading up to my point about values.

I’ve been thinking about my values and how I use my time. I even wrote a post about it called “What do happy people do?”

There’s a connection between my feeling of physically falling apart and my values.

When I don’t properly take care of my physical health, I don’t feel like doing the things and giving my full attention to the things that matter the most to me.

Feeling as good as possible physically will help me give myself more fully to that which is most important.

And these are the things that matter the most to me:

*My husband

*My cats

*Writing

*My relationship with God

I don’t need to have reasons to exercise like, “I want to lose weight” or “I want to be fit enough to run a 5K.” Those reasons are great, and it’s helpful to set goals.

But all the reason I really need to exercise is to know that it will help me feel physically (and mentally) better and I’ll be better able to pay attention to what matters the most.

Likewise, I don’t need to have a reason like, “I want to lose weight” to eat better. All the reason I need to eat better is to, again, know that it will help me feel more like paying attention to what matters the most.

And the same for tending to any injuries and illnesses.

I now have my reason—my value—for taking better care of myself physically. All I need to do is follow through.

What are your reasons for taking good care of yourself physically? What’s your method for following through?

OCD, teaching and the fear of grading papers

It was one of the scariest days of my life.

It was my first day of teaching English. I was 22 years old, and I had a classroom full of 18-year-old college freshmen looking at me. I had to do something.

I followed the script I had carefully worked out before class. I could barely speak, but I managed to call out the names on my class roster. I made a pen mark beside each name.

But I was so nervous that I had to slide my arm along the desktop as I made the pen marks down the list. If I had lifted my arm, everyone would have seen how badly I was shaking.

As scary as that day was, the scarier times were soon to come, when I had to start grading papers.

I was in the first year of my master’s program in English at Bowling Green State University. I was teaching composition classes, where I reviewed the basics like sentence structure and paragraphing.

It stands to reason that if you’re teaching writing, the students have to practice it. And if they practice it, the teacher has to read it. And evaluate it.

That triggered my obsessive-compulsive disorder, especially my checking.

I was obsessed with fears of not reading each essay completely and fairly. I was afraid that I would miss something important or judge the paper unfairly.

So I compulsively read and reread each essay. I painstakingly wrote long comments explaining my critiques. I reread my comments and rewrote them when necessary, using liquid eraser fluid to cover the changes.

If I completed grading one 500-word essay in 30 minutes, I was making good progress. It took me hours to review and grade 20 to 25 papers.

This fear and this ritual continued as I taught English for four years while in school, and then for about two and a half years after I left school.

Even though during that time I started treatment for OCD in the form of medication, which tremendously helped my obsessions and compulsions, it could never wipe out the reading and checking OCD related to grading papers.

How this expression of OCD would have benefited from Exposure and Response Therapy.

I can just imagine how I could have “exposed” myself to a student essay, to read once, then again as I made comments. Then I would have worked to prevent my compulsion to do the whole thing over and over again. I would have worked at living with the anxiety of not checking each essay “just one more time.”

I enjoyed much about teaching: the interaction with the students, the joy of seeing them learn and practice new concepts and reach their goals. But memories of the joys of teaching are overshadowed by the memories of the fear I had of grading papers.

Have you ever had a job or volunteer task that caused you a lot of anxiety? What did you do about it?

The power of the thoughts we choose

It was early morning, a Sunday, and I didn’t have to get up at any particular time. It was still dark outside. Larry had fed the cats, so they were full and ready to go back to sleep. The blankets had settled just so over me, and I was warm. It was quiet.

I love mornings like that, when it’s still dark and quiet.

I kept saying those words to myself. Dark and quiet. Dark and quiet.

I waited to drift off to sleep again.

But then the thoughts came. Intrusive thoughts. Thoughts about the past, about situations that hadn’t turned out the way I wanted. Thoughts about people who had said things that hurt me. Thoughts about all the things I needed to get done.

“You don’t have to think about these things,” I told myself.

Then I decided to change my wording.

“I don’t have to think about these things,” I said to myself.

I imagined that thought overlaying the other, painful thoughts.

“I don’t have to think about those people who hurt me. I don’t have to think about anger right now. I don’t have to worry now. It’s dark and it’s quiet.”

I believed that my conscious thoughts, what I was telling myself, could drown out the intrusive thoughts. I believed they could be stronger than the thoughts that made my heart beat faster and brought on the anxiety.

Thoughts come and go. I could choose the ones to pay attention to.

“I don’t have to think about these things.”

And I concentrated on the darkness and the quiet that surrounded me. I concentrated on the sounds I could hear. The clock ticking. What sounded like Chase Bird having another bite to eat. The almost-silence of the morning.

And I fell asleep.

How do you cope with unwanted thoughts?

Checking OCD and harm obsessions—again

Here’s another example of checking OCD and the harm obsessions that drive it:

It couldn’t have gone far. I had heard it lightly thump the carpet when it hit the floor. Yet, I couldn’t find it.

I was looking for my ring. On my way to the bedroom to put it in the jewelry box before I washed dishes, I was pulling it off my finger as I walked through the living room. That’s when I dropped it and it hit the floor.

That’s why I was crawling around on all fours, running my hands over the carpet, searching for my ring by sight and touch.

I finally found my ring.

I also found two small pieces of dried grass or a part of a weed. And a few pieces of lint.

I couldn’t help but laugh at myself as I sat there on the floor. Just that day I had vowed to “stop looking down so much.”

It seems like whenever I look down at the carpet or floor, I see such things: pieces of grass or a pine needle from outside, dragged in on a shoe, or pieces of lint from blankets or clothes.

Sometimes I’m able to overlook such finds. But lately it’s harder for me not to pick up every piece of foreign matter I see—or think I see. Sometimes I pull up only carpet fibers when I reach for what I think is a piece of lint.



Is the white spot in the middle a piece of lint or a part of the carpet? Turned out it was part of the carpet.



Last year I wrote a post called OCD: Picking up sticks, where I described my old rituals of checking for harmful objects outdoors.

What I’m doing now is only at home and only inside.

But the obsession is the same: I’m afraid that harm is going to come to another. I’m afraid, in this case, that I’m going to leave something on the floor that one of the cats will eat and be harmed by it.

Vacuuming cuts down on the amount of lint and other debris on the floor, of course, but something is always left behind. And it might be harmful. Or so goes my thinking.

I never seem to be “all done” with checking OCD. I get rid of one ritual, only to have another take its place.

It’s frustrating, but it’s part of having OCD. I have to continue taking on the rituals as they come. I can’t give up because one ritual is particularly difficult to deal with.

I could pick up stuff all day long. But I have other things to do with my time and energy, as we all do.

And I no longer want to be captive to this checking ritual.

So I am trying to stop looking down so much. I’m trying to keep my feet moving and my eyes facing forward as much as possible (I don’t want to fall on my face!).

And if I do see something that I want to pick up, I’m trying to avoid reaching down and checking it.

I’m not always successful. But with practice, I hope to get rid of this checking ritual.

Do you ever want to be “all done” with self-improvement? How do you keep up your motivation to become a better person?

Anger: Working through it

In the moment, I feel like I’m having an anxiety attack that has come on quickly. My arms and legs feel numb, my heart rate increases, I feel like I can’t breathe deeply. I have trouble speaking, and I usually get tears in my eyes.

Later, when I’m reliving the moment, I feel agitated and hyper, and my mind fills with the words I wish I’d thought of saying.

I keep reliving the moment, day after day, and sometimes, month after month, year after year.

That’s what anger does to me.

I don’t handle anger very well. I tend to feel guilty about feeling angry.

I also don’t like conflict and avoid it when the better choice might be to face it. When I avoid it, I sometimes end up angry over situations that I could have attended to sooner, if not for my fear of conflict.

I’m holding on to a lot of anger, some from years ago.

My goal this year is to let go of what I don’t need in my life, and that includes harmful emotions. Anger that I hold onto, that turns into grudges and resentment, is something that I want to let go of.

From a health standpoint, I know anger that I keep stuffed down inside can aggravate my OCD and other anxiety.

It affects my depression, too. I tend to feel helpless in my anger, and the helpless feelings are directly related to chronic depression.

But I want to let go of anger for a bigger reason. From a moral standpoint, I don’t want anger and resentment to ever get in the way of having compassion for others.

So how do you let go of anger?

I talked with my therapist about this recently, and he told me it’s not really a matter of letting it go.

It’s a matter of working through it.

It’s a matter of being assertive and friendly and expressing myself honestly and completely so that I don’t feel helpless.

Because when I tell myself I’m helpless in the face of conflict, my brain shuts down and I stay mired in the chronic depression.

I’m practicing this friendly assertiveness in therapy, reviewing situations that have come up in my interpersonal relationships, thinking about and talking about what actually happened and what would have been the best outcome.

I’m not going to wake up one morning and not feel any anger anymore. But I will gradually get better at working out anger and conflict so that I don’t feel helpless. And with that, I will get better at not carrying around anger.

How do you work through anger so that it doesn’t interfere with your peace of mind?

Getaways that help my depression: A guest post on Wendy Love’s blog

Today I am guest posting on Wendy Love’s blog Depression Getaway: Encouragement, information, inspiration and hope as part of her series “February’s Favorite Depression Getaways”:

I have had depression since I was a teenager, perhaps even earlier, but I wasn’t officially diagnosed by a doctor until I was 26 years old.

Since then, I have been in treatment for it. That treatment has included medications and therapy.

Recently, I was diagnosed by my therapist as having not just episodes of depression, but chronic depression.

Medications have helped me tremendously, but I have learned that they can’t help with every aspect of depression. So I have learned other tools for helping when the darkness descends and I need relief. Here are some of those tools:

To read the rest of the post, please follow this link to Wendy’s blog.