It's been happening every night for a week now. After I change out of my doctor's scrubs, brush my teeth and say my prayers, I climb into bed and place my weary head onto my pillow.
As I lay there, I replay the day's craziness in my mind: a work pace that would kill a jackrabbit, the constant deadline pressure from working on my experiments, and all those tasks and chores I didn't have time to do.
I toss and turn for what seems like hours until the Trazodone kicks in and I finally slip into the arms of Morpheus. Then, every night, as regular as a German nutritionist, the dream starts.
I'm sitting in an enormous pipe that stretches as far as you can see in either direction. It's quiet in there, except for an occasional drip that echoes through the dank metal tube.
My head starts nodding and I'm about to fall asleep in my dream when a voice that sounds like Hannah Montana on helium screams, "Howdy, y'all!" and breaks into maniacal laughter.
In the distance, I hear a rumbling sound that's getting louder and louder. I look up and see the cause of the commotion. A huge wave of water, filled with peculiar objects, is raging down the pipe and heading straight for me.
As the wave slams closer, I spy Dolly Parton, floating on breasts the size of ice cream trucks, as if they were gigantic water wings. Riding on Dolly's back is celebrity fossil Joan Rivers, who's wrapped in a red carpet. She's tugging at Dolly's blonde wig and screaming, "What are you doing? I said I needed a lift! I need a lift!"
They rush away and a half-dozen members of a Welsh rugby team swirl by, jogging in place and chanting a Dylan Thomas poem about canaries. They're on the roof of an enormous black SUV with Tony Soprano at the wheel. He's shaving his heavy beard with an old-fashioned straight razor that's dripping with blood as he reads the Wall Street Journal and weaves through rush-hour traffic.
Up pops the woman who emcees the pledge drive for my local public broadcasting station. She's standing on a raft of unsolicited direct mail, screaming that I'll never see the final episode of "The Mating Dance of the Australian Cheek Warbler," until I send her $10,000 -- and match it myself.
Then the river hits me with the force of a tornado in a telephone booth and I'm swept underwater, gasping for air.
I usually wake up about then, thank goodness. I shake the madness out of my head, pry the cat off my face and roll out of bed -- primed for another day on the Tilt-a-Whirl of life in the 21st Century.
Does your life seem like it's raging out of control? Are you constantly stretched in multiple ways as if each of your limbs is attached to a team of plow horses who were just shot in their muscular bums with a dart gun and who are now angrily running off in four different directions?
Whether it's the competing demands of work or your children or your parents or your friends or volunteer activities or exercising or all of them together? Fixing breakfast, fixing lunch, getting the kids out the door, but your son forgot to get your signature on his PE homework so you have to run back inside for a pen. You sign the form, you pile into the car, you drop them at school, you make an illegal U-turn. Somebody honks and you flash them the bird as you drive off to work where you can't get anything completed because no one cares about your deadlines and everything's a crisis and your boss is a micro-managing lunatic when he isn't hitting on you.
During your 30 minutes for lunch, you try to run as many as you can of the two dozen errands you couldn't get to during the weekend with all the play dates and soccer games and photo days and taking everyone for a hike and visiting your mother and making dinner for your friends because it's your turn and grocery shopping at the three different stores it takes to find all the things you like. And the kids need baseball cleats and ballet shoes and underwear and the dog is out of kibble and your daughter's hamster has to have that special kind of food that it likes, oh, and those little chew toys, too?
Of course, everyone else is out running their two dozen errands and traffic is worse than rush hour. You finally find a parking space a half mile from the store's entrance, dash inside, find what you need and the man at the front of the line finds out that the three-liter bottle of Grey Goose vodka isn't the one on sale -- it requires a mail-in rebate form -- so he asks for the form and the clerk, who could not care less because who wants a job like this anyway?, slowly tries to find it in the stack of papers next to the register.
He finally decides forget it and walks away but you have to get back for the 1:00 meeting and the lady in front of you decides she wants stamps, but then doesn't have enough money for them anyway after a careful search of every last crumbling piece of lint in her ancient purse. They finally check you out, you run to your car, back out and drive to the office, and you're just about to make the meeting except your ex-husband calls on the way and he can't remember if he's supposed to take the deduction for Christopher on his taxes or little Isabella because he can't find the Marital Separation Agreement. He needs the information right now because he's meeting with his accountant at 1:00 and, sorry, he could have called you a week ago, but he forgot.
And your call-waiting bleeps and you recognize the number so you put your ex on hold and it's your dad's nursing home saying that they can't get him off the roof again and is it OK to tranquilize him this time?
When you finally do manage to get home for the day, feed the kids, water the plants, tend to the animals, pay the bills, clean the kitchen and finally have a moment for you, you're too tired to do anything but have a glass of wine. And as you start to relax, your neighbor's kid -- the renters -- starts practicing with his garage band and the drums thud and rattle and crash as the electric guitar pierces the air like a wolverine with its tail caught in the disposer and you want to call the police but you hate conflict and you have to live with these people so you take two Ambien and another glass of wine and you go to bed and you toss and turn yourself to sleep, and you keep having these strange dreams?
Does any of this sound familiar? If so, my friend, you may be suffering from what we in medicine call the silent killer: Stress.
In strict scientific terms, stress results from having dozens of things to do and only the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual bandwidth to handle somewhere around 10 of them. Stress can cause heart palpitations, increased blood pressure, gastric upset, shortness of breath and -- according to a groundbreaking study at the Cambridge Medical University -- an uncontrollable urge to stand up on your couch or desk and sing emotionally wrenching Pink songs.
We're seeing this tragic sight more and more often in these tumultuous times of ours. Out of nowhere, someone will suddenly hop onto his desk and mournfully sing:
"I'm not here for your entertainment
You don't really want to mess with me tonight..."
Although modern medicine has been doing its best to treat the symptoms of stress-related illnesses (SRIs), the leading medical associations are baffled as to a cure. They have recommended everything from acupuncture and Zen meditation to individual therapy and neural stimulation, but you've come to me because of my revolutionary and innovative approach.
Last year, I was awarded a federal grant of almost five figures to study my radical proposal for curing SRIs. While most doctors recommend developing coping skills and taking medication to cope with the escalating demands of our modern world, I believe they're concentrating on the wrong end of the problem. My contrarian hypothesis is that -- instead of treating the symptoms -- we should be working to increase a human being's capacity (in layman's language) "to do stuff."
You may recall an experiment they forced us to perform in high-school chemistry. We stirred a granular solid (sugar) into a stable liquid (iced tea) until a small mound of solid (gunk) formed at the bottom of the beaker. Great, we thought. Time for lunch.
But there was more. The liquid had reached what we professional scientists refer to as "the saturation point." You could stir that beaker like a monkey on meth, but it would not dissolve one more single crystal of sugar.
However, as our teacher explained, as the temperature of a solution is raised, its capacity to dissolve a solid increases. Aha! So we fired up our Bunsen burners, applied them to the bottom of the beakers and, Voila! We produced the sweetest iced tea outside of Athens, Georgia, itself.
Using the same logic employed at the highest levels of government, if something works this well with iced tea, why not try it with humans?
Moments ago, I lit a Bunsen burner and placed it under my chair. Already I'm starting to type at least 40 percent faster. I've created three new word-processing files and am writing and editing multiple medical journal articles on my discovery, all at the same time. I'm also entering the data I'm collecting into two different spreadsheets while creating Power Point slides for the presentation I plan to give at a medical conference next month.
I just called my publicist, too, and we're discussing the media strategy for the book I'm writing. I'm working beautifully -- thinking, writing, planning, talking -- going like gangbusters. I'm working faster and faster, churning out the production of a dozen workers -- although I am getting a little hotter now and sweat seems to be dripping down my face and my chair is smoking and...
Hey! What's this? Some force seems to have taken control of my legs. I don't know why, but I'm rising to my feet. I'm, I'm climbing onto my desk. Hey! What is this? Why am I clearing my throat? Why am I about to...
"If someone said three years from now
You'd be long gone
I'd stand up and punch them out
Cause they're all wrong."
Rats. It's Pink again. Another great idea, up in smoke. I'm going back to bed.
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