Anxiety Attacks and Failed Willpower Throws

First things first: I failed my willpower throws all week last week. I ate sugar in mass quantities at work and at home. I did not go to the gym at all last week - which I justified each day with a challenging website build going on, and high stress levels over all.

Money was tight due to an attempted debit card sort of ID theft that threw stuff off, and poor planning, and a 2.5 week pay period because of how paydays fall compared to business days, etc. All told, we were scraping the bottoms of barrels we didn't ever want to touch.

Work was tough due to a new project requiring technical coding of stuff that I've never done before. Lots of Google and Stack Overflow searches there.

And, finally, my anxiety is getting the best of me during stressful times like this. It's causing insomnia and all of the subsets of issues that come with that. I'm averaging less than 5 hours of sleep per night, which is worrying me because lack of sleep is probably a prime contributor to the illness I got that caused this anxiety.

This morning I realized that the biggest knee-jello thoughts are when I think of the fact that I was feeling poorly, went to check into the hospital, and woke up 5 days later with no memory of anything in between those two events. The idea of feeling semi-ok, then waking up full of needles, catheters, and surrounded by family, and having only defeated the odds of dying by a narrow margin, terrifies me. I can't even watch shows that have hospital scenes without my legs feeling like pins-and-needles. (SPOILERS for watchers of "Wayward Pines": every time someone wakes up in the Wayward Pines hospital after an "accident" and I know it's centuries later, it just makes me feel like curling up in a ball somewhere).

I lost 5 days of my life to an illness. 5 days of my kids growing. 5 days of living with my wife. 5 days, just gone to the oblivion of heavy sedatives. But, more than that, I lost control of my mind and body, the only thing I can reliably count on most of the time. The idea that some of my brain might have changed, and I can't even tell, terrifies me every day.

It was only pneumonia and meningeal encephalitis. I survived, through medical science and caring hospital staff. I still have my facilities as far as I can tell, and I still have my family. But, now fear is a much larger component in my day-to-day life, and that's foreign to me.

I'm rambling, time to stop.