“Don’t bite off more than you can chew.” My mom always seemed to know my limits before I ever did. During scheduling for school, picking clubs and sports and classes, she always seemed to know.
“I’ll be fine Mom,” I would always say. “I know my limits. Besides, this will make my junior and senior years a breeze.” And so my sophomore year of high school started. I had loaded my schedule with every academic possible. Honors math, double science, english, history, and of course, the bane of my existence, french. My mother disapproved of the schedule, saying I should take an elective or a study hall, but I persisted. This year would be great. I would put in the effort, and come out the other end smarter, and from there it would be smooth sailing.
I started off well. I would come home exhausted, goof around for a few hours, then do homework till late at night. It was hard, but it worked, and I enjoyed it. My mother would come home from work late on Tuesdays, as she taught a night class, and she would come up to my room and hug me.
“You are going to do so well in college,” she would tell me. I knew that she said it with concern and a certain sort of hesitance like she wanted me to know I was doing well, but at what cost? Though I seemed to be handling the workload alright, at what point would I physically not be able to chew anymore?
It all seemed to come to head in late October. The work started to catch up to me and I couldn’t chew what I had bitten any longer. It was a rare Tuesday evening of little homework, and I had been baking madeleines for that dreaded french class when it started. My heart was beating fast. Way too fast.
I was alone in the house, my mom teaching her night class and brother at a social outing with friends. My heart hammered in my chest. You could feel my pulse by simply putting a hand over my heart. I tried taking my pulse. A bpm of 160 didn’t seem all too accurate and I was certainly no medical professional.
The first thing I did was call my mother. At first, she didn’t pick up. She must have still been in class. I turned to Google second, which yielded no particularly useful answers. Could it really just have been anxiety? Was my workload finally catching up to me? What was Mom said at the beginning of the school year about biting off more than I could chew? It was the question I asked myself constantly until she arrived home. But even when Mom came home, hours passed and eventually my lungs started to fill with fluid.
It wouldn’t be until later in the ambulance with a bpm of 280 that it would be explained to me that I had SVT, a relatively common heart condition that causes the heart to beat fast and incompletely. A condition that can be triggered by stress. Even though I had felt like I had everything under control, the weight of my workload ended up crushing me.
In the end, it taught me how to manage my time and my personal limits. What was worth spending my time on and such. But I think the most important lesson it taught me was about proper self-care and making time for myself. Time to myself was something I not only needed mentally, but physically. Going forward I learned how to manage my time better and account for that. Even if I learned it the hard way, I learned not only not to bite off more than I can chew, but how much too big of a bite is.
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