Leslie, I am a walking advertisement for what physical stress does to your body.

I was in the hospital for 8 days in mid-to-late November. The last day there, I was so not ready to leave (insurance kicked me out, sigh) that my pdoc suggested I take a two-week "vacation" (enforced by him, LOL) from my job, which had been causing me enormous stress.

I went back to work in mid-Dec., a mass of itchy red bumps and scaly, dry patches. At the end of the month I saw a dermatologist. He took one look at me and said, "Have you been under a lot of stress lately?" I laughed, then said yes.

In mid-Jan. I got a NEW job. I have no set schedule. I get 40 hours to use as I need. If that means I need to go in at noon, then that's cool, I just work till 8. Usually 3 nights a week or so, I have meetings to cover (I'm a reporter) and that adds an extra few hours to the day. I am the ONLY reporter for this weekly newspaper. I'm expected to write 5 to 7 stories a week, give assignments to my photographer as necessary, maintain 2 "briefs" sections of news-and-notes type stuff, maintain a "government watch" page telling what's going on around the city, and visit 2 cop stations and write police reports for 2 papers.

I was so freaked out for the first 5 weeks. My boss and I (she's 10 yrs younger than me) were kind of slowly circling each other, trying to figure each other out. All she did at first was criticize, and left me wondering if I ever was going to get a compliment (she's better now). I had FOUR DAYS of training before the person I replaced left for HER new job.

Anyway, I am now an itchy red mass again. I feel like a zoo monkey on display -- all I do is scratch inappropriately ;-). I see the dermatologist again in a few weeks, and when he sees that it all came back, and WORSE, he's going to chalk it up to stress again, and so I am. I had this crap BEAT -- a zillion dollars in prescription lotions and creams and ointments and scalp treatments, because it gets really bad on my head, but I used them faithfully and they worked. And now I'm right back where i started.

Most weekends I am so exhausted I cannot get out of bed (depression isn't helping that, either). That's stressful, too -- I have things I need to be doing, and I have no energy to do them.

Anyway, that was a very long-winded way of saying, mental issues cause physical ones. :-)

Candy