When you don’t listen to your body, your body has a way of forcing you to listen. Or at least that’s what my body does, over and over again, from annoying to terrifying effect. When you suffer from stress-induced anxiety, as I do and have since I was a child, you get a host of stress-related illnesses to go with it.

“He needs someone to treat him like the teacher treated Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker,” I said.