Could be worse, right?

You know that stress inventory you can take? You get one point each for a long list of disastrous life events? Let’s just say I have lost count. In the last year alone I’ve lost my husband (and his brother), sold our home, moved across the country, quietly quit my job, watched my closest friend-slash-sister-in-law move out of the country, and… well, I guess that’s it. Could be worse, right?

—Holland on the back cover of Holland, My Heart

It recently occurred to me you may not know “that stress inventory”, so I found it for you.

In 1967, Thomas H. Holmes and Richard H. Rahe published a paper called “The social readjustment rating scale” in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research for which they studied more than 5,000 patients looking for a correlation between stress and illness. Um, yeah. We know very well they found one.

The American Institute of Stress has a worksheet you can download and print.

Of course, I filled this out for Holland. By my calculation, she falls in the 150 to 300 points range, giving her a 50% chance of health breakdown in the next two years. Good thing she met Kai, amirite?