The night before the election just a week ago, I was anxious, but resigned. Soon, we would have an answer and we could move on with our lives having a sense of what the next four years would be like.

I wanted to write about how I was feeling at that moment, a written time capsule that I could look back on. But I didn’t.

I have a kid who commandeers my laptop for schoolwork for hours each day. That’s my excuse for not writing more.

When I do get a turn on my computer, all the pressing things I wanted to do on it – compose emails with something other than my thumbs, write blog posts, etc. – those things tend to flow through the brain sieve and leave me sitting in front of the keyboard feeling perplexed about why I’m there.

We all knew the election would happen something like this. We’ve also all been trained from elections past that we can have a pretty good idea of who won on Tuesday night if we stay up late enough.

Having the early warning that we wouldn’t know results on Election Day didn’t stop our family from watching election news for 72 hours straight until our brains imploded, then eating carbs until we finally got answers.

On Friday night at the end of a long week of hitting refresh on headlines that provided no news, I went to work.

I was floated to our sister floor at the hospital. It has a spidery geography and what we call “heavy” patients – people who have a lot of physical needs. Working there meant hauling up and down corridors between patients’ rooms, trying to remember which door leads where, and cramming ten hours worth of work into eight. I worked hard, and I didn’t get everything done.

One of my patients had Fox News on all night long. It was hard not to listen to what the broadcasters were saying, and hearing their perspective was not helping. “Are you sure you don’t want to turn off the TV so you can get some sleep?” I asked. No, leave it on.

Later, I slid my thumb onto the volume and rolled it all the way down so that while the drama was still playing out, I could no longer hear it.

It took an hour and a half after my shift the next morning just to finish documenting the care I’d been providing all night. I stepped out into a balmy world with colors that seemed impossible – blazing red and golden yellow again a brilliantly blue sky.

I parked my car and went for a short walk, retracing the steps of a walk I’d taken with the kids the day before. The baby had fallen asleep and one of his shoes fell out of the stroller without my noticing. I was hoping to find it so there would be order in at least one area of my life.

I found the shoe. I walked back to the car with my phone by my ear, listening to more commentators speculating in the absence of new information. I didn’t get to bed until 11 a.m. Saturday morning and quickly fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until dusk.

While I slept, my family was in the car on the way to a local park on Saturday when the Chaplain’s phone blew up with election results. I woke up to a subdued sense of relief that evening as I realized the wait was finally over.

A lot of us have been on earth long enough to know how we deal with stressful situations. We have choices, then. Will we be kind to ourselves when we do what we always do when we’re stressed, or will we try to change how we react to anxiety?

My entire body is still a lumpy bag of knots from the stored stress I’ve been piling up over the past year, accelerated by the past week. Chronic stress is tough. These days I’m happy when I wake up and find that stress didn’t cause my hair to fall out overnight, leaving a shiny bald pate behind.

Did you learn anything from this past week? Did you do your old song and dance, or have success with a new method of coping with the unknown?