The Good Book Cure

Who doesn’t feel anxiety? But what if that feeling won’t go away? This newscaster has a solution

- Linsey Davis

I SAT IN THE ROCKER IN OUR BEDROOM staring at the blood pres-sure monitor, dreading what the numbers would say. I could hear my mom cooing in the other room, cradling my newborn son, Ayden. It should have been the happiest time of our lives. A baby boy in perfect health. My husband, Paul, and I were blessed, richly blessed. But I couldn’t see it that way.

I was so afraid I wouldn’t live long enough to see Ayden’s first birthday. Any day now, I could die, I thought. I couldn’t turn off the negative tape playing in my thoughts. My head throbbed; my heart raced. Here I was home, finally home, and I felt as if I were millions of miles away, trapped in fear. “I want my wife back,” Paul had said. I wanted my old self back too, the relentless, intrepid woman I used to be, the news reporter, the broadcaster who never hesitated to ask a subject a difficult question on live TV. Now I trembled at greeting each day.

If only I could just find a way to retrain my thoughts. To keep them from veering off into this pervasive negativity.

I gazed at the bookshelf across the room. There was an old paperback Bible, a read-in-one-year version that had been my constant companion in the early days of my career, when I worked at local stations in Michigan and Indiana. Before I got my job as a national news correspondent for ABC, I went through that Bible three times, marking and underlining favorite passages. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.

Troubles? My return from the hospital had been delayed by six days. Preeclampsia, the doctors said, a serious condition characterized by high blood pressure. I thought it happened to women