Please let it be a stroke. I was 26 and living alone (except for my cat) in Salt Lake City, when I found myself praying these words. My neurologist was pretty sure the spot on my MRI was a stroke, but he said it might also be a brain tumor. He said I’d just have to wait three months (three months!) get more pictures taken, and if the tiny spot had grown, well, then, that meant it was a tumor.

I’d spent part of a recent night falling down and stumbling around my apartment like a drunkard, thus the visit to a neurologist and the MRIs. And so here I was, a young, non-smoker who’d always been in decent physical shape, wishing for a stroke diagnosis.

Luckily I was spared the three-month wait. A stroke specialist (of course I got a second opinion) confirmed that it was, indeed, a stroke just a few weeks later. Now, however, the race was on to see what had gone wrong before it could go wrong again. A gauntlet of tests, some nasty and some not, stretched before me.

In between tests, I went to work as usual, and tried to carry on, and I think I put up a fairly credible façade of being “a trooper” during the day. At night, however, I lay awake by myself and thought about the bad things that could happen, and the parts of life I could miss. Maybe this was it, really it, the final it. Maybe my number was up, and I’d never become President of the U.S., or marry, or have children, or find out what my face would look like at age 40.

The stroke, it turned out, was of the “embolism” variety, meaning the clot had originated somewhere else in my body and traveled to the brain before becoming lodged in a blood vessel and killing off a bunch of brain cells. Normally, the lungs filter these things out; unless, of course, some kind of hole in the middle of your heart lets a clot travel unmolested to your brain.

I’d already undergone one open-heart surgery to repair a hole in my heart—when I was 2 years old—so I thought I’d already been there, taken care of that. Growing up, I’d had no physical restrictions. The only reminder of my crazy birth defect, a heart with a gaping hole between the ventricles, was a long cross-hatched scar that ran up the middle of my chest and looked like a pale pink centipede.

But no, the doctors found a new hole, in a completely different spot than the first—between the atria. Now the agonizing wait I’d escaped earlier truly began. I had a surgery date set for early June, but that was still almost two months away. All I could do was sit tight and wait, and hope another clot wouldn’t sneak through in the meantime, causing another stroke that might leave me permanently incapacitated or dead.

As I waited, I realized I needed to do something to prevent myself from contemplating all the “what-ifs” or I’d go nuts.

The key was to distract myself.