We recently bought a home in Tryon. (Technically, it’s just outside of town, but I can throw a trashcan to the town limit.)

We’ve been doing some pretty serious renovations to the place, one of which is removing some older popcorn ceilings. Now I know why these types of ceilings were so popular, you can cover up a LOT!

Our painter looked at our ceilings and said, “I believe you may have asbestos up there.” Excuse me? Did you say the A-word?

For those of you who grew up before the 1980s, asbestos is probably no big deal as it was everywhere back then.

Today, the word asbestos is almost, like, Ebola, in terms of the fear it can create in our minds. I’m not going to name any names here, but someone who lives with me got a little bit nervous (understatement of the year) at the possibility of us having asbestos in our house and floating around in the air.

Remember, we’ve been ripping down sheetrock, ceilings, floors and the like. So, if there was asbestos in the ceiling, we had all been inhaling it for a couple weeks. Awesome. There goes years of healthy eating, exercising and not smoking, poof.

So, we put a halt on everything while we had the popcorn ceiling tested for the toxic gas, I mean insulation. I can’t tell you the alarm and panic going on in our minds as we awaited the test results. It was excruciating. This could throw off our entire timeline and budget not to mention we could all have cancer! I had already given my notice to our landlord, we could be homeless!

And then.

It happened.

We got the results back. No Ebola, I mean asbestos! We’re all going to live!

Luckily, all our worry, stress and anxiety was for naught.

The next time you start worrying out about something you can’t control, pause, take a deep breath and take it one step at a time. Let the facts guide your decision-making and the amount you freak out.