Anxiety and Stress Forum - Am I Suffering From Stress/anxiety And Not Something Else?

Am I suffering from stress/anxiety and not something else? This is what I have been going through:

heart palpitations
chest pressure
chest pain
headaches
migraines
sweating
irritability
anger
exhaustion
high blood pressure
arms feeling numb or tingly (may be from bp)

i have been under what is probably an enormous amount of stress in the past year and a half. Feb of 2004 I was diagnosed with pheochromocytoma. Then shortly after that I started loosing some of the sight in one of my eyes, which led to my diagnosis of vonhippel-lindau disease. I had a pheochromocytoma removed a year ago. The tumor in my eye (a hemangioblastoma) is untreatable so I started a clinical pilot study in january that requires me to travel from the west coast to the east coast every 4 weeks for an eye injection. I also know that I have 2 more pheos, but they are small and don't seem to be active yet. I am under a lot of stress at work trying to keep up with a large workload and being gone so much makes it worse.

I had been having "episodes" once or twice a month since november, but last month I had 2 weeks of daily episodes every morning on my way to work which left me tired, irritable and with either headaches or migraines for the rest of the day. I thought I had a pheo going active on me so I quit drinking coffee, quit eating chocolate and anything with sugar in it to try and reduce triggering of the pheo. When I went for my eye injection last week, they couldn't do it because of excessive leaking and partial retinal detachment from it, they were afraid to change the pressure in my eye or if I was having spiking blood pressue didn't want to cause a bleed or leaking from injection site. They sent me to see some other doctors. I had a blood test done to test for an active pheo and it came back negative. I also talked to an endocrinologist who is an expert on pheo's and he told me that vhl pheos don't get active in vhl people until they are larger than mine are now.

At this point I am at a loss as to what is going on with me. The symptoms I am having are just like when I was sick with my pheo last year, but milder. I am wondering if what I am going through is stress/anxiety? Before all this I used to be able to cope with stress without any problems, but so many things have changed and happened to me in such a short period of time that I am wondering if I am doing this to myself by stressing out.

How do I cope with this? What are things people do to try and lower the stress in thier life? I can't quit my job. I don't think that I could find another job right now that would allow me to continue my medical treatments (being gone so much). I am sure that there are things I should or could be doing to cope better, but I don't know what they are.