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Pilot health. I wish I could change history. (story #1)

Pilots are limited to flying 900 hours max each year and 100 max each 30 days. Fortunately for us our aviation authority has no skill in agricultural operations and would look the other way. We all enjoyed the peace. I used to get the usual old 2 year audit. Aviation would come and have a cursory look at my base then I’d take them home and Patsy would have made them a nice lunch. However my base was smick. Clean, orderly and surrounded by trees and scrubs. It did look a picture and I’d been runner up on tidy towns industrial site one year and winner another.
In 1983 I flew 1900 hours between May 25 and the end of January '84. That included 7 months without a single day off. In addition I ran the business, with limited capital and paying interest of 24%, yes you read that correctly, twenty four percent,operating with cheap and unreliable trucks and it goes on. That year was my biggest but I did continue to fly at times for 3 or 4 months without a day off. Days off weren’t great because by mid morning no adrenalin had kicked in and a headache would develop. Withdrawal symptoms. I found the best way to address this was once or twice a week finish early and get home in daylight hours. During spring and early summer I would work in excess of 100 hours each week and sometimes more than 110. There are only 168 hours in a week.
Stress. Yes continuous. Only because I always took on too much work and was continuously running late. Cropdusting was always relatively easy except in high winds which were a factor in spring with frontal systems passing. Management and administration was tiring, getting home endeavouring to have dinner with incoming phone calls. Binge drink to get to sleep and coffee in the mornings and during the day to keep awake. Well something had to give, my heart began to beat out of rhythm and now I’ve lived with that since 1987. The symptoms are both less energy and stamina.
Some years back I had surgery for a hernia. The surgeon asked me how I got this out of rhythm condition. I told him I wasn’t sure. It was either work and whiskey or stress and scotch. He grinned and said in all the years he had practised it was the first time he had an honest answer.
When we are young we figure we are 10 foot tall and indestructible. Symptoms of abuse sometimes don’t appear until a considerable time later.