A Day with Anxiety part 2

We make it to the hospital, but I’m freaking out a bit since I don’t know whether I can walk to the door or not, but I don’t want to have to use a wheelchair because that’d mean something major was wrong.

I check in, and I feel a bit calmer. At some point in my packing to leave, I began chewing on a piece of gum and can no longer distinguish between the numbness and the minty tingle on my tongue.

I haven’t been to the hospital since my artery dissection and small stroke fall out from the injury almost 2 years ago.

The heart palpitations started after I get triaged. Those are a daily occurrence, so it’s more of an inconvience than anything else, and I feel a bit better. Still dizzy, but calm. If I have a stroke here, at least my chances are good.

I spend an hour in the waiting area. The hubs is being a trooper even though I’m ruining his plans by making him sit with me through all of this. My anxiety claims just as many of his days as mine.

Everything is fine until I notice a man come in with a trash bag. He’s a loud puker. When it hits me that that’s what the bag is full of, my body freaks the hell out. I go up to registration because I can’t sit still. I’ve got one finger in my ear to block out the man while I ask the lady as politely as I could about when I’d be getting back. 

Apparently, I’m next, but my fingers and toes are tingling again and there’s a ringing in my ears. I use the bathroom … again. When I come back out, the man has somehow gotten louder and another woman is wheeled in with a puke catcher in her lap. I fall to my chair, pretty positive I’m going to pass out now. The hubs is trying to keep me calm, but he’s got his own issues with hospitals, so we’re a real pair.

It seems a better option to just go home and if a stroke comes on … well I tried.

Instead, I’m called back. Once away from the puking man and the lady with the bucket, I’m exhausted. I tell the doctors about my symptoms, we go through the stroke tests, I get a CT scan, and I spend six hours waiting around for tests and results. But it’s not too bad most of the time. Having two panic episodes in one day takes the fight out of me. I’m not anxious anymore. Just tired and hungry.

The results come back negative for any artery dissections or stroke. I'm thrilled. I really didn't want to relive that experience. 

When I get home, I eat a bowl of soup and pass out, completely ignoring the dizziness that comes with lying down, and sleep for 11 hours.

After all that, I have to admit, it wasn’t that bad of an anxiety day. Maybe a 5 out of 10 on the type of panic-y days I can have. Most my anxiety revolves around my health, so as long as I’m feeling good, I don’t really have a problem at all.

It’s obviously a lot worse for some people, but I wanted to share my day with people who maybe don’t understand. I know a lot of my reactions are blown out of proportion, seem extreme, and crazy, but when I’m in the midst of my anxiety, logical thought is impossible. My sole concentration is on feeling better and panic ensues when that doesn’t immediately happen.

It’s exhausting. Anxiety is exhausting.

A good resource for learning more about mental illnesses is the National Institute of Mental Health.

A Day with Anxiety part 1

Before I even open my eyes, I feel off balance, like someone has kidnapped me in the middle of the night and left me on a boat to die. I don’t want to open my eyes because if the dizziness doesn’t go away, it’s going to be one of those days.

I take stock of everything I’m feeling, testing if it gets worse when I move my head—it does—moving my jaw around and noticing the stuffy, crinkly pressure in my ear.

God, I love fall and all its weather changes that heighten my vertigo and turn me into an anxious hermit on the brink of panic until my body adjusts.

I finally open my eyes and the dizziness doesn’t stop. My fingertips start to tingle, and I start to sweat. I sit up because I need to do something to get everything to focus before I fall over the panic edge.

I begin the body analysis, noticing how once I focus my eyes on something, my head adjusts and the spinning is gone. I know this feeling; vertigo is an old friend. I’m not going to die, nor pass out, nor is this a stroke.

I get out of bed, flex my fingers, continue the ‘I’m fine’ mantra through breakfast and every time I move my head and have to repeat the focus process.

I wanted to go shopping today. I’d wanted to maybe get a coffee too.

That’s not going to happen anymore. The thought of walking through the mall with this dizziness makes my stomach flip.

I don’t get out of my pajamas. I play Skyrim for a few hours because it takes my mind off everything, and I’m calm.

But now I feel useless. It’s Tuesday and I’m wasting it away on a video game. I think maybe a bath will help. 

I settle in, ignoring the heightened dizziness of lying down, and read a book in the warm water.

A phone call from my mom pulls me out of my daze. I sit up quickly to answer and immediately regret that impulse. The room starts spinning, but I concentrate on my mom’s voice, talking with her about the cats in the backyard while my balance equalizes.

Suddenly, my tongue feels like it’s fallen asleep. And it’s all I can think about. Why is my tongue numb? Has this ever happened before? Yes. But this isn’t a stroke. I can still see and there’s no headache. But what if this means another one is coming? Should I go to the hospital? It kind of feels like I may throw up.

My mom’s voice breaks through, but I tell her I have to go, not waiting to give a proper goodbye.

I rush around the house, trying to get dressed. I tell the hubs I need to go to the hospital, but I’m silent after that. I can’t process conversation right now. I’m just trying to get dressed without passing out or throwing up.

I go to the bathroom three times in fifteen minutes before I get everything together to go. One of the more lovelier side effects of my panic attacks is the body release. It’s all kinds of pleasant.

Tomorrow comes part 2 at the hospital. 

To learn more about my experience with anxiety, go here to read about my first panic attack story and here for my battles with OCD. 

Camping and Temp Work Frustrations

How to describe my life right now: stressed, in a constant state of anticipation, vacillating between ‘Everything’s going to be okay’ and ‘Holy sh*t, what are we going to do?’

The hub’s work contract is up in two weeks and despite everyone’s assurance that something will get worked out, nothing seems to be even remotely decided except for the roundabout expiration date of his current contract. It glows on the calendar, mocking me.

It’s tense around here. I try to keep the support alive, but then I have to pay a bill or something on a car breaks and I am reminded of how much money we don’t have and how much worse that’s going get if this doesn’t pan out.

Not that we won’t get on our feet either way, but I’ve done the unemployment game before. That game sucks.

So when my parents offered to pay for us to go camping with them this weekend, we jumped on board. We may have stayed at a federal campground with no electricity, showers, or any signs of modern society—the outhouses were rsurprisingly clean—but it was the most relaxing weekend I’ve had in a very long time.

 The hubs and I decided that money, jobs, and future financial crises talks would be pinned on the board of things we’d worry about after we returned to the land of internet, electricity powered lights, and heated water.

I’m back now, but I’d rather not be.

On Monday the official 2 week mark drove in carrying truckloads of stress behind it. I spent two hours that night combing job boards, another hour trying to go through bills to see where we can trim more fat, and a couple more hours coming up with the statistics on how long we could live off our available credit.

Give me mosquito bite covered legs and dirt seasoned food over this uncertainty any day.

 Temporary work shouldn’t be a thing …

Triggers

I was 12 when the furnace blew up at my parent’s house. It wasn’t a huge fire. The only thing it damaged was our old broom. I vividly remember my dad waving it around like Indiana Jones with a torch. That was when I first started checking stove nobs.

I was 19 when the apartment complex my fiancé and I lived in had a break-in. The guy was caught pretty easily, and the people got their stuff back.  No one was hurt, but I stopped feeling safe. That was when I started checking windows and door locks.

I was 19 when the plane I was on had an electrical fire. The oxygen masks dropped down and black smoke filled the plane. When the system shorted, the plane free-fell for two seconds at most, but I was terrified. I couldn’t get out of my seat; and even if I could, where would I go? People were screaming; I was praying; the nice stranger next to me was comforting both of us by pointing out stuff outside our window until we emergenct landed. That was when I started having anxiety about being trapped.

I was 20 when my fiancé and I rented our first single-family house. I loved the privacy of it, the fact that I could finally get that dog I’d been missing since I left my parent’s house, and I felt more adult in a house. But, the house was ancient and rickety. It made weird noises. It came with an old gas heater that sat in the middle of the house and heated it like a fireplace. I didn’t have close neighbors to cushion my worries about break-ins. That was when I developed serious OCD.

I checked the stove nobs at least 20 times a day, and I had to count each nob out loud while touching them a certain way in order to feel satisfied that they were off. I checked the windows every time I left and every night even if I knew they’d never been opened. I started organizing things from big to small and everything had to be straight, label facing forward. I looked at my heater like it was an armed murderer waiting to attack. When I left the house, I would stand at the door nob, twisting it back and forth, feel confident that it was locked and start toward my car before that little voice told me to check it one more time. When it got to the point that I was counting, straightening, taking more than ten minutes to check everything, I knew I had to just stop.

I’m not a medicine person, never have been, so I took conquering OCD as a personal battle. It took a lot of online research, a lot of introspection, and sheer willpower to learn how to understand, stop, and retrain my thinking patterns in order to let go of most my ticks. 

It came down to the realization that I was wasting my time worrying about things that I couldn’t control and doing all these habits I had formed to trick myself into thinking that I could. I had wasted countless minutes, hours, and days where I was stuck in the paranoia of OCD.  And then I just stopped. It sucked. I left my house constantly consumed with the thought of having forgotten to check something. But, after a while, I started mentally shoving those worries out of my head. I became deeply aware of how my mind processed fear and how the reasoning side of my brain could be used in order to smother that fear to a level where I could function happily again.

There’re still days where I have flare ups. I still have to check the stove nobs a certain way every night, but I only do it once. I’ll never be completely free of it. When my stress is high, my OCD is more active, but never to the point of where it’d been. I know how to counteract it. I am comfortable now that I can stop my impulses and stop the anxiety of the fall out.

Of course, right after I conquered OCD to the best of my ability was when I had my first panic attack completely unrelated to those old fears. I’m still dealing with that fallout.  But the point is, help is there if you look for it and are ready to receive it. OCD and anxiety play off fears and until you’re ready to confront those fears, you’ll never be free of them.

**I know some people with mental illness cannot personally control their illnesses. I don’t think there’s any weakness in that. If you present a real danger to yourself or others, I applaud your use of the medical community in order to eliminate that danger.  I don’t think how you treat something makes a person any better or any worse than how another person does. Anyone actively seeking treatment, no matter what the form, is fighting the same battles and receives the same level of respect from me.**