MyAnxiousMind

I think I have always been an anxious person, for as long as I can remember I was always overwhelmed with worry. When I was in grade school, I remembered a student telling the class about his brother that had been born with a heart defect and instantly I could see my heart beating through my shirt — a sure sign that I too must have been born with a heart defect. There was the time when I got a nasty scratch while attempting to retrieve a golf ball from a heavily wooded area, unfortunately that scratch turned into a terrible case of flesh eating bacteria.

This continued on into Jr. High School where I had my first experience with “The Weirdness”. The weirdness is a state in which you feel like you are dreaming but you are fully awake, like you are watching a movie of yourself. These episodes started to occur at a particularly stressful period of my life as I was sure I had developed deadly skin cancer after my journalism teacher was diagnosed with the same disease.

The anxiety continued on into my High School years, I tried not to let it hold me back as I spent time with athletics, drama, singings and other artistic endeavors, but in High School the diseases started to pile on: leukemia, lymphoma, brain tumor, stomach cancer, breast cancer and Parkinson’s. I never told anyone about the fear I was in, I didn’t think they would understand, I know I sure didn’t understand what was happening to me.

I left home for college and the fear and anxiety seemed to lessen a bit even though there were episodes of multiple cancers, I managed to graduate college and get a job. My recent episode, which I’ve been in for about 3 years, started on a drive to my parents house. I had a particularly bad sinus infection and had taken several over-the-counter drugs, which did the trick, however they also did wonders on slowing my reaction time. As I was preparing to enter the interstate, I noticed a large building that was fully engulfed by flames, I couldn’t take my eyes off it until I heard “WE ARE GOING TO CRASH!!!!!” I snapped back to reality just in time to jerk the wheel to the right and avoid driving into a small pond.

My heart was pounding uncontrollably but I continued to drive on. My mind kicked into overdrive “what the hell just happened there? this must be the beginnings on some weird numerological condition.” I begin to picture myself at some large university undergoing endless tests to determine what this strange illness was. I was freaking myself out. By now my body was overheating, I was visibly sweating, my vision dimmed, my body felt week and I eventually had to pull the car over and have my wife finish the drive.

I wasn’t able to drive back home the next day, nor was I able to drive again on the free for the next 6 months. My world was slowly shirking, there were fewer and fewer places I could go where I felt “safe”. While all this was going on, I was able to hold down a job and actually change jobs but the anxiety and fear continued to build. Finally, on a Saturday afternoon I could take no more. I told my wife what I was feeling and begged her to take me to the doctor. The next available appointment wasn’t until Monday morning, so I locked myself in my room until then, Monday would mark five days that I hadn’t left the house.

Monday morning came around and I wasn’t sure I had the energy to drag myself to the doctor, I was paralyzed with fear. I sat in the doctor’s waiting room, cold, hot, shaking, feeling weird. Finally the doctor came in to see me. I explained what I had been feeling and he told me this is a classic case of generalized anxiety disorder but to be sure and to set my mind at ease, he would run a bunch of tests. When the tests came back clean, he prescribed me an anti-depressant called Celexa, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, that would help “take the edge off”.

I began taking 20 mg of Celexa a day and after two weeks was bumped up to 40 mg a day. The drug did seem to take a bit of the edge off and also made me sleepy, I was going to bed at 8 PM every night and once asleep was bombarded with vivid dreams all night long. I didn’t feel like myself while on Celexa, I felt a bit like a zombie and I didn’t like it.

As my prescription was set to run out, I called the doctor’s office and informed them that I would not like to continue the treatment. They made no mention of slowly stepping off the drug so I went cold turkey. Big mistake. I suffered through 3 horrible weeks of withdrawals. The worst withdrawal symptom being what I called brain zaps or shocks. Every 5 seconds it felt like an electrical jolt would pass through my brain, these shocks were constant for about 10 days before they begin to fade. As the drugs excited my system, I returned to my anxious state.

Several months had passed and I was still experiencing high anxiety and was now having daily panic attacks. If an attack happened while driving, I would avoid that road in the future, my commute was slowly becoming a twisted maze of safe roads I could travel. My hands would sweet, I would get tunnel vision, the weirdness — I’m here but not really here feeling, I felt like I lost the ability to walk (this wasn’t noticeable on the outside but to me I couldn’t remember how to walk correctly), my heart would skip beats or beat very fast, I felt dizzy (not fall down dizzy, just off), the list goes on and on.

Finally I was persuaded to make an appointment with a psychologist. On my way to my first visit I was thinking of ways I could get out of going, I need some kind of excuse to avoid showing up. I fought against my mind and eventually found myself sitting in this psychologists office. I was paranoid. After a few minutes of talking, him explaining what anxiety is like, I began to relax. The MDs diagosnis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder was upheld and Acrophobia and Hypochondria was also added to the list of disorders.

I am currently meeting with the psychologist two times a month. We are using talk therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Exposure Therapy to help me overcome my anxiety. I made huge steps forward in the first two months I meet with the psychologist. I am still having a ton of anxiety but I am not avoiding as much as I had been, I am no longer locking myself in my home and I am taking constructive steps forward in my recovery.

This blog is a daily journal of my progress and experiences as I journey down the long road of recovery from mental illness.