Into the void...
“That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.”
-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
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2002-10-25
2:15 p.m.
Yesterday morning, I woke up thinking I really didn’t feel like going into work because my anxiety was awful. Thinking back to when I was in college, however, I assumed that I’d be able to force myself through the day. Today is Friday, after all, and I thought I’d prefer to have the Friday off, so I dragged myself into work yesterday despite the nagging feeling that it was a really bad idea.
I should’ve stayed home.
Few things really occurred in the first few hours of the day; nonetheless, I was in a particularly bad state of mind when lunchtime came. Several days before, my new boss offered to take my one coworker and me out to lunch just to get out of the office and get to know each other a little better.
All of us are really fairly new; it was supposed to be a bit of an ice-breaker.
So, when lunchtime came, it was time for my new boss, my coworker, and me to go out for what was supposed to be a relaxing break in one of my all-time favorite restaurants. Of the three of us, I have the most seniority, and I’ve been training both of them in tons of stuff over the past two weeks even though I've only been working in my job for about four months. One would think I would’ve felt most at ease.
But no.
Frustrated by the horrible waitress and the fact that the recent change in my medications has led me to positively hate everyone I encounter, tension was mounting from moment to moment as I tried to calm myself down by being relatively quiet and sipping on my drink. I was excited about the drink, too, because it’s the first time I’ve gotten to try the new red kind of Mountain Dew.
Well, before our food even arrived, my boss looked at me and asked if I was okay, and, confused, I said, “Yeah, why?” She then pointed at my chest which was completely red for no apparent reason. I put my hand on my chest to feel how hot it was and told her I was fine, hoping the subject would be dropped, we would move on, and I’d go back to quietly hoping that everyone in the world would soon drop dead.
Things never work out that well, though.
Rather than getting better, the problem continued to get worse. Our food arrived and I looked at it confused because I didn’t really know what to do with it. Before I knew it, my boss had left for CVS, convinced that I was having an allergic reaction to something, and my other new coworker just sat there staring at me, obviously wishing she could do something and not knowing what to do.
When my boss came back, I took some of the Benadryl, drank as much water as I possibly could, and said that I needed to call Rob because I didn’t know what to do. By the time he arrived at the restaurant, I felt completely removed from whatever sense of reality it is that I’m generally supposed to have and my breathing was becoming increasingly difficult. Rob made a phone call to my insurance company, and within minutes, we were on our way to the hospital.
Part of the reason I insisted on going to the hospital was because I knew that the new medication I’m on has a risk of seizures and I really didn’t want to chance anything drastic. Besides, the fact that I couldn’t see straight and couldn’t seem to respond to anyone’s questions had me particularly worried because this is something I haven’t experienced in years.
And I needed to know for sure what exactly was going on.
Rob and I took a cab to a nearby hospital and had to find our way to the emergency room while I was in a state of complete and total confusion. He asked an information desk and they pointed us to an elevator, saying it was on the ground floor. So, we got on the elevator, and it promptly started going up. Rob was practically swatting people’s hands away from the buttons, telling them they would have to wait because we had an emergency and needed to get to the ER as soon as possible.
Once we finally arrived at the ER after spending far too much time on the damn elevator, they made us sit in the waiting room for several minutes. By the time I got to see someone, I was already feeling significantly better, although I was still wondering what was going on. There was no doubt that it was at least partially due to my anxiety, but the new medication makes things so difficult to sort through that I just wasn’t sure about anything.
When I was finally settled into a room and a doctor arrived, I thought I was fine. I talked to the doctor for awhile, she listened to my heart, looked at my throat and in my ears, and told me it was probably a combination of an anxiety attack and a reaction to the red dye in the Mountain Dew. Silly me for thinking that just because Hawaiian Punch makes my anxiety go haywire doesn’t mean that any other kind of red drink will fuck me up, too. The doctor also said it could've been a mild seizure induced by the medication.
Now, I’m home again, trying to sleep as much as possible. I’m still taking the Wellbutrin because it occurs to me that I had major panic attacks following the initiation of the Paxil, as well as the Risperdal that I had to quit taking for various reasons. The Paxil worked out well in the end, though, so I hope this is just something that had to pass before I’m fully adjusted to the new drug.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why my doctor would’ve given me something for the depression before he gave me something for my anxiety. I’ve told him that I could probably live with the depression if it wasn’t for the anxiety, and we’ve talked about how unusual that is given how most people freak out so much about depression alone. I’ve lived with depression for so many years, though, that I know how to handle it and I’m relatively used to it as something I just have to deal with.
I can work through depression, but I can’t work through anxiety.
My depression only occasionally turns into something that puts me completely out of commission. Anxiety takes ahold of me so suddenly and so violently that it makes even a slight change to my dull schedule turn into something life-threatening. I don’t care how many doctors tell me that it’s “just anxiety”; the fact is that anxiety can and may lead to a heart attack at any time, especially considering how hard it makes my heart work and how hard it becomes for me to breathe.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s the anxiety that eventually kills me.
