2000-12-06 - 3:35pm

Bonus entry!

EVELYNNE'S FISHKILL NIGHTMARE

(No disrepect intended to Fishkill itself, which is quite a cute little town in an astonishingly beautiful area of New York State.

There was an entry for today (12/06) which sparked this one. You might want to read that one first.

Okay, I've promised myself I'd talk about this for quite some time, so here goes.

Three years ago, Poindexter got a three-month travel assignment to Fishkill, NY. Very cool, I'm excited. We went, I found us a nice little basement apartment for the three months, we were all set.

Well. Then they changed their minds and decided they needed Poindexter in Pittsburgh instead. He went there, I went back to Virginia to touch base at the office, then to my parents' house in NJ, since Poindexter has a roommate in the corporate housing and we were not married yet. Meanwhile I missed Poindexter terribly and was dreadfully homesick for our apartment on San Pedro Street.

Somewhere in all this, I started to feel sick. A very tired, run-down feeling and some weakness. Like a flu, without the upper respiratory symptoms. I went to the doctor, who found nothing wrong. But I still felt awful. So I worried. And I feel physically worse.

Poindexter went back to Fishkill. I joined him there. Whoops, gotta go to Pittsburgh again. No roommate this time, so we drove together. I started to have headaches and horrible stomachaches. It's a huge effort to make myself eat and sometimes I just can't. Food gets stuck in my throat. I really, really want to go home to San Jose. I waas not getting better. I started to think I was dying.

I started feeling generalized anxiety. I could not relax, mentally. I wasn't eating enough. I started to get panicky about everything. Any time I had to leave home to go to the store I would get very nervous, which would exacerbate the physical symptoms and make me feel worse. This went on for six miserable weeks. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever feel normal again.

The odd thing about it all was that there were moments when I did feel normal. When I would get back that "autopilot" feeling and stop obsessing constantly. Just as quickly, it would go away again.

November 21st, 1997 was probably the worst day of my life. It was also the day I started the trip back to normal. That was when we flew to Florida to see Poindexter's parents.

Flying is stressful for me even on my best of days, so in combination with the anxiety I'd been feeling I felt so sick I could barely move. I felt lightheaded and dizzy, and just the process of entering the airport and getting to our gate was horrible.

Somehow I struggled through this. I did NOT want to leave the house and get on that plane. The whole time I could not stop thinking, "I can't do this. I just can't." But there was NO WAY I was going to skip this trip no matter how badly I wanted to do it.

So, amazingly enough, we got there, and just being in a warm place and being done with the plane trip made me feel better. We described my symptoms to Poindexter's mother, who is something of an excellent armchair doctor, and she diagnosed me instantly and began to shriek.

"You're STRESSED! You have no NEST! You need to EXERCISE! You'll be FINE!"

She told me about her own experiences with stress, about which I have forgotten the specific details (all the better to enjoy the tale when I ask her to tell it again). All I remember is "Don't FUCK with my NEST!"

She sent me to her doctor for a second opinion. He backed up everything she said. Told me I could have some medicine if I wanted it, but he would prefer that I try to work through it using exercise, FOOD, and sleep.

Just knowing what weird things stress can do to your body, and knowing I probably wasn't dying, made a huge difference. Beyond that, I started to change my lifestyle and found ways to deal with anxiety to calm down the mild panic attacks I was still having.

In particular, I started to walk. Half an hour a day, sometimes more. I found that during the walks and for a period afterwards, my brain was quieter. It wasn't so busy worrying. Supposedly what exercise does is focus your brain on other areas of the body, leaving less energy for it to worry. And that helps break the worry cycle somewhat.

I also found that if I imagined a worst case scenario for whatever I was panicking about at the moment, and planned what to do, that I would calm down some. That helped.

But in truth, it was almost two years before I could say I was back to "normal". We moved back to Virginia from San Jose and then I had to go through the wedding rigamarole. Even once that was over, I would still have panicky moments, although they were much, much easier to deal with than they had been in Fishkill. I think it's been about a year now since I had one, and I even made it through buying and moving into our new house, which was nothing short of amazing to me.

In more severe cases, I think that these non-pharmaceutical methods alone will not work. I'm told there are anti-anxiety drugs that will keep your body from releasing the chemicals that cause panic attacks, which allow you to get to the point where you can begin to change your lifestyle and patterns of thinking. My case was not that severe, since my anxiety never actually kept me from doing what I needed to do. Some people are not that lucky.

Think about it like this: Have you ever been really, really nervous? You know what happens -- increased heart rate, nausea, trembling, a weak feeling in your limbs? All these things are caused by chemicals released by the body for the flight-or-fight response. Ordinarily the chemicals are released, you deal with the situation, and your body returns to normal.

Now imagine that, for whatever reason, the thing that is making you nervous will not go away. So you are stuck in that nervous state for a week or two. And your body gets so used to being in that state that, chemically speaking, it gets "stuck" that way.

Your senses are on hyperalert, and the slightest deviation in your routine will cause your body to overreact. Something that might ordinarily just dance around the back of your mind or be quickly dismissed -- worrying about your husband when he's a little late getting home from work -- will now cause a full-blown panic attack, with all the symptoms described above.

Most annoyingly, sometimes the symptoms come on for no reason at all. You wake up in the morning, or in the middle of the night, terribly frightened about something you can't name. And you CANNOT MAKE IT STOP. This is the worst thing about it. No matter what kind of mantra you chant to yourself or how much you try to ignore it, you cannot make your body quit freaking out like this.

Similarly, I think, people who are depressed have a world view that is a result of chemical imbalances in the body. They are "stuck" in what ordinary people call "the blues", only those blues have mutated and deepened to a completely dark and black state of mind. You can't just "get over it", because your body chemistry will not allow it. And it was my experience with anxiety that made me finally understand how that can happen.

Well, I'm pooped. I guess that's enough for one day.

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