graceland's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Starting to feel like myself again I called my doctor last week and let her know that the anxiety meds she had me on just weren't working. It had been two weeks and while the heartracing stopped, I was still having some spontaneous crying outbursts and feeling the need to withdraw from the world. Most worrying to me, though, was the side effect of the pain it caused on both sides of my neck, from involuntarily clenching my teeth when I took the medicine. It just didn't seem right. So I started a new med on Friday and already, I am feeling remarkably better. I went out last weekend. I laughed and smiled. It seemed like a lifetime since I had done that. I had FUN. The chest pain declines with each day and the racing has stopped. My left arm pain is almost all done. It hasn't even been a whole week on half of the normal dosage. I always thought that medications for this type of thing were a crutch for people who just weren't mentally strong enough to cope with the world. I thought those people should get tougher. They should have something to "really" worry about and then they'd learn. Now I see things differently. The anxiety and the resulting depression I had been in were debilitating and metastasized into actual physical pain and sickness. I never thought something like this could happen to someone like me. All of my life, I've been seen as strong, a person who can handle almost anything. Many times, I have stepped in and handled tragedies and stressful situations for people when they couldn't. I won't dwell on this much more, I'm just really happy to feel for the first time, in a long time, that every day that I wake up, I don't have to work every hour of that day fighting to stay alive. Most people take for granted the fact that we wake up and live. Living is organic to our being. For me, the last few months, almost every waking moment and my sleeping moments were preoccupied with my mental focus on working to stay alive. Willing my organs to work. Willing myself to breathe. Willing my heart to beat at a regular pace. And when I say every waking moment, I mean approximately every 15 minutes of the day. And I mean going to sleep praying that you wake up in the morning and waking up in fear a couple of hours later, with your heart racing, gasping to breathe and praying that you won't die. It was a terrible way to live and I empathize with anyone out there who experiences those feelings and thoughts. Hang on. See doctors. Push for answers. There's help out there. 9:55 p.m. - 2006-05-31 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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