Ways Cancer Doesn’t Suck: Anxiety Edition

I know you’re utterly familiar with my mental state if not the list of medications that keep it happily in the zone of “mental state” and not just “mental”. Is that a 90’s reference? Needless to say, it’s a fine line we walk over here but we’re walking it.

Prior to cancer (not my own which seemed, somehow, less anxiety-causing although I suppose it wasn’t really, just more of an intense scream and less of a low, steady tearing out of my heart), I had a prescription for an anxiety medication that caused me to care less but to also have a splitting headache not too long after getting to the care-less point. And, since the fact of knowing I would GET a headache made me more anxious, the bottle still sits in the cupboard, mocking me with its potential but being, in my opinion, nigh untouchable.

But the anxiety, it didn’t go away. It didn’t dissipate or get less. In fact, I fell into a panic attack or two just when I thought I’d become the sort of person who could sagely look upon someone else’s panic attack with empathy and gratefulness without wondering how long until I was in that place, too. Twice (I’m a slow learner) I found myself noticing that I should really get up and leave the room/meeting/lecture/etc and try to breathe before I passed out, then attempting to do that very thing, and then finding that I actually could not physically get up or do anything actually except feel like the air was being sucked out of my lungs. They were a different sort of panic attacks. Before, something in particular would set them off for very sane (in a PTSD way) reasons. Now, they are here when they were not for no reason at all, but of course, for ALL the reasons, of which, let’s be honest, there are too many.

And so I asked my lovely physician for something else. I have an irrational fear of doctors thinking I am drug-seeking. I blame it on the emergency room visits when I was younger and blind from a migraine, doubled over and unable to speak clearly, and doctors and nurses treated me skeptically because you can’t verify migraine and so it’s one of the easier things to seek drugs for. But I asked, and I got the words out, which as a very real risk since the anxiety itself was about to send me right over the edge and now I have a different anxiety rescue and my god has it changed my life. I made it through father’s day yesterday without a hiccup and I can mostly catch it these days before I am too paralyzed to move. So it’s a silver lining I wish I didn’t have but I do, and that’s fine.

Speaking of anxiety, it is what has kept me from writing here and everywhere but perhaps if I promise more here soon, I’ll be able to jump this hurdle and come back to it.