I’ve had better times in my life

I’ve had WORSE times as well. In fact, my outside life is just fine, with some little relatively unimportant exceptions that, of course, I blow up in to hideous disasters in my head. Inside, it is challenging to be me lately.

I’m basically able to do nothing but the absolute bare minimum to keep things going, and even that is getting debatable (how bad SHOULD my yard get before I drag out to mow it?). I prefer to sleep. All the time. I have done ridiculous things like spend all morning just trying to get out of bed; it’s as if being anxious for so long has finally sucked every morsel of energy from me. I seriously spent 4 hours just trying to get up and take a shower. I finally got it done, but that was about it for the day.

It can’t be totally the case that I am inept, however. I am able to go to work and take care of the animals, wash the dishes, do laundry, and so on. In fact I’m DELIGHTED to go to work most of the time because I don’t have to decide what to do with myself. Someone will tell me. “Go triage” or “assume care of those three patients” or whatever. And I’m good at my job, and it normally prevents me from being afraid of anything because I’m in an EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT. Emergencies are expected there, and we can fix most of them, and emergencies that actually occur are far easier to handle that the ones between my ears than never materialize (the two times I’ve had anxiety/cardiac issues at work, I was taking a break!).

The bad times are when I am home with unfilled time. I have plenty I COULD DO. I could plant flowers or work out or finish an article or work on a book or find another freelance job (typical example of my head’s machinery: I am pissed off at losing a gig I didn’t want to begin with). I could read a book. I took go take pictures. But usually I don’t do any of that because it’s too exhausting. I have given myself mental gold stars for stuff like “I took a shower!” So I’m probably not going to coordinate a photo walk.

“What,” some have asked, “are you depressed about?” I don’t know. I don’t even know that I am depressed. I know it looks like depression. I also know that anxiety looks an awful lot like depression if it goes on long enough, which mine has. Decades of nearly daily terror apparently catch up with a person. If you ask me what I’m SCARED of, I can readily name 50 things that I am worried about all at the same time. But now that I have actually put enough stress on my heart that it’s cracking under the pressure, I am frozen to the bed or couch with panic that if I move at all the racing pulse will begin, and that, I hate above all.

If I never have to have a panic attack so horrible that I wake up on the floor in a slick sweat, nauseated, with a pounding heart? I will feel like the richest person on earth. Until then I’m apparently fashioning a lonely agoraphobic life for myself, unintentionally.

I have a feeling this is the kind of mental habit that gets quickly difficult to reverse, so I’m making myself do one thing a day. Overachiever, huh. But that’s more than NOTHING each day. Today, I’m going to have my hair done AND see my therapist. Two things! For some reason, he seems to feel that we need to talk.

I started to write a “sorry I’m not posting” post until I remembered those annoy me. Don’t clutter my feeds with that shit. Post if you want or don’t if you don’t, I mean, there’s plenty of other stuff out there to read. But I wrote it anyway because when I read stuff like this, I think, “Thank GOD other people feel this way.”

No, really, I don’t need any credit!

I don’t mind. REALLY.

I’m the lowly nurse in there sweating in a totally untenable position to hold down the patient fighting against a procedure. I’m the one filling up linen bags with sheets wet with diarrhea and vomit and swilling patients down so they feel clean and nice, and all that after starting an IV in a finger because that’s all they had and “my God, I didn’t even feel that, you’re a genius!”

I’m the one holding a child’s hand while she screams with fear and pain and somehow managing to convince her that this next pain is necessary…an IV, moving a broken bone for an x-ray, grating bone against bone for a splint.

I’m the one endlessly reassuring patients and parents and sons and daughters, explaining again what that was the doctor just said. Explaining I’m sorry, he is going to die soon, is what the doctor said. It’s me, at the bedside, holding wrinkled old hands and smooth bloody young ones while the pulse flickers and fades.

And I’m the one who thought ahead and got those blood cultures and a chest x-ray on the hypoxic febrile patient who was really here for hip pain after a fall, because gee, that fall was a result of that bad pneumonia.

I really don’t mind when, after all that, everyone in the room says, “Thank you so much, doctor!”

I don’t mind at all.