ugh

Shortly after I met Sugar D, I started having horrible gastrointestinal attacks. I'd been having gastrointestinal complaints for a couple of years already, but after I met Sugar D, sudden, intense, and long-lasting nausea joined the parade of symptoms. The attacks came on without warning. One minute I'd be fine, the next I'd feel like I was going to be horribly, violently ill. Often they occurred at restaurants, right after dinner, and I'd either be trapped in the washroom or race home in a cab. Either option was hugely embarrassing, especially if my dinner companions weren't particularly close friends.

A number of factors were at play in those attacks: poor diet, too much booze and stress, undiagnosed panic and anxiety. I've already written, at length, about how I overcame panic and anxiety. Or so I thought. On Thursday night I had another attack - the first in many, many years. Out of nowhere, I felt nauseous and shaky and terrified. I'd been talking to my mom earlier in the day and she told me how she had a stomach bug. I thought about all the people at my work who have had recent stomach bugs. I realized if I got sick that night, I'd be totally screwed because I had something important on at work the next day, something I'd been working on for months. So when I started to feel nauseous I was terrified that it was actually happening.

Once I realized how scared I was, I decided it must be panic. So I pulled out my usual bag of tricks for managing panic. Usually just recognizing it for what it is is enough, but not this time. I tried the tapping thing. I tried a happy place. I tried relaxing my muscles. I tried waiting. But nothing worked. It lasted hours - hours of nausea, shaking, trips to the toilet, sips of water, and wondering if perhaps I actually was sick. The ghosts of Wretched Past flitted in front of my eyes, all the grotty floors I've been intimate with. Finally, around 9:45 (two and a half hours after it started), I decided to take some Lorazepam. I've never actually taken it for a panic attack before, only for prevention on solo flights. But I had it, so I thought I might as well take it. It took an hour to take effect, and even then, I still felt sick, I just wasn't terrified. So it was an improvement. I slept - mostly - through the night and woke in the morning with no vomiting having taken place.

I went to work, relieved I could make it, but still the worse for wear. I felt crappy all day, and crappier once I got home in the evening. The day was a success, work-wise, as far as I could tell, but I was exhausted. I don't think panic is the only culprit for Thursday night. Given how crappy I felt the next day, physically, and how the physical crappiness has continued over the weekend, I figure it must have been a combination of exhaustion and panic (caused or ennabled by the exhaustion).

I've been working flat out for the last six weeks. From the moment I arrive at my desk until I race out to pick up Swee'pea, I'm on one long adrenaline trip of not having enough time to get everything done that needs to be done and not being able to delegate anything. So Thursday night was my wake-up call. If I don't set some boundaries at work, I'm going to end up the way I was before: feeling mildly ill all the time and violently ill sometimes, afraid to eat, afraid to be full, afraid to leave home. I know enough to know I'm not exaggerating. I thought that kind of attack would never happen again because I could control my anxiety and panic, but I took for granted the balance and wellness required for that kind of control.

So this weekend is my sick day. I've been trying to take it easy at home for the last few weeks, during my time off, but the bottom line is that 8 hours (or 9 if you count the rushed drop-offs and pick-ups at daycare) of adrenaline every day is just too much for a body to recover from - for my body anyways. I've never felt this way at work before, never been this busy before.

No more.

unprecedented

For four out of the last five nights, Swee'pea has slept through the night, all alone. That's two times two nights in a row. He has never, ever slept through the night in his own bed two nights in a row. It's such a treat to cuddle while awake, taking our time to reconnect and greet the day, instead of the nocturnal cuddles and immediate leap to consciousness.

You'd think I'd be Ms. Calm after all that uninterrupted sleep, but I am not. Last night, just before I fell asleep, I heard a jet fly overhead. It made that freaky whistling sound that I associate with plane crashes in the movies. For one irrational instant, I wondered if it was going to crash into our house and I felt a jolt of panic. But I caught myself: this is just because I'm stressed out. The more stress I feel, the more panic and anxiety I experience (AND the more ice cream and beer I consume). I have to remind myself that the world didn't suddenly just get a lot more dangerous.

Sugar D leaves first thing tomorrow morning for six days in California on business. I have a final walk-through of the new house on Monday afternoon and the electrician is coming to give us a quote on some work we need done before we move in. We take possession of the new house on Tuesday afternoon and I have one day to paint our bedroom, rip up carpet in two rooms, and remove the baseboards before the hardwood installers come. Sugar D comes home on Friday night, just in time for two days of intense packing and one day of intense moving. And that's just what I planned.

What I didn't plan was for Sugar D to crash the car yesterday while he parked it and I got a money order for the lawyer, right before our appointment to sign all the g.d. papers (this was after the whole daycare dilemma and tour -- which we have to decide on by Monday, also unplanned). Sugar D wasn't hurt at all (thank goodness!) and the other car wasn't damaged. But our car is looking a lot like toast. We just got a quote to repair it: $2000. Our insurance agent is unavailable until Monday so I can't find out what our insurance policy covers, what our deductible is, or what a claim like that will do to our premiums. So apparently I have to fit all that decision-making and coordinating in between all the other bullshit I'm dealing with next week. Of course it's not bullshit, but it's feeling just a touch overwhelming.

This morning at the market, I saw a guy from the drop-in centre. He's taken to hugging me hello, I don't know why. But we tend to see him a lot when we're out and about. Anyways, he's having to stay at the men's shelter while his wife stays at the women's because he lost job and they got evicted, all within days of each other by the sounds of it.

I'm feeling so overwhelmed, I almost bailed on the drop-in this afternoon so I could get more stuff done, but then I thought of that guy and wondered what he'd think if I didn't show up after he just saw me this morning. I imagined explaining my problems: my husband's going away and we're buying a big house and our 2006 Toyota needs to be fixed and I have to arrange insurance, and wah wah wah. Um yeah, a little embarrassing.

I can handle this week; I just don't want to. And we can delay the car fixing if we need to because we still have our friends' car. So I'm going to the drop-in momentarily.

more fear of flying

I'm sick - again! Another stomach bug, this one bringing trips to the can and waves of abdominal pain so intense I just squirmed around in bed hoping somehow I could escape my skin. The last time I had that feeling of wanting to escape my treacherous skin I was in labour and virtually strapped to the bed if not literally. It was only when I decided to try to breathe through these waves of pain that I finally got some sleep early Saturday morning. Yesterday I still felt exhausted and weak and laid on the couch all day long, still in pain but not quite as bad as the night before. This morningI'm still in pain but much better: I've eaten two pieces of toast and I've spent more time upright than horizontal. Progress!

I was so sick, I've been thinking about cancelling our trip to Cuba, for which we're supposed to depart in less than a week. I tell you this not to win sympathy but to lead into the real issue: anxiety. People who have been reading me for a long time might remember that years ago I suffered debilitating panic and anxiety, which was mostly triggered by both acute and chronic gastrointestinal illness. To cope, I restricted my life to work and home. Even travelling out of town by car was too much for me to handle. I was terrified of getting sick to my stomach away from home.

Over the last few years, I thought I was pretty much past all that. I travelled to South Africa and mostly managed my fear of flying. I did have times when my stomach felt grumbly but I never let it panic me because I had years of it feeling grumbly from time to time without catastrophic consequences (i.e. vomiting).

But now my confidence is shaken. The only times I've felt slightly grumbly in the last few weeks have both led to nasty illness. The first time wasn't so bad because it'd been about four years since the last time I threw up, so I figured I had at least another year. I figured my dues were paid. But to get sick again in two weeks makes me think my system is weakened or fundamentally broken. Granted, I've been sicker (with an episode that was probably the real root of my panic), but what if I get sick again when I'm in Cuba? What if I'm gribbed by that intense abdominal pain when I'm on a plane or a bus? What if I have to vomit in a Cuban toilet? (I suspect the street would be more sanitary.) How will my system react to Cuba food?

I'm torn. On the one hand, if I'm constantly scared that every rumble or twinge means I'm about to be felled by illness, there's no way I'll enjoy Cuba the way I want to or make the images I want to. I know myself well enough to recognize that I could end up too scared to go to Havana and spend all our time on a sheltered resort. I'd feel very disappointed to come home without going to Havana, since that's really why we want to go to Cuba.

On the other hand, maybe this represents a great opportunity to really face my fears. Maybe it's easy to live without anxiety when you mostly feel ok, but quite another to keep exploring when you feel crappy.

Years and years ago, I fancied myself an intrepid world traveller who just hadn't had the chance to actually travel. After a year or two of not travelling, I realized that that's just not who I am. I like having a home and playing it safe, and that's ok. The last few months I've been looking at amazing photos from all corners of the world, thinking I want to do that, I want to make images like that. I've been imagining myself at a street photography workshop in Istanbul or portraiture workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Maybe I was that intrepid world traveller after all and it had just taken me a while to discover it. I wouldn't want to be away from Swee'pea a lot and I wouldn't want to make him tag along everywhere, but maybe a couple trips a year would be nice.

Now, though, I'm back to the homebody. I guess I'll wait and see how I feel in a few days. We'll probably go. I'm guessing fear isn't covered by the trip insurance I bought anyways.

(And deep in the back of my mind is this article about judging the World Press Photo Awards.

"Flicking through the 81,000 images originally submitted a sense of deja vu is inevitable. Again and again similar images are repeated, with only the actors and settings changing. Grieving mothers, charred human remains, sun sets, women giving birth, children playing with toy guns, cock fights, bull fights, Havana street scenes, reflections in puddles, reflections in windows, football posts in unlikely locations, swaddled babies, portraits taken through mosquito nets, needles in junkies’ arms, derelict toilets, Palestinian boys throwing stones, contorted Chinese gymnasts, Karl Lagerfeld, models preparing for fashion shows backstage, painted faces, bodies covered in mud, monks smoking cigarettes, pigeons silhouetted against the sky, Indian Sardus, children leaping into rivers, pigs being slaughtered."

See that? Havana street scenes are already a cliché, and here I am dying to get in on the clichéd action. It's only a little niggle really, because by the end of the article, the winners are all of clichéd subject matter. But still...)

I think some of my readers have travelled quite a bit. So I ask you, how do you handle the risk/fear of illness when travelling?

platzschwindel

Literally translated, it means "place dizziness," and it was coined in 1870, a couple of years before agoraphobia for the same cluster of symptoms. Around the same time, doctors elsewhere identified American Civil War combatants who suffered from "irritable heart" and Inuit who suffered "kayak angst." Of all those terms (and many more boring and impenetrable terms), why did agoraphobia the most common? It seems the least accurate to me. It's not so much fear of the market or open spaces as it is fear of having a panic attack in public spaces without escape or where an escape would be embarrassing.

Apparently, Pan, the god of flocks and shepherds, used to descend out of the blue to scare the animals, shepherds and nymphs. How perfect that the root of the word panic ties us to our animal side, the fight or flight response. I've started reading Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life by Allen Shawn. On the one hand I want to feel proud of how well I've overcome my panic and anxiety, to recognize just how large an accomplishment that is. Shawn has suffered his entire life, despite considerable insight into his condition. "A phobia is like a pain in the soul," he says. On the other hand, Shawn discusses how chronic, long-term stress (like, oh I don't know, early, sleep-deprived motherhood?) can eliminate phobic symptoms, although they often come back if and when the stress is removed, so it could just be a matter of time. And then again, this phenomenon was documented in WWII concentration camps, and I hate to liken motherhood with Nazi concentration camps.

I'm only 50 pages in, and I see myself in every page.




Quite a while ago, Niobe challenged folks to write a blog post in the style of another blogger. This post started as an attempt at mimicing her style, but quickly devolved into typical Sin. Sorry.

Round the Bend and Back: Part 6

Aliki2006 wrote an achingly beautiful piece about her son's anxiety a while back. Go read it and come back...

I've been balking a bit on writing this last post, partly because I'm trying do some reading on the subject of children and anxiety, and partly because I'm hesitant. I want to stay away from regurgitating what books say, and stick to what I know. Except that I don't really know about children and anxiety and how to help them cope, other than a few memories of my own childhood. It has been something I've been thinking a lot about over the last few weeks, as I've been remembering and writing about my own experiences with anxiety.

On Easter weekend, my niece, who has been having a lot of stomach aches, felt sick while she and her family were having a sleep over at Grandma and Grandpa's. Apparently she spent most of the night feeling like she was going to throw up and she kept asking her parents to take her home right away. Obviously, this struck a chord with me. Except that I didn't have that kind of fear until I was into my twenties. She's such a sweet 8-year-old girl, smart and thoughtful and kind, and I wonder what the best way to help her is? So, I'll take a stab at this post and go outside my comfort zone.

As I mentioned before, I was kind of an anxious child. I was good at worrying and planning, although I don't remember being fearful, particularly. (In fact, one of my sister's most vivid memories of me as a while was she was around 11, I think, and I was around 5, give or take a year. My dad was trying to teach her to dive into the pool but she was scared to jump in face first. As my dad tried to encourage her to take the plunge, I was at the shallow end of the pool, leaping fearlessly into the pool while shouting, "Super Meeeee!" I don't think I need to make explicit the ambivalence that my sister likely felt during this lesson. Although I can't remember it myself, I can imagine the sunny scene vividly, with a touch of pride in my own fearlessness that I believe stayed with me until we moved when I was 8 and I got ostracized completely at my new school, and a touch of guilt that I probably wasn't helping my sister.

But I remember some nights becoming convinced that if I fell asleep, the barn would burn down and the horses would die (Black Beauty had rather an impact on me I think); every time, I was convinced I was having a premonition. By the time I got into my early teens, I realized that these fears arose when I was overtired, and by then I'd experienced several very fearful moments that hadn't turned out to be premonitions. I think my parents probably helped to point out that I'd had those thoughts before and nothing had come of them, so perhaps I wasn't clairvoyant?

(Wait a minute. I do remember fears I had. Like when I first learned about glaciers in grade three, and the teacher said that another ice age would come upon the earth one day, I worried that we would all have to evacuate our homes and run for the equator, carrying whatever we could as a three-mile high wall of ice beared down on us. My only hope was that the glacier wouldn't be able to quite make it to the equator and we'd all be able to squish together around the waistband of the earth. AND I remember in grade nine learning about the geological clock, and how humans came into the earth's history at around five minutes to midnight. I got confused, and worried that midnight was when the earth would end, and it could happen at any second. So I guess maybe I was a fearful child.)

I think my parents did and said several things that helped me relax. My dad had suffered panic attacks in his twenties, so he knew the importance of relaxation techniques and how to conquer fears (his panic attacks were related to public speaking, which he'd had to do as part of his job). He always told me that if I was nervous the night before a horse show, that winning was not important. Winning depends on other people's performance; it's relative. And I don't have any control over what other people do. All I could focus on was doing my best. This is an attitude I have carried forward, and it always helps me to identify things that are within my control and without, and most of the time I can put aside my worries about things that are beyond my control. Because I can't control that stuff anyway so worrying serves no purpose. The thing that screwed me up in my twenties was that I couldn't control when or if I got sick, but I COULD control whether I left the house if I thought it was likely. I COULD control whether I ate certain foods. I sought more and more control over my potentially illness-inducing environment and behaviour.

Sometimes, too, when I was afraid, my parents would ask me what was the worst possible thing that could happen. What was I most afraid of? Many times, when I really explored the fear, immersed myself in it and articulated the details of it, I realized it wasn't so scary after all. I think this is something that could help my niece... asking her to imagine the worst case scenario, and hopefully she would realize that throwing up away from home, while not pleasant, is not really that horrible.

I suspect my niece is also suffering some panic, which I can say from personal experience won't really be helped by exploring her fear. Some of the techniques I used in the midst of a panic attack (which I described earlier in this series) might also help, going through them when she's calm in preparation, then helping her implement them when she's feeling panicked. The book I've been reading recently, The Worried Child by Paul Foxman, which is ok, reports that childhood anxiety is very similar to adult anxiety, and the treatments for both are pretty much the same. As an anxious parent, one of the best things we can do to help our children feel less anxiety and cope with it better is to overcome and treat our own anxiety. I know that having suffered and overcome crippling anxiety myself, I am quick to recognize it in others, and I hope I will be able to help Swee'pea if and when he shows evidence of panic or anxiety.

(Although I want to stay away from giving out advice, I think it is safe to advise adults not to ridicule or belittle the fears of children. One night at summer camp, a different summer camp, the year after the accident, a much smaller camp with a maximum of ten kids who stayed in the house with the camp owners... one night I couldn't sleep. I was terrified the barn was going to burn down and our horses would die a horrible, screaming death and I would never be able to rid my nose of what I'd read was a horrible awful stench of burning hair and flesh. The grandmother was still awake in the quiet house, sitting at the kitchen table. I told her about my fears, that I worried I was having a premonition. I think she said she would be up late watching the barn or something, so eventually I was able to sleep. But the next morning when I came to breakfast, everyone laughed at me and my midnight fears. She'd told everyone.)

Foxman's book also begins by reporting that certain fears are developmentally appropriate for children at certain ages. This information made me really sad. Somehow, I'd hoped that if I did everything right, I could make it so that Swee'pea would never feel afraid. But of course this is impossible. For one thing, fear and anxiety keep us safe; they are evolutionarily essential. For another, I cannot protect Swee'pea from the world. Bad things -- hopefully not VERY bad things -- can and probably will happen to him, and all I'll be able to do is (hopefully if I'm still around) help him cope with the fallout.

So this book I'm reading... except I've stopped reading it because I picked up A Mind Apart by Susanne Antonetta, which I've already raved about... if you have any interest in mental illness and neurological disorders, I highly recommend it. She describes her grandfather's anxiety, which basically made him housebound for her entire knowledge of him, thus: "He talked of muggers and burglars and diseases spread by cats, his world a bright festival of harm."

Anyways, this other book, The Worried Child, is quite clinical and makes lots of distinctions between different anxiety disorders and shares lots of specific ideas about how to help our kids. I just can't get past the feeling that the author is one of those doctors who proclaims and prescribes and diagnoses. Well, I guess all doctors are like that. Anyways, if you can get past that tone, I think it has some great ideas and the author suffered significant anxiety himself, so he has first-hand knowledge. He makes an interesting distinction between anxiety, fear, fright and stress, that is perhaps worth passing on.

Fear: an instinctive reaction to a clear and present danger or threat
anxiety: a state of apprehension or worry about a danger or threat that might occur
fright: a state of fear when danger or threat catches us by surprise
stress: any situation (positive or negative) that requires adjustment or change

So fear can be appropriate. But anxiety and avoidant behaviour not so much, especially if the likelihood of the danger is very low.

At the library I saw a lot of similar books about children and fear, so I'm sure there are a lot of valuable resources if you have an anxious child, and you haven't had the benefit (ha ha) of suffering anxiety yourself.

This past weekend Mad totally pegged my blogging method. I sit down, I start writing and then I stop writing. And I'm gonna stop now, even though we have a very rambly incoherent post that's not really going anywhere... but at least I'm finished this series.

Round the Bend and Back: Part 4

Ok, so I know you all thought this series was over, but I'm really just getting to the whole point of it now. I didn't just find the right counsellor and snap my fingers and all was well. As I've written here and there in this space, I still struggle with anxiety, I still feel it from time to time. What's different is that it doesn't totally overwhelm me, I can cope with it and manage.

Once I accepted that what I was experiencing was mostly panic and anxiety, I started to read. One book I picked up at the library (I can't remember the name of it and I didn't read it all anyways) pointed out that worrying is an adaptive response, it keeps us safe. Many of the most successful people are successful because they are very good worriers. They can look ahead and imagine all the things that could go wrong, then take steps to prevent them from happening, or develop strategies to employ in the event that they do go wrong.

I have always been a good worrier in that way. As a child, I competed at horse shows, which involved significant preparation the night before and morning of. Even as young as 12, I'd calculate backwards from the time I'd need to arrive (leaving enough time to tack up and warm up once there), and consider how long it would take to get there (sometimes as much as 2 or 3 hours) and how long I'd need to prepare in the morning before we left, then set my alarm accordingly. Sometimes I was getting up at 3 a.m. I also made lists of everything I had to do, and would do as much as possible the night before. I couldn't stand the thought that I might forget or not have time to do everything on the list, and it would be catastrophic if I were late for the show (I've always been compulsively punctual, probably my parents almost always made me late if they had anything to do with it). I always had to wake up my dad with enough time to do everything we needed to do together (he always drove me and the trailer with the horse in it). I remember he often complimented my ability to get us out the door on time. My anxiety dreams were almost always arriving at the show so late that it was empty and everyone had gone home.
Anyways, worrying can be a very good thing, from both a safety and success perspective. The stress response that causes panic attacks is also an important defence mechanism. It helps us recognize life-threatening situations and identify the best life-saving response. But sometimes it gets out of control and becomes paralyzing and crippling, like it was with me.

I remember my brother once telling me that being nervous is ok; it means that something is important to us, and it makes us pay more attention and do better on the important thing. I believe he was on to something there, and I still tell myself that when I'm uncomfortably nervous about an upcoming job interview or other performance.

When I started seeing the counsellor, I thought he would give me the answers and tell me what to do. But this wasn't the case. I had to come up with the answers myself, and he was just a guide. However, at the first appointment, he did give me some techniques for the next time I had a panic attack.

One was the sort of cliché you hear about. He helped me identify a happy place, and to situate myself in that place and think about all the sensations that I feel there. I imagined sitting on the warm sunny dock at my parents' cottage. It's on a small lake, and it's very peaceful and warm. Mostly I just felt the warmth of the sun relax my muscles.

The second seemed totally bizarre. I was skeptical of both. The second one involved tapping lightly on various body parts in a specific order. I can't remember the order exactly, but you take your index and middle fingers and tap twice at each place:
1. the middle of your eyebrow,
2. the middle of the occipetal bone under your eye,
3. about an inch from the outside edge of your eye near your temple,
4. between your nose and upper lip,
5. in that indent between your lower lip and chin,
6. in that little hollow at the base of your throat just above your breast bone,
7. hmmm this is where things get foggy... I think the next one is near the side of your breast under your opposite arm,
8. between your breasts in the middle of your sternum. And that's it.

I thought they were both a lot of hullabaloo, but since I'd already tried drugs unsuccessfully, it was my last chance.

Around this time, I'd found a barn that I had started taking a riding lesson at once a week. It required me to drive a half an hour each way, but I really wanted to ride again, I needed something in my life, so I did it. The next time I went up there after my first session with the counsellor, I started freaking out on the drive. So I pulled over and tried the first technique. The thing is, it was SO hard to drag my mind away from the panic and focus on something else. It didn't work. I've always felt that if I can think of bad things happen before they happen, either they won't happen, or it won't be so bad if they do. In the midst of a panic attack, it felt like if I stopped thinking about the bad thing about to happen (usually vomiting), it would happen. It was like watching a predator creep around me; if I let my attention wander even for a second, I'd be overcome by it.

So I tried the tapping thing, and because I didn't have to consciously take my mind away from the panic, it worked. I was shocked. I actually felt less panic. I did it again, and I was good to go. I got back on the road and went riding, but it didn't take me many lessons to discover that you can never go home again. Suddenly the back of that horse was SO high up and I just didn't like spending 2.5 hours of my short evening doing it, so I stopped.

During the time of reading, I remember seeing on a website somewhere advice for dealing with a panic attack. It said to ask yourself in the middle of a panic attack, “What if this is as bad as it gets? What if what I'm feeling right now is the worst of it?” Any time I've had a panic attack, the answer would be, well, I can handle it now. I AM handling it now. This was also a good technique for me. It's a way of trying to keep yourself in the moment, because panic attacks are really all about worrying about the next moment when you might die or you might puke or whatever.

During the next sessions with the counsellor, we tried to look at why my anxiety defence mechanism was being so over-protective. I talked about some of my past experiences, like the food poisoning and the McDonald's thing. I think I have pretty high standards for myself in many respects. I was still in the frame of mind from university, I think, feeling pride in my apathy, believing that it's cool to be laid back. I think I had felt like those two incidents were not big enough to be scary, that it wasn't right to be scared by such things; it's not like we're talking war or rape or murder. One thing the counsellor did was validate that it's ok to be scared by those events. They were traumatic. He gave me permission to accept myself and my fears, and just accepting them seemed to lessen them.

He also told me about a time that his wife got caught short in Toronto, downtown, I guess maybe one of those parts where it's all unfriendly high rises and no shops or cafes with toilets you could use. Anyways, she had to shit in his hat, which he then disposed of. A few things struck me about this: 1) that other people have shitty incidents and it doesn't kill them. It sucks and I'm sure she wouldn't want to repeat it, but she survived and continues to live her life. 2) People will help you, even if it means letting you shit in the hat off their head. Ok, so it was her husband and all, but seriously, that's pretty cool.

I think his story also made me examine my fears in more depth, to ask what was the worst thing that could possibly happen. And I realized, and really accepted, that I might shit my pants one day, but it wouldn't kill me. I might vomit on myself in front of a large crowd, but it also won't kill me. I could even, Heaven forbid, have both happen at once and chances are I would survive – I'd just make sure to burn those clothes as soon as I could get out of them.

One session my counsellor suggested that I try some dream work. So that night when I went to bed, I asked my subconscious why it was being so overprotective. I did have a vivid dream, but it was about my mother-in-law so I immediately discarded it. At the time she was very critical of both Sugar Daddy and I and was constantly trying to convince us to get married. Never mind that I would have jumped at the chance if Sugar Daddy had been the slightest bit interested, but it was quite annoying to have someone trying to tell us what to do so forcefully. I think a large part of me couldn't give her the satisfaction of stressing me out. So I went to the next session and told him about how the dream work failed.

But he didn't think it had failed at all. He thought my dream was quite telling, so I began to accept that my mother-in-law WAS a source of stress. That was another thing that once I acknowledged it, it mostly stopped bothering me.

My counsellor also helped me realize that I'd been avoiding developing any networks here, so intent was I on moving to another city to be closer to my family. For years I scoured job ads and applied for jobs just waiting for a chance to move. Once I realized that I had almost no friends or supports here, I decided that maybe we would move away eventually, but in the meantime I would make this city my home. I started hanging out with people I met at work, and a few months later I saw a flyer for belly dance classes, which I'd been wanting to learn for a while. Six months after that, I decided that life in this city was pretty good, and that other city was pretty depressed with fairly lousy job prospects, so maybe I should plan to stick around.

The belly dance classes were significant. I'm pretty sure it's widely known that exercise is good for your mental health, and it can do wonders for anxiety and depression. But I found that most exercise didn't really get me out of my head, out of my anxious monologues and worries. You can walk and still have your mind going a mile a minute, not taking in a single detail of your surroundings. But belly dance pulls me out of my head and firmly re-inhabits me in my body. I think it's because you have to use your mind to watch the instructor and then try to make your own body move in that way. So it's a combination of exercise and learning that's key for me.

I loved seeing a counsellor. He was a personable guy and I am a chatty person, so I loved having a captive audience who even feigned interest. And he helped guide me to wellness. Although I've always been a somewhat anxious person, the out of control anxiety was most certainly caused or exacerbated by stress, the stress of an uncertain job on a monthly contract, the existential stress of being finished school and trying to figure out what I want to do for the rest of my life, and the not uncommon stresses of family and relationship dynamics. I've known a lot of people who have had mental health problems during their twenties, and as hard as being a teenager is, I think it's harder to be in your early twenties. People expect more of you and you're supposed to be a grownup even though you don't feel like one (does anyone EVER feel like one?).

So, just to summarize, if you're struggling with anxiety, I highly recommend:

• B vitamins
• a diet rich in vegetables, whole grains, Omega 3 fatty acids and not many processed foods... a lot of research has shown that Omega 3 fatty acids play a crucial role in brain chemistry, and it would be my first line of defence for any psychological problem; also whole grains don't fuck with your blood sugar the way simple carbohydrates do
• examining yourself and your stress honestly, maybe with the help of a counsellor
• asking yourself what's the worst thing that could possibly happen and inhabit that possibility
• learning techniques to cope in the midst of panic
• taking up dance or some other physical activity that requires you to learn how to do it (walking, running and biking just don't cut it)
  

So, I think I have one more post in this series, where I'm gonna look at helping children with anxiety. I may even do some reading for that one.

If any of this series of posts has helped anyone, I'd LOVE to hear from you. Please let me know that I didn't bore the pants off some people for naught. If you're not comfortable commenting, drop me a line at cinnamonfemail (at) gmail (dot) com. Thanks!

Round the Bend and Back: Part 3

Ok, so I left off my last post with my diagnosis of IBS and my discovery of Dr. Andrew Weil. But now I remember that Dr. Weil came later.

My anxiety grew from driving and dinners out, to elevators and subways (not that I had any occasion to encounter subways in G-town but we did sometimes go to Toronto and after one terrifying subway ride where the squealing made me feel like we were squeezing through tunnels way too small for the train, I wouldn't ride another one. I still haven't. Which is weird because I loved it when I was younger, as a teenager adventuring in the big city). Not long after we escaped from our crazy enraged landlord into a really nice second floor apartment in an old Victorian house with a lovely kind and conscientious landlord, I got a new job, writing and editing, which was exciting but involved a day or two in the Toronto office from time to time, high up on the eleventh floor, too high to take the stairs. I remember one day in the Toronto office, I spent all day fretting about how I could only reasonably get up or down by the elevator, which I hated hated hated. (It was yet another place where I could get trapped.) Although I managed to put on a competent front and get my work done and hold normal work conversations, inside I was like a guitar string, tuning knob twisting it tighter and tighter, until that moment just before it snaps and frays.

I finally sought outside help for the anxiety. I think I called the family counselling unit or something, next to the general hospital. I spoke to a counsellor and he proclaimed that I had anxiety with agoraphobia and suggested I join a group therapy. It was mostly aimed at people with social anxiety, people who were shy to the point of an anxiety disorder, but that wasn’t my problem. I really didn’t want to bother with it, because I wasn’t interested in group therapy. Especially since social phobia wasn’t my problem.

The agoraphobia diagnosis didn’t sit well with me either. Literally, it means a fear of markets or something like that, and I wasn’t afraid of going downtown, or going to work. I wasn’t completely housebound. When I asked the counsellor about it, he said that anxiety either comes with or without agoraphobia, it's so common, but I still didn't think it really applied to me. Later, I came across a definition of agoraphobia as being a fear of being trapped outside the home, which made a lot more sense to me and seemed a lot more applicable to my fear. That was exactly what I was afraid of. I was afraid of being trapped in a public bathroom or without a public bathroom, unable to get home.

I never saw that counsellor again, but he referred me to a psychiatrist. Maybe it was just him, but it seems to me that psychiatrists are pushers. He just wanted to test my blood to rule out a thyroid problem, which can apparently cause anxiety, so that he could get me on some drugs. I really didn’t want to take drugs. The way I saw it, my anxiety really got out of control right around the time I stopped drinking. I think my drinking suppressed my anxiety so well that I had no idea it even existed until I quit, pretty much cold turkey because of the intense nausea. (Later, I finally figured out that it was probably the Pill, which I'd started taking when drinking started causing the nausea. Once I stopped taking the Pill, I could drink without nausea again. I won't ever go on it again.) Anyways, I asked the psychiatrist why it was ok to take pills to eliminate anxiety, but not ok to drink. And he couldn't give me a satisfactory answer... he hummed and hawed about dosage and context but I came away with my belief intact that if I was going to medicate my anxiety, I would probably be best off doing it with booze. But I wasn't really interested in rekindling my alcoholism so I looked for other answers on my own. When I refused more drugs, the psychiatrist just sort of shrugged, metaphorically, and didn't provide alternatives for me. I never saw him again either.

I decided to quit smoking. I figured that since nicotine is a stimulant setting off little mini fight or flight responses in my nervous system, it might calm me down to stop sucking butts. Instead, all hell broke lose. I think what happened was that my body had gotten used to those jolts of adrenaline, and when they were taken away cold turkey, along with all the withdrawal and psychological cravings, my body decided to take matters into its own hands, and started setting off its own stress responses even more frequently.

Then I went on strike for eight very long weeks, which is when things really got bad. I tried showing solidarity and picketing, but I hated the divisiveness. I hated the Big Bullies that joined us from other workplaces and wore balaclavas and physically intimidated women who were crossing the line. The day I watched a big faceless balaclava'd bully holding up a rubber boot and a jar of vaseline to a woman I had worked with once and who was supposedly betraying our side, the man who was supposed to be on my side but who I'd never met or even seen his face, I went home horribly nauseous, sure I was going to vomit. It had been so long since I'd felt nauseous, but here it was back again and worse than ever.

Looking back, I'm sure the most stressful part of the strike was that I wouldn't even admit to myself that I was stressed out. I had enough to savings to (probably) get me through it, and once I realized the picket line was not for me,I had my days free, something I'd been wanting for a long time. I tried to make the best of it, but I was on month to month contracts when I wasn't on strike, so I think the uncertainty was just way too much. I had constant nausea for months. Even after the strike finally ended, eight weeks later.

One of my first days back at work, I felt that old shaky, sweaty feeling and ran to the bathroom, waiting for the diarrhea and vomiting to start. It didn't. I went back to my desk, shakily, but I still felt sick, so went back and forth from my desk to the bathroom. My colleague saw me and asked what was wrong and I said I must be coming down with the flu. She said she didn't think it was flu, she thought it looked like panic. Her daughter has panic attacks, and they look just like this. I disagreed. It had never ever occurred to me before that these episodes were panic. I went home, where I felt safe, and felt better shortly after arriving.

I think it was around this time that my grandma got in a car accident, and we didn't know if she'd survive. Sugar Daddy had to work, but I took Thursday afternoon off and Friday off and drove, all by myself, to London. I made it, but it was terrifying. The 401 between G-town and London is a pretty lonely stretch of highway through a rural area; in other words, not a lot of public toilets within easy access of the highway. Luckily, I didn't have an emergency, but I was so scared of the possibility, and felt so trapped in that moving car, that just thinking about the return trip made me weep with fear. I remember blubbering away in the hospital cafeteria, not about the state of my grandma who seemed to be doing well, but about driving by myself an hour and 15 minutes back to G-town. Through the blurry curtain of tears in front of my eyes, I remember noticing this mystified look on my mom's face. I think it was the first time she really saw just how bad my anxiety was.

As much as I knew intellecually that my fear about the solo return trip was irrational, I still just couldn't bring myself to do it. So I called Sugar Daddy and asked him to take the bus to London and drive back to G-town with me. And he did, with no questions, no mocking, no attempt to talk me into doing it myself.

Throughout all this (I think my grandma's accident was in May 2002, almost three years since I'd met Sugar Daddy, more than four years since I first got sick), Sugar Daddy was gently supportive. He liked going out for dinner, although I don’t imagine he liked sitting by himself very much, but he didn’t make me go and didn't make me feel guilty for depriving him of dinners out. I could order takeout and eat at home, because then I was close to our bathroom, and safe at home. He never tried to cajole me into staying at a restaurant if I did try to go out for dinner and panicked. He never tried to persuade me to stay for dessert. In short, he never pushed me. He let me push myself.

Some time ago I saw something about how to support someone with anxiety and/or panic. I think it may have been on Dr. Phil (shudder) but it may have been in a magazine or book. Anyways, it said to do exactly the things Sugar Daddy did naturally and unself-consciously. It said to never try to convince someone to stay longer somewhere if they're having a panic attack. And not to push them into going somewhere they don't want to. If they want to try going somewhere, if they want to push their limits, they (we) can only do it knowing they (we) have an escape.

It humbles me to know that if our roles were reversed, I would not have supported him the way he supported me. I totally would have tried to cajole myself out of my anxiety if I were in his position. Perhaps it took me so long to get over it because that was the approach I took with myself.

I wondered if maybe my coworker was right, that I wasn't actually sick with a mysterious illness but suffering panic attacks, but with the constant nausea (I remember popping Gravol once I got to work so that the wooziness would recede before I had to drive home but I would have some relief over the day), I went back to my doctor for help. We tried a few things, but eventually she said, “I'm sorry. I don't know what else to do for you. You don't LOOK sick.” After I had a panic attack at home, I started to feel like nowhere was safe. I became really desperate for relief from the near constant anxiety and dread. I was desperate, so I asked my doctor for a prescription. She gave me Paxil. But it made me more wired and unable to sleep, so I quit after two days. I read on the web that in fact Paxil is contraindicated in people who suffer panic attacks, because we pay SO close attention to every single little sensation in our bodies that the effects of the drug can bringon panic attacks. I was starting to realize that my problem was likely more psychological than physical, but that feeling better would likely require a holistic approach to support a healthy mind AND body.

Dr. Weil points out that western medicine does a few things very well, mending broken bones and curing bacterial infections among them. But it manages chronic, vague, undefined illnesses (like IBS) very very poorly. For example, my family doctor threw some pills marketed at IBS at me, which I took for quite a while, and I think there was some placebo effect, at least I felt like I was doing something, anything, to make myself feel better, and it gave me a bit of comfort when driving longish distances. But I stopped taking them after a while because they creeped me out, and there was no dramatic change one way or the other when I stopped.

When conventional medicine gave up on me, I gave up on it. That's when I started reading Dr. Weil, who has a lot of good advice for making small changes to your lifestyle that add up to good results. He is both an MD AND a naturopathic doctor, so he focuses on natural, lifestyle, food-related modes of healing, and he backs it up with good research. He points out that traditional Chinese medicine, and other “alternative” healing modalities manage the more chronic and vague illnesses, which conventional medicine can't treat, much better.

I discovered Weil's Spontaneous Healing. It sounds like a hoaky, new-agey title I know, but what it offered me was hope. Each chapter focuses on someone he knew personally, and the nasty symptoms they experienced and unsuccessful conventional medical treatments that were thrown at them. Eventually, each person turned to Weil or some other “alternative” healing modality, absolutely desperate and at the end of their rope. And each person is a success story. They became well, despite the fact that conventional medicine could not explain or understand or even believe their healing. Before I read this, I believed that I would never be well again, that my life would become more and more restricted with the mysterious illness that doctors didn't even really believe existed. But reading about people who were much sicker than I was, becoming well, was empowering.

Weil also emphasizes the mind-body connection, and believes that the placebo effect is a powerful thing, not something to discount treatments, but to capitalize on. This too gave me hope, which was what I needed more than anything else.

(If anyone reading this is suffering from an illness that is not being treated successfully by conventional medicine, if you're feeling hopeless about your prospects of wellness, let me know and I will mail this book to you. That's what a difference it made to me. Of course, you could check out your local library first. His other books are good too, and he's a really engaging writer.)

I made more changes in my life. I started eating food cooked with fresh chilis, much to Sugar Daddy's enjoyment. Previously, I'd been scared of their effect on my stomach, but in fact they are, counterintuitively I know, very healing, and anti-inflammatory, particularly for the stomach and intestines. I'd already figured out that spicy vegetable curries and rice rather agreed with me. But now I knew why. Ginger, garlic, chilis, turmeric... they're all anti-inflammatory, and/or antifungal, antibiotic, etc. AND I think eating spicy foods reflects and enhances a spicy outlook on life.

I started avoiding the news. Weil advocates occasional news fasts if you can't handle longer stretches without the news, because the news is mostly sensational fear-mongering. And we really don't need more fear in our lives. I still don't really watch much news. People tell me the things I need to know.

I made sure to get enough sleep. I became almost obsessive about being in bed by ten, but it made a difference. I always felt rotten the day after even a slightly later night.

I quit coffee. This was easy because I noticed an immediate difference in my stomach. I drink strong black tea now, which doesn't seem to have the same painful and anxious effect as coffee. I once tried a half-cup of coffee years later, figuring that my system had healed enough to handle a small amount. I used to LOVE coffee SO much, surely it would be ok. But immediately, my gut got that old familiar gut rot, and my mind started racing anxiously.

I started taking vitamin B6, but didn't notice much difference. Until I went to get a new bottle at the pharmacy, and the pharmacist told me that all the B vitamins work in a chain reaction, so it's best to take a complete B-50 complex. THAT made a huge difference. I noticed that if I stopped taking them for a week, I'd start feeling more vague anxiety and stomach pain. If someone is feeling stressed and anxious, I always recommend the B complex. It clears cortisol, a stress hormone, from your bloodstream, which I believes stops the vicious circle of stress leading to a faster stress response, leading to more stress.

I added nuts and seeds to my diet, which have so many wonderful things in them: fibre, protein, good fats, which help your brain chemistry, and magnesium, which has been shown to reduce arthritis and other pain.

I still can't separate out the anxiety from the IBS stuff. It's a loop, and the one feeds into the other. The more anxiety I felt, the more my gut reacted, and the more my gut reacted, the more I panicked. The gut is a central component of the mind-body connection. When our reptilian brain starts the fight or flight response, which usually happens involuntarily in the face of ANY stress, even the modern kind for which neither fight nor flight is an appropriate response, one of the first things that happens is our gut shuts down to siphon energy from digestion to fighting or fleeing. It's not accident that we talk about gut feelings or going with your gut.

Those changes helped with the bowel stuff, but I still had near constant nausea and intense anxiety. Finally, I called the employee assistance program through my employer, and they hooked me up with a counsellor. One who I could just talk to and who wouldn't tell me to go to a group session.

That's when things finally started to get better.

Round the Bend and Back: Part 2

I wasn't planning to write about this again so soon, but I've been thinking a lot about that time, trying to remember some of the details, the chronology of how things happened... so here's the next installment:

I feel the need to interrupt myself at this point in my story, even though I don’t want to. I worry that you may think badly of me because of the casual way I treated sex. And I want you to know that "casual encounters" didn't always mean sex, and I didn't even have that many... it was a relatively short time in my life. Not that it really matters anyways, but I don't want people to think badly of me.

All that said, I really hate that I felt the need to explain that, and that I gave into it. I hate the double standard still applied to women's sexuality. I hate that our society is still so threatened by women who have (casual) sex and generally discredits THOSE women. I hate that slut is still such a gendered word, that male sluts have to be identified as male.

I suppose it was that same double standard I was rebelling against in my early twenties, in my steadfast refusal to be ashamed of exploring my sexuality, in my pride at being able to separate love from sex. Similarly, I refuse to be ashamed of pooping in public bathrooms (well – as long as no one can be sure it was me). I think that’s why I was so graphic in my last post, which likely alienated several of you. Sorry if I overshared.

Anyways, by the time I met Sugar Daddy, I’d been celibate for almost a year, after a conscious decision, not to stop casual encounters per se, but to stop mixing them with copious amounts of booze. The result was celibacy and it was good for me. It made me realize that those explorations weren’t doing anything good for me anymore.

So where was I? Oh right. I’d just finished working at Black’s and was enrolled in five courses for the upcoming fall semester so I could hurry up and get a general degree, and I’d just met Sugar Daddy. I was even reading Gulliver’s Travels IN ADVANCE of starting school. I’d lost A LOT of weight from being sick so much and not being able to eat a lot. My knees used to hurt if I laid on my side because I was so bony. Many people complimented me on my weight loss, which made me angry, because I hadn’t meant to lose weight. I’d been sick. I usually responded grumpily, “Well if you pissed out your ass for four months straight, you’d lose weight too! Though I don’t recommend it.”

I moved in with a couple of roommates in a rented house, and Sugar Daddy might as well have moved in. He was vegetarian (although too shy to tell me until weeks after we’d ordered several meat-ladened pizzas) and fit and very health conscious. I believe this may have been my first exposure to truly healthy eating. I’d seen obsessive (non) eating, having lived with an anorexic, and yoyo dieting, having lived with my mum, but I’d never really seen someone make consistently healthy food choices and enjoy fruits and vegetables for themselves.

We started our tradition of walking to the Farmer’s Market every Saturday morning (which we still do seven years later) and we’d eat good food all weekend. Around this time, I started to pay a lot more attention to what I was eating, trying to find out if certain foods triggered my intestinal complaints. I became convinced that I was allergic to strawberries, because I felt strangely lightheaded once after eating them. I stopped eating salads after a few unpleasant incidents. Sugar Daddy cooked curries really well, and I started eating more rice and vegetables and less meat. At one point, I had a bladder infection, and thought for sure I was allergic to the sulpha drugs when I felt lightheaded and weird while out walking.

Several times I’d go out with Sugar Daddy and my friends, and find myself on the toilet, nauseous, certain I was going to vomit any minute and unable to find a suitable receptacle (why don’t they put garbage bins in public bathroom stalls?!?), pissing out my ass, out of breath, shaking with chills but dripping with sweat at the same time – basically the same way I felt when I had food poisoning. It was terrifying, and I was trapped, captive until my body allowed me a bit of a break. Eventually, I would pull my sweaty, pale and shaken self together long enough to wobble from the bathroom and catch a cab home, praying that I wouldn’t get caught short in the cab. Sugar Daddy always accompanied me home. I soon stopped drinking altogether, because any booze at all made me feel horrendously nauseous. One night I even slept next to our toilet, I was so intensely nauseous, but I never did actually throw up during any of these episodes.

These episodes happened more and more often, requiring me to pull off the highway on the way home from my parents’ house, or stop in gas stations. Sometimes I would give up on the destination entirely and just turn around, weakly driving the shorter distance back and collapsing into bed.

Over the next year, my diet got more and more restricted as I tried to eliminate foods that seemed to bring on these episodes. I cut out most raw fruits and vegetables, and meat. Some of my restrictions were out of control and irrational but the meat one has proven to be good. I remember occasions from throughout my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood of waking in the middle of the night with horrible nausea, cramps and diarrhea. Since I gave up red meat, I haven't had a single middle of the night episode. And I can remember specific occasions when those times came the night after a barbecue when I would have had at least two beef burgers.

Sugar Daddy and I got our own apartment the next year, I finished school and graduated with my general BA, and got a well-paid administrative job as the result of a local temp agency giving me a lucky placement. So I was functioning fairly competently, but outside of work my world was getting smaller and smaller.

I stopped visiting my parents except for essential holidays, because the prospect of being trapped on a public toilet at a highway service station was terrifying. The thought of having an episode not even close enough to a service station or public bathroom was even more terrifying. If I couldn't avoid the trip, I wouldn't eat anything at all until I got to my destination, to lessen the chance of having diarrhea along the way. I started to carry a roll of toilet paper in the car, just in case I found myself by the side of the road. I’m sure it sounds funny, a funny thing to be scared of, but I was terrified. It was crippling.

I stopped going out for dinner at restaurants, because episodes happened so frequently at them. And it was so embarrassing to traipse across the dining room, and have everyone know how long I spent in there, emerging pale and sometimes still doubled over, walking slowly and gingerly back to my table.

Sometime in 2001, I sought medical help for my symptoms (the physical ones, because as far as I knew there weren't any mental ones). I was referred to a gastroenterologist, who sent me for a colonoscopy. I was very scared of this procedure. If you ever need one, let me tell you that it's not that bad. The preparation is the worst part; the procedure itself is a doddle (as much as having a scope put up your ass and seeing your insides on tv can be) and they give you good drugs. Plus you’re so exhausted from the preparation and nerves and hunger that you can’t rouse yourself to care anymore that someone is putting a scope up your ass and looking at your insides on tv. And they have warmed blankets. Mmm… when the nurse asked me if I wanted a warm blanket, I thought she was being cute. But it was really warmed, like in an oven or something. And it was lovely, compensating for my chilly, exposed ass .

But back to the preparation. I started this series with oversharing and unpleasant details, so I may as well continue in that vein. We lived in a tiny apartment, a former shed in the backyard of our landlord with the anger management problem who shot his pellet gun outside our window for stress relief. The bathroom was tiny. Which turned out to be a real advantage in preparing for the colonoscopy. I took the two bottles of slippery lemon-flavoured laxative with water, representing approximately 40 times the usual dosage. I am not exaggerating. Forty times the usual dosage. So you can imagine how I spent the next seven hours. Just in case you can’t, I’ll tell you. I had my book, and my glass of water (it’s VERY important to stay hydrated during the preparation), and I could reach the sink from the toilet so I just kept filling up my glass, and emptying my bowels in a completely involuntary way, all while merrily reading my book.

The end result of the colonoscopy (ha!) was that I didn't have cancer, and I didn't have inflammatory bowel disease like Chrohn's or colitis (thank goodness). Basically, they couldn't see anything wrong or diseased with my intestines. So the good doctor diagnosed me with irritible bowel syndrome, which is really not a diagnosis at all but an identification that you have shitty symptoms (sorry) and they have no idea why. At my follow up appointment (apparently they don't expect you to remember anything they tell you at the actual procedure, which is a good thing, because those drugs were good), the doctor told me to consume more fibre. But get this: when I asked if white rice had fibre in it, because I eat a lot of white rice and vegetables, he said, yes, he thought it did. I know now that white rice has absolutely no fibre in it (I still eat a lot of it though). (This was before fibre became a marketing ploy.) The only fibre the gastroenterologist – the person supposedly most knowledgeable about the ins and outs of the human digestive system – knew about was in a bottle at the pharmacy. That's what he told me to take. I didn't.

Despite that, the diagnosis was good for me, because now I could do research. And somehow I stumbled upon Andrew Weil, MD. But I think I'll leave that for the next post. I will tell you, though, about one thing I read in one of his books: that medical doctors don't have a single course in their curriculum dealing with human nutrition, even though the second thing that Hippocrates said after, “First, do no harm” was “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food.” I find that shameful. (That was from an American doctor, so maybe it's different for doctors in other places, and I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who knows about this, but my experience with doctors would indicate that most don't know a thing about nutrition.

Round the Bend and Back: Part 1

I've mentioned in a few comments on other blogs and to people in my real life that I suffered terrible, paralyzing anxiety a few years ago. Several people, on the web and in real life, have asked me for more details of how I got healthy. They have loved-ones who are suffering anxiety, or they themselves are.

I've touched on it here and there over the last few months, but I've never really written about just how bad it got, how I got help, and what I did for myself, which might helpful for other people who are suffering right now. So I'm going to start writing about it. I fear it may take me a few posts, to write all that I want to about it. I want to delve into all the nasty details and relive how some of it felt, with the benefit of hindsight and a far healthier perspective. It's ok if you're bored by this; I won't be offended. But I do apologize in advance. And also, things may get a bit graphic... sorry for that too.

Even now, it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly when my anxiety started. For one thing, I can't separate my physical health from my mental health; my anxiety has always been tied to physical, especially intestinal, illness. The McDonald's thing was significant, but I think it goes farther back than that. Back to maybe the winter of 1997-98? It was a shitty shitty winter.

In university, I prided myself on my laid-back near-apathy. I had a lot of fun, and the academic part was an inconvenience. Occasionally I dragged my hungover ass to classes, but mostly I spent my days playing pool with the hair of the dog. At the last minute, I would pull all-nighters to complete papers, and mostly got acceptable grades. I dropped courses here and there when they started to interfere with my pool education or beer appreciation. By third year, I hadn't failed a class. I'd lost my virginity in first year (finally!), and embarked on a series of casual encounters with random men. I don't think I let anyone see if I was hurt by any of them. But my sexuality was just one more thing in my life that I treated with a laid back, whatever happens happens cool disdain, like school, like eating, like drinking. I also prided myself on eating nothing but crap, and not getting sick. I was a bit heavier than I would have liked, but I worked hard to accept my body as it was, rather than give in to our culture's fucked-up pressure to be thin and go on a diet. I mostly ate Kraft Dinner and Mr. Noodles, with occasional chicken fingers, burgers and poutine at the pubs I found myself in so frequently.

Writing this now, I find myself wondering when I constructed this apathetic armour. The academic apathy I'd cultivated for many years, probably since grade six at least. I put forth the minimum effort required to keep getting 80s as a badge of honour almost, and it had the added benefit of infuriating a few teachers who weren't very smart. I often played the smartass. I guess the sexual stuff probably started in second year, or maybe late in first year, after too many heartbreaks. Maybe it started when I lost my virginity. Maybe it's just a necessity of having sex without love.

Anyways, in the middle of third year, the armour started to fall apart. I was living with the roommate who brought in the street kids, and the kid who did crystal meth scared me. We had two kittens, and those street kids got one too, even though the store knew none of them had homes. We found out later, when one of our kittens (Lud, short for Ludwig van Beethoven because he had crazy long hair; we soon started calling him the Rasta Cat because he bathed so infrequently, he grew dreads, and was extremely laid back unless he heard the fridge or oven opening, in which case he would make a run for either of them; once we left him in the fridge for a bit hoping he would realize it's not all it's cracked up to be but it didn't work) got distemper, that their kitten was sick; Lud had to be put down. Our other kitten, Stevie for Cat Stevens, survived and drives me nuts to this day.

In other news of that horrible winter (dare I say the winter of my discontent?), another roommate was suicidal and I had to take her to the hospital after she took all the drugs in the apartment, passed out on the train tracks, and then when she woke up, in one piece, came back to the apartment and told me; my boyfriend stopped speaking to me suddenly at Christmas (which also involved my birthday and New Years); I developed a pilenidal cyst, very painful, followed by weeks of painful dressing changes (which required me to bare my ass to whichever nurse came to our house).

By February, I was pretty miserable, stressed out, and exhausted. My parents took me to Niagara Falls for a couple of nights to cheer me up during Reading Week... It was nice. They weren't judgmental about my smoking for once, I lost 20 bucks (which they gave me) at roulette, they won 30 at the slots... when they dropped me off back at home, I settled down with a big bag of Doritos for dinner and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, which my roommate had rented. So began the horrible food poisoning incident that I wrote about in #11 of this meme. I'm gonna get graphic here, so if you're queasy, you may want to look away. I was so sick, I was puking AND shitting yellow bile for hours before the forced expulsion ended, leaving me dehydrated and weak. Without a word of exaggeration, I didn't pee for two days. In retrospect, I probably should have gotten some IV fluids.

Ok... graphic bit over. You can start reading again.

It was seriously traumatic. Every time I felt nauseous after that, for years, I was terrified that it would happen again. My stomach was never really the same after that. I still kept up the drinking, but it was hard going.

By finals, I had dropped down to three courses. I had two final papers that were not coming together no matter how much reading I did, and the prof, who was a total sweetheart and teaching two of my courses, kept giving me extensions. I just had to get them in by the finals. The night before the finals, I panicked. I couldn't write, couldn't think. The only way to escape was to give up. So I didn't show up for the exams, and didn't submit any papers, and avoided the prof for a couple of years. A few years down the road, he told me that I should have talked to him. He would have helped. In my third course, I managed to write the exam, and dropped from something like a 78 to a 63 with my final, which wasn't actually worth that much.

My stomach just kept getting worse and worse. I learned the unspoken rules and best strategies of shitting in public bathrooms. It's ok for other people to know you're shitting, you just have to avoid letting anyone know it's you. (This, of course, can be difficult when you have a fondness for quirky shoes like I do; I just hope people don't look down.) So I'd wait and wait and wait for silence before I'd emerge and wash my hands as quickly as I could before making my escape unseen. If someone else happens to also be taking a shit at the same time, you wait. If you're further ahead and ready to emerge from the stall, they will wait for you to get out of the bathroom anonymously. If they're further ahead, you let them wash their hands and leave before you yourself leave the privacy of the stall. It's just courtesy. (Although once, a few years ago, someone breached this [previously] unwritten rule and busted me after taking a shit WHILE I WAS STILL washing my hands. Worse, it was a coworker, the kind you don't really like working with but tolerate and make occasional small talk with to keep things running smoothly, AND she had just taken a shit herself. I was furious. I really didn't need that kind of information about her. I guess I still haven't gotten over it.)

I decided to take a break from school. It was clearly making me sick, and I just needed a break. My parents let me stay at home, and paid my rent over the summer while I worked a couple of days a week at a futon shop here in G-town, and spent the rest of the week with them. I bought my first camera, a steel, fully manual Yashica FX3. I explored photography, moved in with a new roommate, and tried to heal. I worked three or four part time jobs starting in September before I got hired full time at Black's. Eventually, I realized that I wanted to work in some kind of communications and figured I'd better finish my degree.

Over that time, I tried to eat a little better, and drink a little less. I remember one day when I had only ten dollars until my next paycheque, I felt immensely proud of myself for spending it on bread, meat and cheese instead of a six-pack. I took Acideophilus to try to repopulate the little guys in my gut I must have lost with the Great Expulsion of 98. I still drank A LOT of coffee though. I think I felt like things were mostly ok. I subletted a little attic apartment and discovered comfort in solitude for the first time ever; for the first time ever, I didn't need to surround myself with people. And it was nice not to have to deal with wacky roommates going through their own shit for a while. I still had stomach complaints - a lot. But I lived and worked downtown, and always managed to make it to a toilet when I needed to. I remember once having to run the last hundred or so metres to my little attic apartment, finding my keys as I ran to reduce time unlocking the doors. I landed on the my little attic toilet totally out of breath, and it felt like just in the nick of time. Sometimes I wondered what would happen if I didn't make it to a toilet on time, but I comforted myself that my body would never let that happen. I thought there was some magical mind-body connection that kept me from shitting my pants in public. Which is what made the McDonald's thing, the night before my first date with Sugar Daddy, the night after my final shift at Black's, so so terrifying. Here was a woman whose body was letting her down, whose legs couldn't move as fast as her bowels. Not only that, but her family just abandoned her, clearly disgusted by her bowels playing fast and loose. That's scary shit.

Stay tuned for the next installment, whenever I get around to writing it...