Assorted Nonsense

When Assorted Nonsense V1 crashed I lost a lot of posts that I was sorry to see disappear into the ether.  Happily, I’ve been able to track down some of them.

This is one, along with the original comments:

From Thu 22 Jun 2006

High Anxiety

Posted by Joe Mahoney
 

This is not a subject I’m comfortable posting on. But I’m going to post on it because… and I don’t mean to be all dramatic here, but… I think it might help people. It could even conceivably save a life or two.

One night about eight years ago I woke up in the middle of the night unable to breathe… or so I thought. I ran around my apartment all freaked out convinced that I would shortly die. Being the proud sort, I chose to tough it out, and didn’t call 911 or anything like that. Eventually I reasoned that if I really couldn’t breathe I would long since have passed out. I went back to bed barely able to breathe and awoke in the morning more or less fine… save for the fear that it would happen again.

This sort of thing has since happened to me on several occasions. I would go weeks convinced that something was wrong with my breathing, that I must suffer asthma or the like. So I got tested for asthma, and found out that although mildly allergic to cats (of which I have three, for some reason), I do not suffer from asthma.

About a year and a half ago during a period of some stress I had a series of episodes over the course of a month –including one ride in an ambulance — that finally drove me to see a doctor. The doctor referred me to a psychologist. Now, there was a time in my life that I could not have handled the thought of seeing a pyschologist. That would have meant that there was something wrong with me. But this time I felt as if I was on the edge, and I welcomed the thought of help. In fact, I almost couldn’t wait the month it took to finally get in and see her.

Now, I’m glossing over a lot of details in the interest of making this a reasonably short post. Perhaps I’ll expand on it later, but for now, suffice it to say that I consider the psychologist in question to have been fantastic. She concluded that I suffered from an anxiety disorder, and that from the sounds of it I’d actually suffered from it for most of my life. Of course, I railed against this diagnosis at first, but now I figure she was right. I could go months, even years devoid of any untoward symptoms, and then out of the blue things would go haywire, I’d spend weeks or months suffering panic attack after panic attack and waking up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. And throughout it all I would appear perfectly normal and cheerful to absolutely everybody in my life… I’m certain they never suspected a thing. And I was proud of that.

In retrospect it was damned stupid of me.

Until last year, I never successfully obtained help. I tried once or twice, but it never worked out. Once I asked a therapist if she knew any breathing exercises I could try. “You’re asking the wrong person,” she told me. “I have asthma. You just think you can’t breathe. I really can’t!” That’s an exact quote. Needless to say, I never went back to her.

No, fortunately for me I was finally referred to an excellent psychologist. She believed in talk therapy. We worked several things out, including finally convincing me that I suffered from anxiety. It’s an emotional disorder as opposed to a mental disorder. It is one of the easiest psychological disorders to treat.

Perhaps the most important thing she taught me was that I control what I think. It may be the only thing that any of us truly control. You CAN help what you feel.

The reason I’ve written this post is because I believe that people I know have died because they suffered from a perfectly treatable disorder. They either left it undiagnosed, or figured it out too late.

If you spend your days and nights freaking out, wondering what in the heck is wrong with you, see a doctor. NOW. There’s nothing wrong with you that can’t be fixed. And don’t stop until they’ve fixed you.

I beg of you.

3 Responses to “High Anxiety”

1.   Sandi Says:
    June 23rd, 2006 at 7:35 am Thank you Joe.
2.   AndrewC Says:
    June 23rd, 2006 at 1:34 pm good going Joe .. sometime I will let you know about the stress management courses I had to take after I left the CBC .. I was diagnosed as addicted to stress
3.   Neil Marsh Says:
    June 23rd, 2006 at 1:55 pm An excellent post, Joe, and very brave of you to put yourself out there like that. Thanks for posting it.Anxiety and depression are what kept me from producing my first radio drama until I was 40, so believe me, I understand.