Anxiety 101

Well the inevitable hap­pened last night. The stress of every­thing going on in my life finally made me come to a screech­ing halt. I am the kind of per­son who doesn’t directly address what is going on. I know it’s there but, like most women I don’t have time to sur­vey the dam­age because I have to quickly move on to the next cri­sis.

Well last night while fruit­lessly try­ing to hang cur­tains (as I am in nest­ing mode prepar­ing for the com­ing start of the new school year) I began to feel kind of odd. I knew I didn’t feel right but I was con­vinced that it was just the stress of try­ing to hang cur­tains on a too short cur­tain rod. But, no it wasn’t. I began to feel like I couldn’t stand up like I was going to faint. But, the feel­ing over­took me and like a scene from that life alert (I’ve fallen and I can’t get up) com­mer­cial I had to make “The call”.

I per­son­ally have never called 911 for myself. I have for my daugh­ter a cou­ple of times but, never for myself. In fact, I have only per­son­ally been a patient in the hos­pi­tal three times in my life. My birth and the births of my two daugh­ters. So I can hon­estly say I have a lit­tle touch of the “I didn’t think it would ever hap­pen to me” syn­drome. So as I gasp for air as my calm chil­dren watched on (which sur­prised me that nei­ther one of them freaked out) I lis­tened to the 911 oper­a­tor ask me ques­tions about do I take med­ica­tions? No. Am I hav­ing chest pain? No. Who’s there with me in the house? My two chil­dren. During this process it donned on me the level of my alone­ness but I didn’t dwell on that. I thought about if this was some major thing who would care for my girls? Let that thought pass too. Had my daugh­ter open the door for when the ambu­lance came and like most women thought about the state of my phys­i­cal appear­ance which was over­all dis­ar­ray seem­ing that before the cur­tain hang­ing I had just woken up from a nap.

Naturally, I was wear­ing this night gown thing that I often wear around home when I don’t antic­i­pate going out or vis­i­tors. So there I sat basi­cally wait­ing on the EMT’s to rush in with chest pads (I didn’t know. Never been through this before). First per­son in? Handsome black fire­fighter. Dang! Of course. He patiently asked me basic ques­tions until the EMT arrived. When they got there they took my blood pres­sure. ²²⁰⁄₁₁₀. Not good. EKG nor­mal. “Miss, because your BP is so high I think you need imme­di­ate med­ical atten­tion”. Dang. Ok.

Had to make the call to a good friend to pick up my daugh­ters. While wait­ing the med­ical per­son­nel joked with my girls and one of them showed them recent pic­tures they had taken with the Jonas Brothers from a con­cert they had here not long ago. Made my kids’ night. Long story short. Ambulance ride. No Siren. No insur­ance. Oxygen. Blood work. Wait, wait, wait.

“Everything came back fine,” says the ER doc­tor, “I know what you’re going through I have a dis­abled child myself. Here’s some­thing for the anx­i­ety. Follow up with a Doctor.”

And now here I sit to relate this story to all of you. Until this moment I have been uncon­sciously aware of the stress. I have my moments but, I try to let opti­mism pre­vail. Something that I took away from last night’s expe­ri­ence is to acknowl­edge the stress and not sup­press it. And anx­i­ety is no joke. I felt afraid. In care­giver sit­u­a­tions we feel our fam­ily mem­bers pain but, you don’t tend to think of your­self. After that expe­ri­ence, I know that it’s time to think of myself too. I can’t care for any­one if I’m not here.

Thanks for read­ing,