Tag: anxiety

Panic!

Trigger warning: discussion of self harm.

It’s mental health awareness week and I have deliberated about writing this. I am not ok. But I am also not really ok with people knowing that. However, given the point of this week to increase awareness and understanding of mental illness, I am putting this out there. It is scary. It feels like I am turning my brain inside out and hanging it out for everyone to see. But it is my hope that it helps someone and creates empathy for people with mental illness.

This week I added more items to my very long list of issues, generalized anxiety disorder & panic disorder. I have struggled with anxiety in the past, particularly from social anxiety, but in the last couple of months the anxiety has become extreme and I have been suffering from panic attacks. These come on suddenly and the feelings of dread quickly become overwhelming . My heart speeds up (my apple watch tells me my heart rate gets up to around 110-115 beats per minute) and I can feel it pounding in my chest. I feel faint and dizzy and like I can’t breathe. The first few times it happened I thought I was having a heart attack. Now that I know what it is I can recognize that I have had a few in the past, but not as consistently as I am getting them at the moment. They are very scary and I feel a constant sense of unease.

I visited my psychiatrist with my case manager on Wednesday to discuss my medication. I am already on medication for my anxiety that is supposed to help with the panic attacks, but the increase in my mood stabilizers a few months back have caused me to gain 12 kg in about 3 months. I wanted to see what other options there were as the weight gain is very uncomfortable and makes it hard to do the exercise I need to do to stay well as the heavier I am the worse my back pain is. This is a real shame as the current mood stabilizer I’m on (Epilim) has made a huge difference to my mood once the dosage was tweaked. For the first time in years I had felt neutral or good about 80% of the time, and even when the downs hit there was an underlying buoyancy to my mood which meant they were not as persistent as they had been in the past. It was so nice to be able to depend on my mood being ok, and I finally lost the suicidal ideation that has dogged me for at least 7 years.

However, adjusting the medication is what had to be done for physical health reasons. Unfortunately, this meant dropping the Epilim dose by 2/5ths and slowly titrating on to a new med. With this drop my mood has disintegrated. Last night was not a good night for me. I think words do not accurately convey the desperation I felt. It’s hard to explain to people without lived experience of mental illness what it is like to go to the supermarket and be triggered by the alcohol on display because feel such strong desire to drown yourself in alcohol but know that if you do you are loosening your inhibitions and you might harm yourself in that state. To walk past the personal care aisle and see the razors and not be able to resist standing in front of them, wanting blades to harm yourself. To stand in front of the bandages and wonder if you should buy some because you are probably going to fail to hold yourself together in this psychological storm, but wonder if by buying the bandages you are somehow giving yourself permission to self harm.

I didn’t buy razor blades or bandages. But it took superhuman strength on my part not to.  I came home. I did my mindfulness exercises. I rocked in my rocking chair with my weighted blanket, headphones on, listening to my favourite music, for an hour and a half. And the storm raged on. The drive to self harm was so strong I could clearly picture the blade against my skin and the droplets of blood as they slid down my arm. And what that pain feels like and sensation of afterwards when the endorphins kick in. Even the shame that always accompanies the cutting.

This isn’t pretty and it probably horrifies most people. I continue to write and put my experience out there even though it is raw and hard to look at because this is the reality of my mental illnesses. It’s not nice, it’s not pretty, and it’s not easily understandable unless you have come through it yourself. Anyone can struggle with illnesses like mine at some stage in their life. And you more than likely have no idea what they are going through. Yesterday I smiled and said I was ok, when I had all this going on in my brain. It’s not polite to answer the “how are you” question with a real answer, especially if you are in public. But that doesn’t mean the person who is saying they are ok actually is. Look beyond the words on the surface. Life is complicated but a little understanding and kindness can go a long way and doesn’t take much.

Day One of lockdown

So today, here in little ol’ New Zealand, was the first day of the four week lockdown. Things have been anxious and up in the air for a couple of weeks, and gradually getting worse, so to have certainty on Monday that the country was locking down in 48 hours was kind of a relief. And today felt like business as usual, interspersed with some strange moments.

I’ve worked from home before (6 months in 2018) so I know what it’s like to try and work remotely, be self-motivated and try and stay on task. But I had not tried to parent/home school while simultaneously try to work my normal 8 hour day five days a week so I was pretty nervous about how that was going to go. We had a practice run at it yesterday which went ok, but today was both more challenging in terms of trying to get Miss G (age 11) to do some school work, and less challenging in that my anxiety was lower and I was more prepared today.

The last month has been a real rollercoaster for me. I broke my wrist in January and when I got my cast off after 6 weeks they found it hadn’t healed properly and there was some talk about possible surgery. Thankfully after splinting it for several weeks, hand therapy, exercises and a visit to the orthopedic specialist, surgery is now off the table, but I was pretty concerned there for a while. I still have limited range in my wrist and damage to several ligaments, plus various sprains that haven’t healed yet but the bone chip they were concerned about is not the problem they thought it was going to be.

My mental health has been it’s usual – very up and down. I’ve had some really bad days where I’ve struggled with suicidal ideation and thoughts of self harm. I have a strong urge to drink all the alcohol I can get my hands on, which is bad as I am a very depressed drunk and likely to self harm (cut) when I drink. One of my previous nurses termed this “functioning alcoholism”. I am not the usual stereotypical alcoholic. I don’t drink regularly, and I hold down a job and am (hopefully) a reasonably functioning, productive member of society. But when I drink, I binge. I drink a lot, drink alone, and I black out. It makes me depressed and lowers my resistance. Like everyone, I am much more prone to doing incredibly stupid things when I drink, and because I have underlying mental health issues those stupid things include various ways of hurting myself.

So all of this has been going on in the face of the serious crisis COVID-19 has become around the world. I’m an anxious person in general, and had started planning back in February when it looked like things were going bad. However, I am also a person with executive function issues so planning and thinking were as far as I got until about two weeks ago when Italy’s deaths started increasing rapidly and our government started taking more actions. My anxiety was through the roof by this stage, as was a lot of people’s I think. The crazy supermarket stockpiling madness was going on, people I work with were very on edge, and the news was full of scary stories.

Thankfully I had a feeling on Friday that we might end up in lockdown this week so I got us sorted. Over the weekend I ran around and got new computer equipment (modem, router and tablet I had been going to buy for ages and had been putting off), winter clothes as it’s going into winter here and getting cold, refilling my prescription meds, buying groceries (not stockpiling, just refilling) and getting chores and errands done that I’d put on the back burner. For once my anxiety had helped me by preparing me for the worst and envisaging what we might need in various scenarios.

By Monday I was knackered and on high alert. It was obvious to me the country was going to have to lockdown but the question was when and how much notice would we get. After the PM made the announcement on Monday many people (including me) were stunned and struggling. I couldn’t concentrate, and my speech kept getting stuck. I ventured out of work about an hour after the press conference and it was chaos, traffic everywhere, lines out the pharmacy door, panic buying at the supermarket.

Today’s been a stark contrast. It’s quiet as there is very little traffic on the road. I have my desk set up and a vague routine in place. I managed both PE time (kicking a soccer ball) with Miss G and a walk, plus did a full day’s worth of work. It’s an odd feeling after so much stress and worry. Of course it hasn’t all gone away. No one knows how many people will get sick, how long we will be in lockdown, whether we will have jobs to go back to etc. But we still have plenty of food in the fridge and are not too bored (yet!). It’s going to be a very odd four weeks at home.

I’ll leave you with this. It’s not particularly fitting for this situation but I found it today and I love the rhythm in these words and the phrase “Light bends around us”. This piece is an excerpt of from “In Transit (for Arthur Eddington)” by Neil Gaiman:

Light bends around us. So we run,
as gravity reclassifies
the stars we saw behind the sun.

To see the world beyond the skies,
to know the mind behind the eyes,
To find the many in the one
he showed us stars behind the sun.

The full poem and a piece on who Arthur Eddington was can be found here .

Ka Kite and stay safe out there everyone.