These past days

It has been an intense week and a few days. I guess from the outside it would appear that I am losing it.

A few months ago I started to become nervous while it worked out at the gym. All of a sudden, my heart rate and forcefulness of its contraction while exercising became very noticeable (only 15 minutes in to a workout usually). Having the type of impressionable and creative mind I have, I immediate developed many potentially fatal explanations for these phenomenon. The only way I've adapted to deal with such potential hazards of life is to worry the shit out of them. As you can imagine, nervousness turns any cardiac abnormality into an amplified abnormality. The other permutation is that nervousness turns any regulate cardiac response into a completely inappropriate cardiac response. Oh dear.

I like to think in terms of hunter/gather a lot. That is, if I were a hunter/gather would I have this problem. In short, no. I wouldn't be alive, no doubt. Since even the most mild of myopias prevent you from hunting effectively, I'd have starved to death sometime around eighteen, which is only five years from the average life expectancy anyhow.

So did ancient man worry about random heart defects, sudden vascular events and other abrupt and fatal maladies? No. They didn't know about them. And even if they did, who'd have time to obsess over these unworthy thoughts?

One does not have to go so far back to find people who would find this worrying thoughts I have a complete waste of time. I suspect in this world only a fraction of a fraction of people ever entertain a thought about dying when they are completely healthy and safe (as I am). It is embarrassing to admit that I have worked myself up to the point where this interferes with my life.

Indeed it has. In mid-February, I began to seek help for the exercise anxiety by self-medicating with an SSRI I used to take, but discontinued in January due to weight gain. Four days into starting it I had a severe night-time anxiety attack during which I drove to the hosiptal. I woke Tara out of a sound sleep and she was understanably terrified. It seemed purdent to discontinue that drug. I continued to have my exercise anxiety, so I went to the health clinic for a consult. I was seen by a PA who I recognized from a previous visit years ago went Samatha, my college girlfriend, requested I get multiple STD tests before embarking on a sexual relationship.

He is an excellent care provider, this PA. He prescribed me Lexapro, which I'd taken before and told me to drop about fifteen pounds. After that visit, things became worse. Everytime I attempted activity I found myself concentrating on my apparently overworking heart. I stopped the gym altogether. Out on a bike ride I noticed my heart rate was unusually high for the amount of activity I did. Then it was happening as I was climbing stairs. I was becoming both scared and frustrated.

I have a problem, however, that prevents me from distinushing real from mind-made. I've found over the years of dealing with this anxiety disorder that my mind can make just about any symptom appear short of coughing up blood...and actually dying. I feel that I committed to something with out ever knowing it, like a pact with the medical gods--the mean and indifferent medical gods.

"Take this head. You'll know all symptoms to all rare and fatal diseases", say the gods to me at the primorital lowering of my skull onto my body.

"Sure!", I say, "That sounds useful!"

"Oh yeah, hey, there is kind of a catch", on of the gods say to me over its immoral togaed shoulder. "You'll think you have every last one of them and it will eat you up."

"Yeah? Thanks. Can I have some rational thought to deal with that?"

"No. We gave that to that calm fellow over there."

And so, every so often, I cry wolf. I've never visited the ED for any phantasma affliction, that is until last Friday. This was a huge blow for me. I thought that whatever my anxiety through at me, I would not make it so real as to visit the ED and expect them to save my life. In other words, I made it real enough to myself that it became real. That has never happened.

There is an addition diminsion to this disorder of my neural wirings. I have cried wolf long ago when I was a child with anxiety and I feel I will not act quickly enough, or at all, if something is actually wrong with me. That is the price I pay, I suppose. Worrying is as addictive as heroine, and I can't seem to kick it.

As I deepen my medical knowledge, I pray that some power helps me to become rational. I hope that I can except with peace the truths of this life: that I will die, that ones I love will die and that it is not a source of worriment or hand-ringing. It is the way life has cycled on this earth for billions of years. I would think it would feel as natural as living.