Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

I went to see my nice Doc­tor last week who is very nice.

That little, nig­gling thing that star­ted in my child­hood and that’s sub­sequently morphed into that big, huge, thing that’s been hap­pen­ing for the last 7 or 8 years. You know, that thing wherein my brain goes into melt­down and my lungs begin to spon­tan­eously crush and I become inex­plic­ably con­vinced that I can’t breath and am going to swal­low my tongue, vomit and die all at once? Well, appar­ently, it didn’t just go away on its own like I thought it might.

In fact, more and more things are trig­ger­ing my panic attacks and recently my anxi­ety prob­lems now sur­face through­out elong­ated peri­ods dur­ing the day, often without any provocation.

I don’t really talk about my wobbles like I do most other things. Not even to K, until recently. Whenever I try and explain just how on most days of the week I feel indes­crib­ably ter­ri­fied, over­whelmed and totally incap­able of doing even the most tiny/mundane of tasks, I just can’t seem to find the words and so find tears instead. The best I can come up with is say­ing I’m hav­ing “bad” or “wobbly” days. Days when I wobble. Or rather, my mind, san­ity, body and world wobble and I just want to go back to bed and hide. Because, there? It’s less wobbly.

I don’t know why, after all the dif­fer­ent hurdles in my life that I’ve adequately man­aged to repeatedly encounter and endure, that it is the simple things like mak­ing a tele­phone call or being in a queue at a check-out that can reduce me to a small, pathetic, gib­ber­ing wreck.

The irony of hav­ing to dose myself up on tran­quil­lisers just so that I can make it through a 2 minute phone call to my phar­macy to arrange to get more tran­quil­lisers is not lost on me.

Dr. Nice was very nice. He under­stood and offered me the choice of a longer-term anxi­ety dis­order med­ic­a­tion pro­gramme or a refer­ral to a Clin­ical Psy­cho­lo­gist. I said FOR THE LOVE OF BOB, WHATEVER WORKS THE FASTEST. Do you know what it’s like to wake up day after day a pris­oner of your own Crazy? Every decision I make is not gov­erned by “Would I like to do it?” but “Will this make me so scared of life that it will send me into giggle-sobbing pal­pit­a­tions where my heart feels like it’s going to burst through my ears and my tongue feels so mon­strously big for my mouth that I can no longer swal­low and so just choke gently, instead?”

So, Dr. Nice decided to sign me up for both, because he’s nice like that.

Today is “Day 4″ on med­ic­a­tion that prob­ably won’t really kick in until at least “Week 3″, with the excep­tion of course, of giv­ing me the infam­ous “Week 1″ dicky tummy Dr. Nice had warned me about.

For one reason or another, I’ve found myself say­ing to oth­ers recently that it’s ok to admit you can’t cope; there’s no weak­ness in it. It’s ok to say that you can’t do things on your own, you just have to know when to ask for help.

I’ve tried deep breath­ing, relax­a­tion and self-help assert­ive­ness tech­niques, mind-over-matter and both expos­ure and avoid­ance tac­tics. I’ve tried for years to just muddle on through this and pull myself together in my own ad-hoc way.

It’s not work­ing and it’s about time I took my own advice. I can’t do this on my own any­more and I’m doing my best to find someone or some­thing that will help me feel what it’s like to not to wake up to a soul-crushing nervous­ness. Every. Day.

P.S. You may have noticed at some point yes­ter­day that I was faff­ing about with the whizz-bang oojima­jig­gery that makes this blog work so swim­mingly. It all involved upgrad­ing Word­Press and mak­ing it even bet­terer and more fan­dangly. But know­ing you, you prob­ably won’t even notice the dif­fer­ence. Or at least, that’s the idea any­way. If you do notice a dif­fer­ence and I have acci­dent­ally made some­thing decidedly a bit on the broken side, do con­sider send­ing mes­sages of gen­eral panic to my email box.