High Anxiiiiiety

A few weeks ago, I found myself lying awake for an entire night with a racing heart and unrelenting chest pain. I didn’t get a minute of sleep.

And I was alone. Julie was in Kentucky for three weeks, helping out her family.

Throughout the ordeal, of course, I flipflopped over the question so many of us face as we get older: “Is this distressing enough to warrant medical attention? Should I go to the hospital?”

After all, the resounding advice, especially for women, is that we shouldn’t ignore the signs. Women’s heart attack symptoms are different from men’s.

On the other hand, the chest pain felt exactly like reflux. Was I being a hypochondriac?

Was it a thyroid problem?

I hadn’t slept for one moment. Was I even thinking clearly?

Finally, though, I felt too weird, and as the sun was rising I decided to get myself to the ER.

***

In the days before this incident, I’d already been experiencing intermittent attacks of a hammering heart and a disquieting feeling. There seemed to be no explanation for it. Julie was out of town, but surely that couldn’t be the problem. I’d lived by myself for years earlier in life, and usually I relish being alone. (Crank up the tunes! Eat ice cream for breakfast!) Still, something was simmering. I told Julie about it and she wanted to come home, but I refused to let that happen. Her family needed her.

My BFF (another Julie, so I’ll just call her JR for now), who lives across the country, was scheduled to come out for a visit in a couple of weeks. Julie suggested that I ask JR if she could come early. I was mortified and strongly resisted the idea. Why would JR want to do that? I was sure that she had a preplanned busy schedule. But Julie insisted that I “just put it out there,” and I relented, composing an e-mail full of disclaimers and apologies and sending it off. JR immediately called and I was right: she already had a raft of commitments, including tickets to a show. But she suggested that I call her every evening to check in. The first of many kindnesses I’d receive, despite my armaments.

***

On the morning I got myself to the ER, I really doubted that I was having a heart attack, but I wanted to rule it out.

Of course, because I am who I am, I decided to take a shower first. No sense facing medical professionals with crazy hair!

Despite the early hour I then texted the young woman who occasionally boards our little dog Buster, and she rushed right over to pick him up even though it was a Saturday before 8 a.m. and I’m sure that that was the very last thing on earth she wanted to do. The second kindness.

Finally I summoned a car to come pick me up. It was only about an 8-minute drive to the hospital and I assumed I wouldn’t perish in those 8 minutes, but I thought it best not to drive myself.

I contacted Julie, of course, and she again wondered whether she should fly immediately home from Kentucky, but I still wouldn’t hear of it.

I also got in touch with my sister Janine, who lives two hours away and told me she’d be driving down immediately with her husband and would stay a couple of days. The third kindness.

And there were others.

***

Long story short, my initial EKG was “alarming,” according to the ER doctor, because of something called “inversions” (what? had my heart actually turned itself upside down? I wouldn’t doubt it, the way it had been thrashing around). But once I calmed down everything returned to normal, and I was released 8 hours later with standard test results and a suggestion that I seek out a cardiologist, just in case.

My self-assessment was that I’d had a panic attack.

So what was the stressor?

My only conclusion was that because Julie was gone, I had more tasks to accomplish than usual. I do tend to get anxious about impending “to-do”s for no apparent reason. Maybe dealing with my upended routines and our aging dog Buster and his meds and routines – all of them easy, basic tasks – became too much? I don’t know! It’s my only theory.

***

A few years ago I watched a documentary by Susan Polis Schutz called It’s “Just” Anxiety. It follows the lives of people dealing with severe anxiety, and I mean severe. These poor people are in agony. One young woman wails in her car because she’s too afraid to go into a bank. (“Why would anyone ever want to be with me?” she cries.) A middle-aged woman still lives with her mother because her OCD and germaphobia are so bad that she cannot leave the living room chair. Scott Stossel, editor of The Atlantic, disclosed in his interview that he has agoraphobia, panic disorder, fear of cheese(!), and especially fear of vomiting; he carries Dramamine, Pepto-Bismol, and a seasickness bag with him at all times, even though he hasn’t vomited in decades.

So, to put it all in perspective, my anxiety is – most of the time – a piece of cake.

More than 40 million Americans have some form of anxiety-related disorder. Sigmund Freud harbored a terrible fear of trains. Charles Darwin suffered from crippling dread. The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz had stage fright so acute that he couldn’t perform unless his personal physician was sitting in the front row. While reading 49er quarterback Steve Young’s autobiography QB: My Life Behind the Spiral, I was astonished at the debilitating anxiety this Hall-of-Famer had to overcome, just to play the game of football. Basketball player Kevin Love of the Miami Heat once had a panic attack right in the middle of a game.

***

When I was about 10 years old and in Catholic school, I developed a strange OCD condition that was actually covered in the documentary. In a nutshell, it involved my performing the same action repeatedly until I just about wore myself to a shadow. One manifestation of this was that I feared being incorrect so much that if my father asked me whether I had locked the door as we were leaving the house, I would run back inside and re-lock and re-check the door multiple times, in case I was incorrect or had spaced out, in which case I feared that my “yes” answer would be some sort of de facto form of lying (and thus a sin). It drove my parents – and me – crazy.

The other – even more torturous – form of this anxiety was that I came to believe that when I said my prayers at night, I had to concentrate surgically on every word so that I fully and deeply understood everything I was saying. If I lost focus, I forced myself to start over. I remember sitting in bed on hot summer nights, sweating, increasingly frenzied, as I spent hours trying to finish my prayers, starting over, starting over, starting over.

Looking back, I believe that much of that anxiety was fostered by going to a religious school. Don’t get me wrong; my education there was terrific. But I think that the combination of my timidity and naïveté and the intimidatingly hardline religious education at the hands of the nuns caused me to be easily alarmed. Someone in class had asked about the hypothetical scenario of being struck dead on the church steps while on the way to Confession: would the sinner go to hell in that case? That scenario had filled me with fear of ever doing anything wrong, no matter how inadvertent.

It wasn’t long before I lost those extreme OCD tendencies, thank goodness. I’ve remained a worrier, though. For a while I took the beta blocker Inderal when I played drums onstage, just to keep my legs from shaking. And I’d get sick before every softball game I pitched. I definitely could have been a better athlete had I not been hamstrung by anxiety and the yips, starting in high school.

I’m lucky, though, that I don’t suffer from depression, because anxiety and depression often go together. For the most part my nervousness is simply a trait I mock in good humor. (See Smoke and Mirrors about medical appointments and parking, Booth Phobia about street fairs and farmers’ markets, Panic at the Pump about gas stations, and The Lonely Neurotic, which is self-explanatory.)

My good humor did take a temporary respite, however, when I was in the Emergency Room for 8 hours.

***

After my sister and brother-in-law left, I was still having tremendous trouble sleeping. My fear of a heart attack was diminished, but there was still an unease in me. I was still all too aware of my heartbeat, and all too concerned about a relapse. It’s like a circuit that goes haywire: anxiety increases our heartrate, which increases the anxiety. It was then that JR casually told me in what I thought was a routine phone call that she’d decided to scrap her plans and was going to fly to SF early. I started to slowly calm down. And that was the fourth kindness.

***

In the few weeks after the incident, I mentioned my anxiety to a few people if it came up somewhat naturally in conversation. And with almost all of them, there was a common theme: “Why didn’t you call me??!” They sounded upset, even hurt, that I hadn’t reached out to them.

“We would have invited you over for a cocktail!” a neighbor insisted as she hugged me. 

I should have known that talking to people – even strangers – can work wonders. A few years ago, while on an Amtrak train, I started having heart palpitations and feeling sick. (I didn’t even think about the three cups of coffee I’d just had with breakfast.) What was wrong with me? Was I having a medical emergency? I was really concerned and decided to leave my room and sit among people in the Observation Car, just in case. “Whereabouts are we?” I asked a fellow rider to distract myself. “Probably a few miles west of Denver, because we just went through the Moffatt Tunnel,” he told me. “We’re at about 9,000 feet.” It occurred to me then that maybe I was experiencing some altitude sickness. “I wonder if that’s why my heart is hammering,” I said. “Oh, for sure,” he answered calmly, unconcerned about my heart, which was a comfort. “But we’ll be steadily descending now.” My fears were assuaged, and he had no idea what he’d done.

***

So why hadn’t I said something this time around? Maybe a cocktail and some conversation would have been the answer.

Maybe I don’t want people to “take care of” me because I fear that it’s infantilizing and makes me unappealing.

Or does my shame about reaching out to someone come from a Victorian sentiment that I’m just not that important? Possibly.

But wouldn’t it make more sense to “just put it out there”? If friends can’t be available, they’ll say so, right?

Most of the people in It’s “Just” Anxiety eventually found help and saw results. Not cures, but some management of their symptoms. “I have a life now,” one of them said, “and I feel happy.” A huge toolbox of medications and therapies is available for anxiety sufferers.

I don’t know whether I need to be going down any of those therapeutic roads yet. But I did learn one huge lesson for now:

People are good. They want to help. When in need, PICK UP THE DAMNED PHONE.

***

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***

Due to popular demand, I am including, at the end of each blog post, the latest random diary entries that I’ve been posting on Facebook for “Throwback Thursday.” These are all taken absolutely verbatim from the lengthy diaries I kept between 1970 and 1987.

January 31, 1976 [age 20]:

“Krish and I went out to pizza at Shakey’s and then to see ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ at Century 22. It was an excellent movie. Good old Ken Kesey. And his magic bus. Krish did not try to even put his arm around me, and I’m glad but also slightly offended.”

February 1, 1976 [age 20]:

“Tonight [a dormmate] asked me to go ask Jeff and Jim upstairs to turn their stereo down, so I went up and it was all dark inside their room with a blacklight on and Dylan on the stereo. How dreamy! So instead of asking them to turn their music down, I stayed and joined them! ([My dormmate] wasn’t too happy with me.)”

February 7, 1976 [age 20]: [Ed.’s Note: Gad! The extent of our stupidity (and energy) at that age!]

“On Thursday, I’d mailed a letter to [my friend] Joe and got really mushy in it, even going so far as to say that I love him (in a friendly way). Well, he and [my friend] Morris came by last night complete with Jack Daniels, rum, tequila, brandy, champagne, Coke, 4 boxes of mixes, glasses, peanuts, napkins, shaker, jigger, etc. The night was unreal. We [including my roommate Sally] sat around, talked, and drank until we were plastered. I had two glasses of champagne and a great number of rum-and-Cokes. I can remember fragments of things, like someone taking off my shoes and socks, and me spilling drinks, and drinking scalding tea and wearing Joe’s jacket backwards. Joe and I ran up and down the halls and wrote Morris’ phone number on all the girls’ doors. Then we stole pencils and wrote inane things on the hallway poster out there, like under ‘I am here because . . .’ I wrote ‘to experience the joys of food poisoning.’ Sally eventually got sick and conked out, and the boys left at 3:30 a.m. Sally and I woke up at 7:00, for some reason, and we asked some poor girl to walk to 7-11 and get us Slurpees. Later we found out she had to walk in the rain! Sally had gotten unconsciously sick in the night and it took us two hours to clean up our room. In general, we were sick as dogs all day. What a fun time!”

February 13, 1976 {age 20]:

“Originally I intended to study tonight but [my friend] Bruce came over and painted my nose with my yellow felt marker and now it seems that I’ve spent all my hours making up a crossword puzzle for no reason at all.”

February 20, 1976 [age 20]:

“I had a fever today so I stayed in and watched Dinah Shore, who really irritates me because 1) she interrupts everyone to 2) argue badly because I really think she hasn’t any brains to speak of at all. But I wanted to see Richard Dreyfuss – he’s a little arrogant but the most intelligent (not to mention good-looking) young star I’ve ever seen or heard.”

March 3, 1976 [age 20]:

“Don, the dorm guy upstairs, asked me to go to a concert on Friday to see Dan Fogelberg! Don is a psych grad student who’s from New York and he’s kind of old – I think 25. But I like him because he knows about Jack Kerouac and I can talk to him. The only problem is that I really don’t know who in the heck Dan Fogelberg is, so I’m going to go home tomorrow night and ask [my brother] Marc to give me a crash course in Fogelberg 101.”

March 13, 1976 [age 20]:

“[My friends] Carolyn, Mary, Diane, and I headed up to San Francisco today to eat dinner before picking up [Carolyn’s parents] at the airport. During dinner at Pam Pam East I dropped a morsel of food down the front of my chest, reached for my purse, and knocked my glasses across the table and into Diane’s food. Later, as we were crossing the street and discussing the meal, Carolyn told of how her salmon was just a 2-inch-square piece, and just as we came up beside a young lady and her boyfriend, Carolyn said loudly, ‘Mine even had a BONE in it!’ and the girl turned to her and said, ‘You’re lucky!’ ”

March 15, 1976 [age 20]:

“Don dropped in after dinner and we talked through two records till he finally asked me to go to San Francisco with him on Sunday. Thinking of the THREE papers I have to write this weekend, I immediately, of course, said yes.”

March 21, 1976 [age 20] [a serious one, but representative of how a naïve young woman can be made to feel, so I’m including it]:

“Jerry [a fellow student whom I had dated once or twice, nothing more] had gotten us tickets to see Pablo Cruise, but when I got to his house he said he wasn’t going, and then we proceeded to have an hour-long argument that got me so confused that I couldn’t trust my own values. I guess the crux of it was that I was ‘deceitful’ and ‘conniving’ because I wouldn’t sleep with him, that I shouldn’t think I can turn men on and off like a light switch, and that I was causing him ‘pain and agony,’ as if it were MY fault, and as if it’s MY problem. He is very brilliant and he swerved around a lot and I started doubting myself and wondering if I should adjust my limits just for him. At 12:30 when I got back to the dorm I went to see [my dormmate] Mike.  I love him so much as a friend, we got stoned in his car, and I told him everything and he sweetly said, ‘Look, that’s a bunch of lines, you don’t have to take that stuff, he’s gotta respect you. If he really liked you he’d accept you.’ At 2:00 I came home feeling much better; at least not every man is like Jerry. I’m hoping that maybe I’m not really a guilty, untender person after all.”  

March 24, 1976 [age 20]:

“At this point in the semester I seem to be getting pretty concerned about my studies – I’m WAY behind in Law because I still don’t have the book yet, I’ve got an English Lit paper due Monday which I haven’t even started, and I have about 100 pages in that stupid ‘Norton Anthology’ to read. So what did I do today?  I went to see the gray and quiet poet Howard Nemerov, and then I sat outside the door writing about universal human realities.”

March 29, 1976 [age 20]:

“My hay fever is so bad that from Friday night until today [Monday] I haven’t stopped sneezing except to sleep. Plus my nose is so raw from honking it and my throat is so dry that I decided not to go to work. Then when I was leaving [the dorm] to go have dinner at home, I noticed a policeman about to enter the parking lot where I was still illegally parked ’cause I hadn’t gotten up in the morning. In the 15 seconds it took me to get into the parking lot he’d already given me a ticket. I now owe the municipal court 5 clams!”