I don’t even know where to begin. So I’ll just say what I feel: Eat a bowl, haters
The last few days have been epically bad. First I went on nortriptyline, then I got notice my divorce forms had mistakes, then I went off nortriptyline, then Rudy got mad at me, then I had a neverending panic attack, and then I got brain zaps. And I still can’t feel my hands.
To deal with panic attacks, my primary put me on nortriptyline in addition to the Lexapro. Mom is pretty sure I had a seizure on the nortriptyline, which I’ve taken before. I didn’t anticipate a problem except for being groggy.
It was a problem though—I couldn’t remember how I got into a wheelchair—and I feel like I have regressed, not improved. Logical Me knows that’s not how any of this works and recovery is not a straight line but Reactive Me is worried that this is permanent. That I will never get better.
In the middle of all of that, I got a notice from the divorce people that stuff was wrong with my paperwork, and in trying to fix it I kept creating more problems. So I’m in limbo until I hear back. The last I heard was something like “will mail these to you if all looks good.” That if is doing some seriously heavy lifting.
After 2 weeks of giving nortriptyline a shot, it was clear it wasn’t working so I went off of it. And like going off of all antidepressants it wasn’t a lot of fun. My blood pressure bottomed out to the point I was fainting just trying to sit up. Of course no one believed I was that sensitive to that little dosage, so I had to overexplain myself and not say “fuck you” to everybody who was worried. The restraint nobody knows I’m spending energy on y’all.
Then the other night Rudy got mad at me. He said “f [my] attention” which he explained away, but it’s just not sitting right with me. I have a standing agreement with myself not to make any regretful life decisions on weed or suffering withdrawal from antidepressants, so I’m biting my tongue.
But it feels razor sharp in my mouth right now. If there’s one thing I can still cling to, it’s my impulse control. I think that comes free with every anxiety disorder. That whole fawning to save my life thing.
Speaking of anxiety, all of this chaos has given me one rolling panic attack. As soon as one clears, it feels like another is on its way. It’s disheartening because I was actually doing quite well…
I’m sorry, I must interrupt. My blood pressure is still really low, but I pooped! This calls for a celebration! Please happy dance in place.
The Brain Zaps were intense and numerous yesterday. They have been weaker and fewer so far this morning. I’d like for them to have not happened, but it’s not for nothin’ I’ve been called hypersensitive to drugs.
And last but not least, my hands. I can’t feel a damn thing with them right now. So it’s super hard to use my phone and eat. Trying not to get trapped by anxious and depressed thoughts with all of this going on?
In November I wrote an email professing my love for Rudy. I don’t know what came over me. I just know that my feelings were strong enough to override the Feelings Kill Switch that my brain thought it needed to rely on to protect me. So my fondness was intense.
I’d already told Dan I wanted him to leave, and he promised he would, but he never followed through. I found myself thinking constantly “I don’t want to live the rest of my life like this. Whatever time I have left.”
***
Cancer made me bolder. Plus I’d spent a lot of time learning to reflect on my feelings while trying to cope with GAD.
Something that sticks with me from Tara Brach’s podcast is the self-reflective question “What am I unwilling to feel?”
I was unwilling to feel a lot of things, but mostly I was unwilling to feel happy. It seemed like as good a time as any to stop the self-destructive bullshit. To my surprise, Rudy’s response to my confession wasn’t “You’re cool and all, but…”
***
Rudy and I had been casual online friends for years because the Brain Tumor Fairies sprinkled us with similar dust. We started talking everyday, though, when the cancer went all in for another round of “What could possibly suck worse than this?”
When I did a thought experiment considering how I would feel if I never spoke to him again, I knew for certain how I felt about Rudy. And although things are messy, I think they’re beautifully messy.
***
Anyway I want the world to know that a new main character dropped.
Sometimes I chastise myself for overthinking things, especially when it comes to anxious thoughts. However, I’ve realized that no one else is going to analyze this stuff for me.
I do self-guided therapy because of the expense (financial and otherwise) of traditional therapy. So thinking about things deeply is to dwell in the belly of the beast. It is not pleasant, but feels necessary.
And that’s about all the context needed for readers of today’s blog therapy session.
When I was very young, like maybe four, we went on a vacation with my grandpa that included a family reunion in South Dakota.
Somewhere along the way we stopped at an indoor water park. My grandpa was supposed to catch me coming down a short slide into a pool that was small and maybe four feet deep. At my age, it might as well have been twenty feet deep.
As I was going down the slide, my dad was launching off of a trapeze in the big pool. Grandpa turned to look at his son as I was coming down the slide and didn’t catch me. I was in over my head, and I couldn’t swim. There was much coughing and sputtering complete with the burning sensation of chlorinated water in my nose and lungs.
After all the warranted fussing, the adults tried to coax me back in the water with a flotation device, but I would have none of it. My lizard brain figured my odds of not drowning were better if I just stayed out of pools.
(I hated pools until junior high, and probably would have hated them longer if I was OK with my classmates knowing I was a big weenie.)
For reasons that seem obvious to only me, anytime Dan looks at something shiny when I am trying to keep my balance, I flip the fuck out and have a panic attack.
Falls are the new drowning.
On my way back downstairs after a recent session of occupational therapy, Dan looked away from me as I white-knuckled the Rollator from carpet to vinyl. Seeing him distracted while I felt unsteady, I said, “My brain needs you to pay attention to me!”
Onlookers may have been shocked at the terror in my voice. I wasn’t.
It’s been about 24-hours of barely speaking to Dan since yesterday’s stalemate. I’ve decided that I don’t want the burden of his anxiety when some days I’m barely capable of handling my own.
He can face his anxiety or not, but I don’t feel calm. And the only way I see to avoid serious regression is to minimize the number of panic attacks I endure.
Unfortunately, while the quiet tension mounts, I remain in a cycle of disordered panic. I can’t sleep, my feet are cold, I spend hours at a time curled up in a fetal position. I recognize the physical pain of being tight and closed, but it’s involuntary. It seems as soon as I stretch out, I find myself in a ball again. With no idea how I got there.
So I went all of today not asking for his help with anything. That way I don’t have to navigate the guilt of his sighs or listen to him remind me that he’s been in pain for 30 years now.
To be clear, I am not dismissive of his chronic illness. It’s just, to be perfectly blunt, his PsA doesn’t cure my fucking cancer. I keep reminding myself I didn’t choose this tumor. But I don’t want to have to keep reminding myself. I’m tired of reminding myself. I feel like I’ve earned a little tantrum, as a treat.
For eight years I’ve been saying to anyone who will listen, “I want one thing not to be a fight.” And my progress with PT? Well, no fight! It was glorious!
But here I am fighting again when I feel pretty strongly I shouldn’t have to. I can be stubborn and entitled too. Like, dude, work on yourself because your anxiety and depression clearly affect me. And I DO. NOT. WANT.
Ninety percent of the anxiety I experience now is me trying to determine what my giant man-baby needs so his fee-fees don’t get hurt.
Because he won’t just say it out loud. And he acts like he’s doing me some big favor by holding everything in.
Three days in a row I had to deal with some stressful things. This is my anxiety progress report on those things: showering and a haircut Sunday, cleaners cleaning Monday, and an oncology appointment Tuesday.
First, before I take on these things individually, I need to take a moment to remind myself that doing three days of stressful stuff before now would have been unthinkable, but I’ve been doing virtual, self-guided therapy and taking Lexapro and things are changing for the better.
It’s amazing that I attempted them. Before-Anxiety Disorder Emily wouldn’t have thought much of any of this. However, the Emily that has panic attacks just because would have needed days between each thing and will still feel horribly incapable.
Whew! I was having depressed, anxious tantrums a couple times a week. I’m so glad something gave, and it was the anxiety—not me.
Showering
Mom buzzed my hair for me. A completely passive and calm experience under normal circumstances, but with panic? Totally draining. And then there’s the shower.
This is still quite difficult for me, but there were moments the running water felt good, and that is huge.
Before, the water stung and I could barely move. Now I get a few minutes of “Hey, this experience isn’t a sensory nightmare!” before the awful sets in. Which may not sound like much now that I’m writing it, but it is significant. I promise.
I slipped getting up which caused all my muscles to seize panfully, but when Dan wheeled me back to bed I didn’t shiver from panic and recovered quickly. I also stood up and transitioned to the bed smoothly.
Cleaners
Every two weeks a lovely crew of about three or four cleans the stuff we just can’t: floors, the shower, etcetera. We round up the cats and get out of their way so they can work efficiently.
In the past, this has triggered panic attacks that basically paralyzed me. I could barely get in and out of the king bed. I often tell Dan I feel like a beached whale when this happens. I can’t move my arms out of my body’s way. I can’t reposition myself. I can’t roll over. He’d have to help.
Then that level of immobility would create a feedback loop of anxious thoughts in my brain that would cause my freeze response to double- and triple-down on the terrorizing, panicky spiral.
I’d worry I’d be stuck there. Worry Dan would hate me. Worry I’d hurt him somehow with all the physical help I needed.
Worry. Worry. Worry.
Yesterday, though, I got into and out of bed myself.
Oncology
I went down two steps into the garage yesterday instead of using the ramp—with a lot of help. It wasn’t at all pretty, and there were a couple times I lost my balance and Mom said “whoa!” as she looked on. But I tried.
The attitude of “let’s see if I can do this hard thing” is its own step in the right direction.
At the cancer center follow-up (which only included routine stuff, yay!) the phlebotomist noticed it was a couple of days past my birthday. We discussed cake—always a pleasure—and she gave me a toy ring as a present. I’ll leave you all with a very short video of the light-up ring in action.
(There are flashing lights, so if that’s problematic for you, don’t press play.)
And that’s my anxiety progress report. More about the various treatment thingies I’ve been trying, too, in a future post. I’ve been trying EVERYTHING.
i started taking Lexapro instead of Xanax for anxiety. Xanax made me feel groggy for too long, and the sluggishness that accompanied it was sure not helping my mood or the paralyzing nature of the panic attacks and prolonged anxiety I was experience.
Wow. Is this what it’s like to not be anxious? I think I like it. What a humongous relief it is to shut off panic mode.
My mind was still racing a lot, but the thoughts were happier, not anxious or depressed.
Day 2
Panic is more noticeable today but likely same as yesterday. The shock of relief is wearing off, and I’m adjusting accordingly. Still feeling better and moving easier. Still grateful.
A lilttle bit of nausea today. I took the med with coffee but not food. (Too eager to take more and didn’t wait until breakfast was ready.)
Was up at 2 a.m. with my standard panic attack but instead of ruminating on how awful everything is I was thinking about all this stuff I might be able to do in the future.
Just this side of an IBS-D flare. I suspect adjusting to the new med has my guts feeling dubious. Plus less pain has meant a better appetite and they might be adjusting to digesting increased volume of food.
Day 3
I slept 8 straight hours! Booyah!
I feel like the mindfulness and meditation are just new skills I’m learning instead of beating myself up for doing something else wrong. It feels pretty profound, actually.
Still having panic attacks, but they aren’t triggering more panic attacks in an unending loop. I’m so relieved.
Still muscle plenty of muscle pain.
Day 4
5:30 am
I am awake after having a weird-ass dream. My muscles are incredibly tense and I am buzzing.
Nothing new, just everything is…weirder?…than usual.
It feels like withdrawals but I’m Zen about it? My brain is like, why are we not panicking anymore? We don’t know how to operate like this!
One of the books I read (Unwinding Anxiety) likened anxiety disorder to addiction. The brain essentially operates using similar mechanisms and forms a habit.
And this buzzing feels like that week I unwittingly forgot to take amitrypryline for pain because I didn’t remember to put it in my pill sorter thingy.
Take your meds, Emily.
5:30 pm
This is a rough time to deal with an anxiety disorder. Nevertheless I plod on with the Lexapro.
I hurt. I can’t tell if my muscles are residually sore or freshly spastic. Maybe both.
There was definitely a panic attack about 1:00 am, and I haven’t really felt relief yet. I thought it would have passed by now but yesterday’s news cycle was a lot, and panic might be appropriate even without an anxiety disorder.
Day 5
I feel more stable mood-wise. The first couple of days had me feeling pretty high.
Overall, I feel like it’s helping. I took a little break from mindfulness and let the med do the heavy lifting. Kinda nice, honestly.
Day 6
Today was a very typical day for me. I didn’t notice any progress, but nothing horrible either. Just kind of so-so with anxiety today.
It’s there, but it’s not constantly up in my peanut butter.
Day 7
Happy birthday to me!
No racing heart this morning and no internal buzzing sensations.
My tummy is a little tight, but it’s my birthday. I’m coddling my tastebuds today and not my IBS. If I get uncomfortably flared, I’ll accept it and ride it out.
Overall, this is the most me I’ve felt in a long time. I’m very hopeful that this med will help me move through my self-guidef anxiety therapy at a quicker pace. The sooner I can manage the anxious intensity, the better.
The way things are wired in my head, I have to be careful. There are two switches side by side. The one on the right shuts off my ability to feel. Anything. The master shut-off, nuclear option. That one makes healing anxiety a challenge.
The switch on the left merely shuts off someone else’s ability to harm me. I think of that switch kind of like a well-chosen troll block on social media.
Both can be helpful when flipped intentionally. However, if I flip the one on the right and leave it on, I can too easily create extra suffering when it’s time to deal with whatever unpleasantness I was hoping to avoid.
The problem for me typically comes when fear has me grappling for switches in the dark and I end up snagging the master switch with a flailing arm on my downward spiral when the non-nuclear option would have been just fine.
This is how I see my generalized anxiety disorder. A result of mindlessly going nuclear too frequently and developing a sort of muscle memory for the nuclear switch.
The good news I see here is that it’s something I can learn not to do.
I was recently lamenting on Bluesky how waking up with my anxiety takes an expensive toll on my body—dizzyness, imbalance, shallow breathing, elevated heart rate, a deer-in-the-headlights paralysis, malaise. It sucks extra, starting every day like that.
I was offered empathy and hope from people who get it, and I’ve added a couple of recommendations to my Amazon wishlist that have the potential to help me. I started following a new account on Instagram too.
People reaching out to me when I’m struggling is helpful, and I blog pretty incessantly about my struggles because I think I can pay that kindness forward.
If you’re struggling with anxiety you do not have faulty wiring. You’re just a human being, and there’s another switch you can try.
Not one to bury the lede on this kind of thing, I’m happy to report my scans show no cause for alarm. The brain MRI is particularly comforting, noting “no significant change” in my brain tumor. At Barnes, this was just called “stable.”
The neck/chest/abdominal CT isn’t as easy for me to interpret. There’s a lot going on in there, but it’s unclear what exactly. Nothing points clearly to more cancer though.
There’s a line about how easy it would be to biopsy a couple of lymph nodes in particular, but three of those suckers have been biopsied already. My first thought was, “yeah no thanks.”
I’ll see what Dr. Oncologist says in a couple weeks when I see him, but I’m over being chopped and tenderized.
I was telling Dan about the radiologist’s remarks for biopsy and he laughed out loud. “Read the room, Radiologist.”
We know the man’s just doing his job, and we’re glad he’s doing it, but just…
I’m on biopsy hiatus right now. I’m so done with that pointless noise that Dan is done with it too on my behalf.
***
Though the CT and MRI were done on the same day, the reports were released to me in MyChart a couple days apart, giving me the opportunity to be anxious about what that meant.
Did the MRI show growth and they weren’t going to release the report until Dr. Oncologist saw it first? Or is it just a more complicated area? Is the radiologist for the brain stuff out of town?
I realized what I was doing (feeding my anxiety monster) and took a moment to recalibrate. “Girlfriend, you don’t know. Give me that Monster Chow and stop binging. Go breathe until you feel better.”
*I used to count the MRIs, but I stopped. 30-ish is a guestimate because I don’t want to go into my patient portal and count. Not my idea of a good time.
For several reasons, the election results triggered my generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) causing me neck and shoulder tension that made me feel like I couldn’t breathe and caused severe, immobilizing pain. I reached for a new edible, the NGW Dark Chocolate Raspberry Bar.
Anxiety is something I deal with persistently since my cancer diagnosis, so I thought I’d write this edible review in that context, deviating somewhat from how I’ve approached earlier reviews.
Today’s review is for NGW’s Dark Chocolate Raspberry Bar. Check out my other edible reviews.
Taste: Good. I prefer milk chocolate to dark chocolate, but I didn’t find this too bitter and it wasn’t heavy on that weed taste at all. There were real raspberry pieces with those seeds you experience when you eat fresh berries.
Overall High: 1/10
I kept taking bites of this hoping for something to work. It did help with my pain, finally, but it took a while and I never really felt high. It did eventually make me sleepy.
Time to Relief: 165 minutes
I tried this edible on an empty stomach, how I usually take edibles. However, I had been taking Betty’s Eddies chews for several days prior. There was no tolerance break, which may have influenced my experience with this product.
Duration of Relief: 8 hours
I slept through the night, which I count a win.
Pain Relief: 6/10
Worth taking, but the price is high when I factor in I had to consume about 12.5g of this bar to get any noticeable relief.
(The bar is smaller than others I have tried with only four 25mg sections. From approximately 5:30 pm to 8:15 pm, I ate about half of one section.)
Munchies (Intensity): 1/10
I ate a square piece of leftover pizza, and it tasted better than usual. I didn’t overeat or feel too hungry to sleep, and I didn’t have any specific cravings.
Couchlock (Intensity): 0/10
I didn’t experience couchlock at all.
Time Dilation (Intensity) 1/10
At one point I had a thought time was moving pretty slowly, but it barely registered. Since I was relaxed and ended up sleeping, I don’t know whether I simply missed the more intense time dilation sensations or if they were extremely mild with this dark chocolate raspberry bar.
Additional Notes:
The packaging mentions that their process involves less weed-y tasting extraction methods. I found that to be true, but wonder now if that process affects potency at all.
To be clear: there are only a couple of days left. The election is now; it ends Tuesday.
I’m trying to remember not to hold my breath about what’s coming, but the anxiety that accompanies presidential elections in the US is not to be trifled with. So I often have to remember to breathe, as ridiculous as that sounds.*
Every time time I see the news about another Trump rally things get worse. Like him fellating a microphone in Milwaukee? What?
Now can we talk candidly about his increasingly uninhibited behavior? How ’bout now?
Can we agree that his rhetorical weaving is concerning? Sure, it’d be funny to me… if I weren’t terrified he’d sell the US to Putin for a tank with his name painted on it, some cryptocurrency, and a half a cheeseburger.
This is one of the problems for me personally and perhaps the nation politically: Donald Trump is so morally repugnant that he has made himself visually repulsive. In addition to turning the orange face and weird hairdo into a caricature of evil, now I’m revolted by the news because I have to look at his ugly face and hear his ugly voice constantly.
Eleven thousand seven hundred and EIGHTY.
Every time I say “eighty”—and that’s the year I was born, so, side note: there are a ton of triggers in a doctor’s office—I hear that phone call from 2020’s biggest, sorest loser in my head. There are things you can’t unsee, and things you can’t unhear.
I would be lying if I said I don’t wonder how much easier It would be to deal with my GAD if Trump and JD Vance were exiled.
I’m also still reeling from reading that piece in The Daily Beast where Jeffrey Epstein is reported to have said that Trump has no moral compass. I mean holy shit. If Epstein is saying that about you?
Cuckolding has (re)entered the political chat, by the way. I had to look up the definition because I couldn’t believe my ears, what with the brain tumor and being gaslit a few too many times.
But there’s the pettiness of the garbage truck thing and the McDonald’s thing too. Like, my dude, I don’t think you want to be drawing attention to the word garbage right now or showing the world you think fries are stuffed in the container by someone’s bare hands.
Trump’s claim that he’ll protect women raises more red flags for me—being promised this by a marriage counselor who did no such thing—too.
I am confident Trump will lose again, I’m less confident that he’ll acknowledge it. And that’s what makes me anxious.
* It’s not strange once you understand the fight flight and freeze response.
With a week left to go until the General Election, I have to be careful about how much news I consume. Especially after the cowardly decisions of enablers like Bezos and Soon-Shiong, there’s a great deal of anxiety that comes with being disabled and navigating the political hellscape here in the United States.
I do plan to watch VP Harris’s speech at the Ellipse tonight, but I have been very diligently managinging the time I spend pondering the political. I avoid social media sites or meter my time on them. Even the one site I enjoy using most (Bluesky) is abuzz with triggering truths.
Striking that perfect balance where being informed doesn’t mean being exhausted with anger eludes me most days. And for me, anger and anxiety are inextricably linked. At least temporarily. That’s a problem for someone trying to manage her GAD.
Here’s how I see it: Republicans didn’t do shit until it was way too late, and that is rage-inducing.
If I’m frank, their belated arrival to the table of empathetic humanity reads to me like they’re only now moved by the realization too few voters prefer what they’re selling.
And for a bunch of Unfetter-the-Capitalism! types? Well. Doesn’t seem like they understand the marketplace of political jobs, now does it?
Too bad the words ‘conservative’ and ‘Republican’ are soggy after steeping in that basket of deplorability for so long.
Anyway, I saw a link to this Flux article on Substack where a conservative talking head got booted from CNN for being too racist:
“The sheer difficulty in identifying qualified, respectful conservative voices without ties to extremism was astonishing.”
Conservatives of conscience* relinquished a decades-long commitment to bad economic policy (trickle down is the best idea they’ve had) for an openly racist and misogynistic platform that’s now synonymous with the word ‘Republican.’ From my vantage point, the assholes thought they were God’s gift to the American flag.
The spectacle at Madison Square Garden Sunday shocked some, but for plenty of us it would have been more shocking to see Trump’s campaign acknowledge its use of unforgivable rhetoric.
I expect a rebrand of Republican conservatism as some of them realize this is a stink that will live in our collective scent memory for at least four score and seven years hence.
I don’t feel up to the task of assessing whether these blatantly racist tactics are more helpful in the long-term because they’re undeniable or more harmful because they’re shouted unapologetically to the masses. They are vile, regardless. And writing that out loud feels important in the wake of ballot box fires, disenfranchising bullshit from NC’s Freedom Caucus Chair, and whatnot.
Whoever wins, I’m sure that violence is imminent. The kids who didn’t get presents on their sibling’s birthday and had violent meltdowns are all grown up, and they are miltant fascists now. I want to believe we can elect Kamala Harris and deliver sweeping majorities of sincere public servants to Congress, but I am low on hope.
