May 17, 2025 | Anxiety, Cancer, Personal
Monday’s dentist visit to get a temporary crown was hard on me. I’m just now getting around to writing about it, though, because the physical exertion of PT this week plus the stress of the dental visit depleted my energy stores.
For the uninitiated, chemo is traditionally very hard on teeth.
All the puking plus all the being too dizzy to move and brush my teeth plus suffering through dry mouth was always going to be bad news for my teeth. So my feelings of general dentist anxiety were met with visions of horror stories I’d heard from my cancered friends and the tens of thousands of dollars they’d needed on top of cancer treatment costs because their teeth were literally disintegrating.
I can’t imagine radiation helped me much either.
***
I was eating dinner last week when I chewed something uncharacteristically gritty. I ran my tongue over my molars and could feel a tiny hole. “I think I lost a filling,” I told Mom, who recommended her dentist. I hadn’t been since my first round of chemo in 2017, so I was anticipating a nightmare. But I called Friday and they got me in Monday.
I was so distraught that Dan had to bear hug and lower my rigid self into the dentist’s chair. (I still have panic attacks that immobilize me, even though they are less frequent and less severe these days.) But the staff was kind. And after the new patient exam, the dentist told me that if I didn’t mind seeing the other dentist at the practice and waiting a bit, they could take care of me without coming back the next day
I had lost part of a filling and a chunk of tooth and needed a temporary crown while the permanent crown was in the works. This is my first crown, and believe you me: those suckers ain’t cheap. (So I’m asking for help again, because SSDI is an absolute joke.)
My dentist also recommended scaling and Invisalign down the road. I was all set to be like “I’m not doing orthodontics again” but she explained that cosmetics weren’t the issue. The overcrowding made it difficult to brush and floss, which would hasten decay. Basically, pay now or pay later.
***
In all, I was in the chair for three and a half hours. The Novacaine wasn’t working terribly well on me, and I ended up stopping them twice while they were drilling out the bulk of the original filling. The stress set off my autoimmune whatever-the-hell-doctors-can’t-diagnose, and I ended up with a low-grade fever, muscle aches, and a cold sore Tuesday morning.
The dentist at the practice was very kind and knowledgeable, but looked 13. It was added trauma to realize I am an old. Next thing I know I’ll be saying things like “whippersnapper” and talking about my friend Arthur. Arthur Itis.
Anyway, when he called me a trooper, I knew it was going to be a fun 48 hours of liquid meal replacement shakes.
I am better now, and proud of me for being an entire adult about my dental health. Bottom line is that without EMDR therapy and physical therapy, I’d have made a thousand excuses to stay home and avoid seeing a dentist. I’m proud of me and so grateful this didn’t happen before I was ready.
All of that—crown, cleaning, X-rays, Invisalign—means now I need to raise about $8,000. Yikes. If you’d like to contribute a few dollars to my dental fund, please donate at PayPal.me/EmilySuess or my Brain Cancer GoFundMe.
Mar 17, 2025 | Anxiety, Brain Tumor, Chronic Illness, Personal
I’m sipping probiotic tea after an IBS flare that hurt my abdomen significantly enough to launch me into another panic attack.
The tunnel vision. The pre-syncope stars. The pounding heart. The muscles that just will not to the point I couldn’t even flush the toilet and struggled to pull my pants up. Struggled as in the physical exertion feels infinitely more exhausting than running my first 5k did.
It would be humiliating, the inability to flush a toilet, if I could think about what was happening in the moment, but that’s the thing: the thinking part of my brain (the prefrontal cortex) just relinquishes all its power to the lizard brain (the amygdala) when I enter panic mode. So I look back on the event with shame, even though there’s not a damn thing I can do until someone invents a time machine.
Everything I’ve read assures me that shutdown is one of the ways it’s supposed to work in the the event of actual, life-threatening danger. My brain is not broken, just overwhelmed. The “disordered” part of having an anxiety disorder (and it’s looking more and more like panic disorder too) is that my brain has deemed pretty much everything anxiety- and panic-worthy.
For years I’ve tried to sort out why I’ve had an IBS flare when one occurs and then spiraled into overthinking.
Did I eat too much fat? Did I eat too much sugar? Did the weather get the best of me? Did I get too much sun? Did taking my medicine without food trigger an episode? Am I just too fat and unhealthy? Is my body broken beyond repair? Is this my life now? Will I never have another good day?
What psychiatrist Judson Brewer writes is that the what matters more than the why. Searching for the reason why is an attempt to rewrite the past and make a better one.
But that’s not possible. So I’m spinning my wheels trying to think of what I did to myself when I should be focusing on what anxiety feels like so that my brain can reform its habit loops based on the positive and negative feedback it notices.
I am still so very much a work in progress, by the way.
This anxiety disorder didn’t happen overnight. In fact, I think it likely stems from being dismissed by doctors, pushing for answers, and then getting the brain tumor diagnosis. For a decade now, I’ve felt like if I don’t investigate the problems myself, no one will. (If you’ve been following this blog for a while that might be obvious.)
I’ve spent years starting from the place of “I’ll probably die because no one who can help gives a shit.” Talk about anxiety-inducing. “I’m an English major! I didn’t go to med school!”
That negative assumption is not true, but I haven’t convinced my lizard brain that doctors aren’t inherently shitheads.
Anyway, I am reminding myself that getting better takes time just like developing GAD did. I’m trying to be patient with myself. Trying to remember that when I have panic attacks I’m not regressing, not starting over.
It’s like pressing pause on a movie to get a snack from the kitchen. I don’t need to start the whole thing over from the beginning. So I’ll sip this tea and spend a few moments reflecting on the progress I made.
Because all is not lost. Because I can do this hard thing. Because I have help.
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Mar 6, 2025 | Anxiety, Personal
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.
What follows is a journal of my thoughts. I’ve had some bad experiences with antidepressants before, but am happy to report that I tolerated this one really well.
Day 1
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.
Feb 24, 2025 | Anxiety, Personal
When I was a kid, my parents often did things themselves to save money. For instance, I remember my mom laying new tile in the hallway, my dad fixing the central air conditioner.
As an adult, I’ve been hard on myself about my independent-study therapy, wondering if with all this writing and reading I’m still doing it wrong. But I crossed my proverbial Rubicon today when I realized that I don’t lay tile to save money, I read self-help books about anxiety.
I am doing the godamn thing, even though it’s hard and I’ve never done it before.
Last night about 1:30, I got out of bed to go to the bathroom. On my way back to bed, I had a panic attack and recognized it for what it was in that moment for like the first time ever.
My heart raced. My vision became grainy. My hearing got muffled. My nystagmus kicked into overdrive.
Me and my Rollator made a bee-line for bed after struggling too long at the grab bar to simultaneously pull my pants up and not fall over. As I shuffled across the cold bathroom tile, I thought to myself, “This makes no fucking sense, so it must be a panic attack.”
I hadn’t eaten anything bad or tried a new medicine. There was just nothing that I did to cause the horrible internal things I was feeling or the outwardly noticeable symptoms.
I said to myself, “It would be therapeutically helpful if I could ride this out before lying down and reinforcing the pattern, but now is not the time. I will just stay mindful until it’s over and remember not to let my thoughts feed the gremlin pulling levers in my amygdala.”
The acute part of the panic attack ended in a couple of minutes.
However, I couldn’t get back to sleep for several hours. Instead I noticed an extremely restless wakeful pain in my muscles. A sensation I’ve been experiencing for years. This time, though, I promised myself it wasn’t worth fearing. Fear makes everything worse. That’s undeniable.
So today I have intense muscle pain. Probably because I couldn’t shake off the anxiety at that unholy hour. I feel like I’ve run a marathon without training. I have no energy and my muscles are convinced they consist of 99.9% lactic acid.
After years of wondering, I have my answer and it’s a non-answer. Schrödinger’s answer, if you will.
Why am I like this?
Because.
Feb 20, 2025 | Anxiety, Personal
One thing I have been using my free trial of Spotify for is listening to audiobooks. The most recent book on anxiety I’ve listened to is Rewire Your Anxious Brain: How to Use the Neuroscience of Fear to End Anxiety, Panic, and Worry by psychologist Catherine Pittman and author Elizabeth Karle.
On Amazon the book is marked “therapist recommended.” Though for me the Spotify algorithm suggested it, I can totally believe therapists would want people with anxiety disorders to have this information.
As always, my reviews are offered with the understanding you’ll make your own damn choices. I blog about my experiences, and hope that’s helpful when it’s time to decide what things are worth your money and energy.
The Neuroscience of Anxiety
This book was even better than Unwinding Anxiety at explaining to me how my brain works. Particularly the two paths that lead to my experience of generalized anxiety disorder: cortex-based and amygdala-based anxiety.
Anxiety that originates in my cortex is borne of obsessive thinking, whereas my amygdala doesn’t bother with that weak-ass thinking stuff and just launches into anxious default override mode at what feels like the slightest provocation. Or even no provocation at all.
Where other aurhors I’ve read haven’t bothered with detailing this distinction, I found it immensely helpful and satisfying to have a “why” to offer myself when some techniques worked better than others at alleviating worry, panic, and anxiety.
Sometimes my anxieties knock politely, and sometimes they bust through a wall like the Kool-Aid Man.
Self-Assesments
At a couple of different points, I thought to myself, “Holy shit, you have been through it, girl.” During one of the self-assessment portions, I realized that I was having panic attacks—not just garden variety anxiety, but rapid heartbeat, dizziness, paralysis, etc—daily for most of 2024. And sometimes these attacks lasted for hours.
That’s why there were no reported changes to my brain tumor on MRIs. Anxiety was a condition I’d been unwittingly nurturing since childhood, and the brain cancer was just more fodder.
I woke up every morning for months in sheer terror. And my oncologist—bless his quite thorough, helpful, and knowledgeable heart—gave me fuel to reinforce the panic with each new biopsy until I became a shell of a human with a soft, fearful middle.
Anxiety Exercises
Knowing why the exercises would help and how I could expect to feel as a result made trying them easier.
For example, I realized that immersion therapy appealed to me for handling my fear of falling. However, by bailing on my standing at the first sign of vertigo, the amygdala wasn’t understanding I was safe.
Instead it was reinforcing what it remembered about protecting my body: don’t move and nobody gets hurt.
The realization that I need to ride out the panic coupled with the requisite mindfulness (internalizing different sensations) gives me hope that I can continue figuring this stuff out through independent study.
Anxiety Medication
The basic information I got about different anxiety meds and how they work has helped me in two ways: I know why I don’t like Xanax, and I’m not fearful of trying something else in the future.
GAD had programmed my brain to freak out over everything, including new medications. Now that my lizard brain understands the meds aren’t going to kill me, my cortex can chill out and stop trying so hard to convince myself meds are not a threat.
(Incidentally, unwinding anxiety is the best metaphor for how this junk is all tangled up in my brain like a trunk full of last year’s Christmas lights. Absolute perfection.)
Overall I found this book helpful, particularly as someone who experiences severe anxiety, disability from anxiety and cancer, and an unceasing desire to understand how things work.
