The Art of Managing Depression/Anxiety

My birthday is in late June.  I always wait for it with anticipation.  It’s my day.  However, birthdays have a negative and positive side to them.  Birthdays serve two purposes in our society…celebration of an individual and noting a person’s timeline.  I like the celebration part but the timeline really disturbs me.  It makes me feel like I made it to the finish line once again, but it also means that a new race to survive has begun.

The fear of new dangers arising and old danger rearing their heads is acute.  Generally, I get physical symptoms related to anxiety (stomach ache, for one) which start up right after my birthday and reach a crescendo in early July.  At that point I start to wonder why my danger antennas are at full alert.  Is there real danger out there?  Possible, it has happened before.  Or is it anticipatory anxiety.  This is a more certain possibility.  I have gotten anticipatory anxiety every year since a series of really dangerous things happened around my health and my physical survival was at risk.  The acute anxiety is a Post Traumatic Syndrome (PTSD) attack.   The birthday is the trigger.

I am now at the stage in this attack of acute anxiety and/or PTSD when I start to wonder what to do to alleviate the symptoms.

Plan A is to take some actions that will help get me firmly back on the  “one day at a time” and “be in the moment” track.  My two most potent weapons are meditation and mindfulness. Unfortunately,  currently I am resisting doing both of those things.  I need to keep trying and finally there will be a crack.  My goal is to live in the moment where it is  safest.

While I am waiting for Plan A to work, Plan B is to act “as if ” Plan A is working.  It is a trick of the mind.  When Plan B is not working, I go  to Plan C.  In this plan I suspend reality and imagine that an angel has taken my place.  I even give her a name.  My real self, in my imagination, is suspended in space, waiting for my acute anxiety to pass.  The angel, free from the acute anxiety, lives in the moment.  This works if I am willing to suspend reality.

The there is Plan D, identify the problem and wait until it passes.  No tricks, just patience.

Life is about Love

© G. Dumas

I have wondered over the years whether and how my depression/anxiety has effected my mothering.  My most basic rule has always been to never consciencly use my son to lean on when I am down.  He should lean on me not the other way around.  While I think I have done a good job on the conscience side, I wonder whether my mood problems have unconsciencely affected my relationship with and or hurt my child.  A mood disease is both confusing for the one who suffers but terrifying to those around you because it effects your personality.  There is nothing scarier then to have a parent change their personality.  I saw it a few times with my Dad.  It was like an alien had taken over his mind.  We all want our parents to be strong and their for us.  Since I wanted so badly to have my father present for me, I have been conscience of not exposing my son to the worst my disease has to offer.  However, I have been honest with him about the facts of my disease.  I emphasize it is just a disease like any other, but it can get complicated.  As my great grandfather use to say “life is grand if you don’t weaken”.  Just taking the next step each day is not weakening.  That is lesson I hope I have taught my child.

Glass House in the Sea

G. Dumas©

I suffer from both Depression and Anxiety.  Medication mostly takes care of the depression but medication just takes the edge off my anxiety.  In my case my phobias (which are intractable) are directly connected to anxiety.  If a phobia button is pushed my fight or flight hyper-anxiety goes into action. The thing about phobias is that while the event that started the phobia was very serious, subsequent events that are not as serious bring the phobia front and center.  This is similar to a post traumatic syndrome reaction.  All these things seem to be connected.

In any case what brings this to mind is that one of my most fierce phobias is starting to bear its ugly head, the surgical phobia.  (I touch on this topic in an earlier post below.)  Without going into my medical history, I have two or three small and sometimes big operations a year to deal with tumors most of which are benign.  However, once in awhile they are not and life gets medically more complicated.  I have been extremely lucky and all problems have been handled.  I think the world thinks I should be grateful and treasure each day.  However, my reaction has been to develop a phobia that gets triggered whenever I have to deal with both a surgery and much worst, waiting for the pathology report.

What is so difficult is that my phobia can not tell whether the event is minor or serious.  So in either case I become terrified.  Pre surgery the anxiety/terror builds and then right after the surgery, I relax for a few days, exhausted from the adrenaline rush.

But the worst is yet to come, the pathology report.  I generally insist on getting the results as soon as the report is available.  I never wait for a doctor’s appointment.   However, getting the pathology report is never easy.  If I don’t get news within the time period that I think is reasonable, a week, I just loose it.  This is where it becomes dangerous.  I am in so much psychic pain, that it becomes unbearable.   I am desperate to be relieved of the pain…suicidal thoughts becomes an option. When I contemplate suicide it calms me down…that is perhaps the scariest part of this whole phobia drama.   So far the pathology reports have come in just in time to mitigate my suicidal thoughts.  As soon as I know the results, the panic subsides.  However, I am exhausted from all the drama for at least 10 days.

I am discussing this particular phobia because tomorrow I am going in to the hospital for a relatively minor surgery where they will take out what is probably a fatty benign tumor.  I have had two fine needle biopsies of this tumor in the past and in both cases it was reported to be a fatty tumor.  So this surgery should be routine.  Unfortunately, for me routine surgeries still activate my medical phobia and I go through my phobia dance.

I have thought alot about how to protect myself from the potential consequences of this very dangerous phobia.  Since getting the results of the pathology report is the most dangerous time for me, I have others advocate for me.  I am so freaked out when it’s time to hear the results, I can not even call the doctor.  A very kind member of my family takes over that chore.  My medical advocate has learned over the years to be very aggressive but the reality is that doctors are hard to get hold of and only a doctor can okay the release of the information in the report.

My latest idea is to have the pathology report, which will be online, sent to both my psychiatrist and my general practitioner.  They both understand my phobia and how I suffer from it.  They actually want to help me deal with it.  I feel comfortable with both of them in contrast to the surgeon.  They will get the results for me as soon as they are available.  My other doctor can then take her own sweet time to call me.

When it is over, I will feel grateful!!!

© G. Dumas

Anxiety, in my case, is a 24-hour affair.   I start the day with an ever so slight discomfort in my body.  Fifteen minutes into the day, a non-specific fear begins to work its magic throughout my body, increasing the discomfort.  I then take a mental anxiety reading by assigning myself a number on a scale of one to ten, one being calm and ten being very serious painful discomfort.  If my score is a three or four, I know that what I am feeling in my body is non-specific anxiety.  Five through ten usually involves some outside event.  It does not take much to elevate the score.

In my case, physical discomfort from chronic, non-specific anxiety is not unlike chronic pain.  The difference between non-specific anxiety-related pain and other types of pain is that anxiety pain involves constantly questioning myself about why I am so anxious, what am I doing wrong.  It dovetails very nicely into depressive negative thoughts, the blame game or “it is my fault that I feel this way, there must be something I can do to make the anxiety go away.”

In contrast, event-related anxiety, which most people feel to some degree, can lessen once the event is resolved.  But when your baseline is three on the anxiety scale, outside events can get you high up the scale fairly quickly.  To be at seven or above translates into severe mental distress.

For generalized anxiety, I take medicine and meditate to even out my discomfort.  However, I have found no way to lessen more severe, generalized anxiety.  I just tough my way through it.

When anxious events actually occur, like a medical problem or even something as mundane as giving away clothes, the only helpful thing I can do is to try to resolve the event that is specifically triggering my anxiety as soon as possible.  Unfortunately, that is not always possible.  So once again, toughing it out with the help of anti-anxiety medicine and meditation is the only course of action.

My art piece for today is what I think anxiety looks like.  Having a visual view of the condition reminds me that “severe generalized anxiety,” enhanced by event-related anxiety, is a serious medical problem that currently has no cure.

© G. Dumas

While being victimized by a car thief when the car is fully insured is not a financial tragedy, it is disconcerting for my anxious persona when it is my car.  My car has always been a safe place for me to go.  My anxiety is always comforted by the idea that I can just take off.  Once when I was particularly anxious about medical test results and feeling like my coping skills were at the end of my rope, I got in the car with my dog and drove about 30 miles away and stayed in a motel for the night.  That change of place somehow calmed me, and I felt safer.  Having the option of just taking off like that is not necessarily about anything in particular, but it is a way to move around the pieces on the chess board when, for whatever reason, my anxiety is off the charts.

Out-of-control anxiety is more discomforting than anything I have ever felt.