Reverse High

Last week my chest was tight for over a day, and sometimes when I stood up, the room seemed to tilt. Toss in some heart palpitations and a touch of nausea, plus the fact that I'm headed overseas next week for a number of months and had heart surgery when I was four, and I reluctantly concluded that it would be smart to get checked out. The nurse in my new doctor's office heard "chest tightness" and "dizziness" and informed me that the emergency room was the place for me. Yay.

Well, I don't like to spend money, but I don't like to play around with heart questions, either, so I went to the ER . . . after going to work Thursday morning. (Yep, I took the luxury of mentally scheduling my ER visit.) Fast forward beyond the check-in and efficient intake and nice nurses and technicians (one of whom I saw pushing his child around WalMart today--okay, that was small-town weird), not to mention the excitement of sitting in a hospital gown in my own monitored bed. (I was delighted that I could proofread math for an hour with no temptation to get up and do anything! The work was a great conversation starter, too. I met all kinds of neat people in the ER, including the lady in kidney stone agony across the room.)

Fast forward to the ER doctor who insisted on chest x-rays and blood work in addition to the EKG, so as to put my health first. Again, I don't like spending money, but when you put it that way . . . Dr. McNeil was a very nice man. So nice that, before I left, he prescribed me a drug to help with heartburn or ulcers, since he couldn't find anything wrong with my heart. I didn't really think that my problem was gastrointestinal, but since he was nice enough to prescribe something for me, I figured I'd be compliant enough to try it. (I'm a first-born, remember.) I mean, it couldn't hurt.

Fast forward a lot more to this week, when I've been in the midst of packing and preparing to move overseas. It's been going super well, due to mucho help from Aunt Pat and Mom (and Lisa last week). ("Aunt Pat did more than I did," Mom said, which is the reason I listed Aunt Pat first.) It's been going well, yet I've still felt panicked most of this week. Mentally, I felt okay, but I had a constant bubble in my chest, and there have been moments when breathing was harder than usual. Yesterday, I thought, "This must be what it is like to feel like you're going to have a panic attack," and repented of the times I've wondered critically how a person can have a panic attack. This was me, and I felt on the brink of having one. Last night as I was lying in bed, I worked to breathe deeply to get myself to relax. Then--I confess--I sang to calm myself down. I think I sang myself to sleep, but I can't verify that, because I fell asleep. I was glad that I'm not loud, because I'm sure that Diane would have enjoyed hearing my voice waft upstairs at 1:00 AM.

Today I told Mom, "I've been under stress before, and I've never felt the way I've felt this week."

"Well, you aren't getting any younger."

"Um, no younger than two months ago! I live with busy-ness lots of the time!"

"Well, you've never packed to move [overseas]."

She's right on both counts. Then we also talked about how the way I've felt this week is distinctly different from the way I felt last week before I visited the ER. So somewhere in this conversation it dawned on me that  I started feeling this way a day or two after I started taking the medication. I didn't recall that anxiety was a stated side effect, and sure enough, when I got home, the first couple of web sites I checked didn't list it as a top contender. After all of the other side effects, they said things like, "Be sure and contact your physician if you feel anxiety, mental depression, etc., etc.," like as if you'd be exceptional if you did.

So then I Googled "Z----- and anxiety." Whoa, Snowy! Now I realize that it's generally not ideal to self-diagnose based on internet commentary. But the word on the street was pretty interesting. Person after person said things like, "I had to stop taking this medication because it made my anxiety flare up" and "I felt like I was going crazy." Oookay. So my nice doctor prescribed something for me to remove my chest pains that induced near-panic the week before I move!

Trust me, there is a happy ending to this story. I skipped my noon dose of the med and was feeling noticeably better by supper time. "It's probably a placebo," a brother told me. As in, "You're probably just feeling better because you think it was the med making you sick." He does realize that it would technically be the opposite of a placebo, but I told him, "If I can make myself feel better by imagining that my medicine was making me feel awful, then I don't even care if it is a 'placebo.'" Ha. That would be a pretty good. Next time maybe I'll try, "I'm feeling sick because I don't have a strawberry milkshake." (The part about the strawberry shake was for Craig, who teases me mercilessly about a time when I was nauseated on a road trip and couldn't think of anything I could stomach besides a shake.)

So now it's been 24 hours since my last Z dose, and I feel like I could float. I haven't felt this good about feeling good in a long time. "I think that everyone should take Z, just so that they can feel this good when they come off," I announced to my family a bit ago. Some people take drugs to get high; I'll take coming off them any day.