(this is a long a very personal diary I am writing and publishing on advice from my counselor. It doesn’t have much to do with politics but I feel dailykos is a safe space for me to publish. If this is not your cup of tea, I don’t want to waste your time, just skip.)
My life has been turned upside down lately. It started in February when my emetophobia (for those that do not know, that means extreme fear of vomiting) connected anxiety started to really flare up again. I was missing work because of panic attacks. I remember vividly one day I was in the bathroom and heard someone who was loudly being ill in the stall over. Being in the middle of natures call, I could not escape and found myself trapped in what I consider one of the worst hells imaginable. I still honestly have nightmares about it, months later. I know this might sound odd to some of you who have never experienced the phobia, but for those of us who suffer with it, having someone vomit loudly feet from you is probably just about as close to dying emotionally as a person can get.
That day I went home from work, having one of the worst panic attacks I had ever had in my life. My mind was fuzzy, my face was numb, I could barely hear myself speak, hell I could barely see. I stumbled up to my boss and told her I was going home. When she asked why I calmly explained that I was having a panic attack and it was home or a hospital. She obliged and sent me home. That day, I called my health insurer and my doctor. This was rock bottom for my emetophobia. I had had down times in my life, junior year in college (2013) being one of the worst of them, but nothing like this. Ritual anxiety avoidance behaviors began to make a return into my life. I was starting to have trouble sleeping. Panic attacks were becoming the norm.
I had enough. I just wanted this lifelong affliction to end. For years since I was a child I remember this fear being with me. Any time anyone was ill in the family it was “Does your stomach hurt?”, “are you nauseous?” “did you just have diarrhea?” (I can spell diarrhea and nausea without spellcheck, thanks crippling fear). I remember checking expiration dates religiously, checking the temperature of the fridge, and even just avoiding perishables entirely or even eating entirely because of the fear. At various times in my life its damn near destroyed my life. But in February 2019, I was in shambles. I remember my wife taking me home, in tears, shaking like a leaf, memory already burning its way through my brain causing indelible trauma (say that is dramatic all you want, it is felt, trust me).
Let me just say, my wife was my rock that day. She has been through 12 years of this fear with me, with my ups and downs, successes and failures, and never once has she called me crazy, or made fucking gagging noises in my ear or said “what its only natural”. She has been nothing but understanding, open minded, and absolutely caring about this. Nobody in my life has ever supported me or expressed as much genuine love for me in such weak moments besides her. Not anyone in my direct family at least.
Looking back on the events of this past Valentines Day and everything that has transpired since I heard that poor man being violently ill at work, I needed her more than I really knew. My wife has been working diligently toward her MSW for about a year and a half now. We decided about 2 years after graduation that she would go first and I would work to help her through her graduate degree, then she would find a job, I would leave mine and obtain my graduate degree. Although it hasn’t worked out that perfectly so far, she is still working toward becoming a social worker, and hopefully an LCSW after about a bazillion supervised hours and some other incomprehensible hoops she has to jump through after graduation.
So of course, on the ride back, watching me shake like a leaf in the throes of a full blown panic attack, she suggests that it is time to deal with this, once and for all. I was at a good job now, after all, nice benies, including sweet-ass full coverage health care with mental health care included. This was the perfect time. “After all these years, don’t you want this off of you” “Hon, I just want what is best for you, and it is clear to me that this is something that you need. We are not going to be in a better position than right now” “do you really want to live like this forever?”
I agreed. It was time to deal with it. Emetophobia and the rituals, anxieties, stressors, triggers and everything else connected to it had so much power over me for so long that I didn’t really understand how to even begin to live without it. In a weird way it had always been a comfort to me, my rituals protected me, my vigilance made it neigh on impossible to get sick, my obsessive research into virology and the battle against the dreaded norovirus gave me cold comfort. Researching and tracking patterns of disease made me aware of what was going on around me illness wise. Although these things, and the illness itself were destroying my morale and psyche, my rituals and obsessions became beacons in the fog.
But at a poin they no longer keep the panic attacks at bay. My old coping strategies were once again failing me, as they did in college, and I was beginning to recede back into extreme anxiety and near constant panic attacks. I knew it was a matter of time, it was only so long before I was afraid to eat, to go outside, to touch dishes, to go to the bathroom. It was time to stop this before it stopped me, again, so many fucking times before.
I got a referral to a counselor from my insurance company, after some awkward conversations with a couple of MAs and a really nice, refreshing conversation with my primary care provider (who has been a consummate professional through all of this. The fact that she even believed any of this made me feel so relieved and heard). I set up a date to see him, all the while keeping my absolute dread about going to work a secret to everyone, save my wife (and even she didn’t know the full extent of it). I burned through my PTO and sick time, wracked with panic that I may be trapped with someone who is ill. One time while I was waiting to see my counselor for the first time, a guy threw up at his desk into a garbage can. I liked the guy, but goddamn was I irate and anxious and just...I dunno man. Having this illness has taught me that I can get angry at a person for throwing up even though I know, intellectually and rationally, that it isn’t their fault. Who hasn’t had the sudden urge and cannot make it in time? I never expressed any anger at the guy, I only felt anger, guilt, and shame at myself for even getting angry or anxious about something so stupid and small as someone being ill at their desk.
Finally, in mid March I saw my counselor. I was skeptical at first. I mean, essentially I was paying some stranger to talk to me because of some ridiculous phobia. Echoes of my mothers “walk it off” attitude fueled my skepticism that this would help at all. But my wife wanted me to do this, and honestly what else could I fucking loose, so I walked into that office and my life started to change in strange new ways. Some of the good, others terrible, but all leading toward healing this lifelong curse. I told myself that I would go in there with an attitude that I am ready to change this. I am ready to face whatever it is I have to face, whatever demons in my past or whatever bullshit stress I have now, I would face it and not run like I have so many times in the past.
The visit went well. I knew that the first appointment was just an assessment, my wife told me as much. Lots of standard questions about what was bothering me, how long, how severe. He had heard of and worked with emetophobic clients in his 40 year career so that immediately put him at ease. I did make it a point to tell him absolutely no exposure therapy because making me throw up would not cure me at all. He just laughed and said he would never do that and his demeanor just put me at ease. He then asked if I was open to medication, an I gave a hesitant yes. “Lemme guess, side effects?” “Yeah Mike, I can’t take stuff where the FIRST DAMNED SIDE EFFECT IS NAUSEA, man. Its like a catch 22.” “So there is our first hill, getting you to take this medication”. From there, I started my short and very strange journey with a little drug called zoloft.
I was technically prescribed the zoloft in mid-February, when I first talked to my doctor about my anxiety and phobia. I had it filled but never even touched it. Those warnings blared at me like bomb sirens, man. Dizziness, nausea, vomiting. Fuck that, are you kidding me? Then I met my little friend “obsessive online research into anything that might make you throw up” for lunch and started googling stuff like “zoloft experiences” “bad zoloft reactions” etc.
There was another reason why I was secretly so resistant to the idea of anti-depressants:
In Mid-2017 my mother had what I can only describe as a complete nervous breakdown. She became paranoid in the direct aftermath of the election of Donald Trump. Being a lesbian, she believed that Trump would eventually terminate her rights as a grandparent to my step-brothers son because she is married to a woman and not a man. Honestly, in the beginning I could see her paranoia, I was fucking scared too. But it started to grow tentacles into other aspects of her life. Us kids were messing with her health care. The government changed her will. Her partner of 25 years was her abusive mother, who as coming after her. I remember one night, when I was in a previous job returning home from a business trip, she called me and asked me if I had messed with her medical standing order or beneficiaries of her will. I asked her how could I possibly do that without her knowledge or permission without a POA? She didn’t have an answer, said she loved me and hung up. I dunno why, but that memory really hurts.
I hadn’t really been that close to my family in recent years so I heard a lot of this second hand through siblings. The doctors settled on a diagnosis of severe traumatic stress triggered by the election of Donald Trump and abuse in her past (I mean, come on, look at his fucking views about women who would fucking be triggered). They settled on wellbutrin as a treatment, which, given the diagnosis and the relative success rate of wellbutrin in these types of cases the treatment made sense. But what didn’t make sense was my mom’s reaction and her subsequent slide into a psychotic break. In theory, counseling and the medication should have helped her. Unfortunately, she is one of the few who has a negative and adverse reaction to wellbutrin, one which was very extreme in my mother’s case. She started seeing and hearing things. She attempted suicide twice. She was arrested 3 times. For some reason no one thought that the wellbutrin had anything to do with it. Turns out it was fueling my mother’s behavior. Once they took her off of it and put her on some mystery drug (again, second hand, after all this I became estranged from everyone in my family, very long story), all was well.
So I was skeptical. I didn’t want to puke. I definitely didn’t want to go crazy, jump out into traffic and get arrested. But both my doctor and counselor educated me that sertraline works on a completely different neurochemical and the odds of my having a reaction was next to nothing, despite my mothers (lets call it) “negative” experience with wellbutrin. I trusted them, and despite everything that happens next, I still trust the process.
I invited my wife to my third session with Mike, just because I believe that she is a part of the solution I am looking for. Unbeknownst to me, she brought the zoloft I had been struggling with taking for so long into the office. Mike asked me if I trusted him and her enough to take a half a pill. With every cell in my body SCREAMING at me not to do it, I took the pill.
Low and behold, nothing happened.
It felt amazing to know that I had been so damned scared, and nothing, absolutely nothing happened. After that, I took 25mg religiously for 2 weeks and was riding high from the success. My next appointment with Mike was 2 weeks after that and I actually was starting to feel like the pill was working. My general anxiety level had dropped, my panic attacks had lessened. I felt like I was doing great. Looking back on it now, it could have been placebo, or that I gained more confidence because I overcame a major obstacle in my life, or hell it could have been the first sunny two weeks in Oregon in over 6 months. Who the hell knows. All I knew is I felt like that zoloft was doing the trick. Mike said it was time to go up to the fully prescribed 50mg dosage, which I had decided to do on a Friday in April.
During all of this I had sought, applied for, and obtained a promotion at my work. It was a temporary position, to be shared among 3 employees and had no raise, but I figured if you wanna be a boss gotta do boss things regardless of anxiety. So, at work, I was a couple months into the unofficial new gig (the official one would start till September) at the time my anxiety really started to spike. A few days before the date Mike and I had settled on upping my dosage of zoloft I had to do something that I felt was absolutely morally repugnant at the behest of my boss. I understand her reasoning, she was acting has been acting in the best interests of our unit, but her asking me to do what she asked me to do crossed a moral line that contributed to my ultimate nervous breakdown at the end of April 2019.
One of my co-workers who I had formed a friendship with (and I don’t form irl bonds lightly) was starting to be pushed out of the organization. “She doesn’t pull her weight”, “she screws up all the time”, “she tells people wrong information”. All very true statements about her. The last straw for my manager was she had a file at her desk for a month, that literally everyone had been looking for. I had the unfortunate honor of finding it. When I told her, she did what she had been telling me to do for weeks when I caught her in a mistake. Send an email. CC her and her boss. Build a strong case, push her out and open her position to someone more competent. But I think I saw something in her that many did not because of my recent experiences.
In December my wife and I moved in with her parents for a third time (okay, okay, we’re a mess). This time though, it wasn’t because we made some dumb financial decision and fucked ourselves on rent or something, it was because Ellie’s dad has dementia and its progressing. Not rapidly, thankfully with meds, but noticeably. His impulse control is shot. He fixates on certain things. He doesn’t recall dates, times, places, or even what year it is sometimes. He can still have a full intellectual conversation about high level global politics (he is one of my favorite political buddies cause he is a thoughtful Oregon conservative and I am a left wing progressive), but sometimes he gets caught in a loop telling the same story about how he lived in San Fran during the start of the cultural revolution. My mother in law was exhausted, we were getting gouged by rising rent costs in the Salem area, seemed like a win-win.
My father in law had much the same experience at the start of his disease. He was a fantastic grade-school teacher — one of those weird ones with stuffed lizards and preserved bugs that really make an impression on a 4th grade boy — but he started to go down hill. Talk to himself. Classroom in disarray. Failed observations. The district unceremoniously pushed this man with 30 years teaching experience out the door with nary a peep. While I agree, it was time for him to retire, the amount of pressure and stress the put on him in the end accelerated the progression of the disease in the early stages. I am convinced of that.
What I saw in my father in law during that time is what I saw in my co-worker. The same exact behaviors, and yet now I am the one doing the pushing. She worked for the outfit for 14 years, nothing to scoff at, and now just because I have worked there for 7 months and got some rinky dink bullshit in name only promotion I am supposed to be the one that pushes HER out? And just knowing her personality, it would kill her. I tried to explain to my boss multiple times that I thought that was what was happening, but she said essentially there is nothing she could do. So two days before increasing my dose of zoloft, and my subsequent extremely rare reaction to the medication, my levels of guilt and shame were at all time highs. At this point, just two weeks ago I was riding high, now I am in a position to essentially help fire one of my friends who is potentially in the very beginning stages of dementia.
When I first increased the dosage of the meds, I started having weird vivid dreams. Nightsweats. Insomnia. Exhaustion. Trust me, exhaustion and insomnia at the same time are weird and I don’t wish it on anyone. I am actually feeling a bit of it right now despite being on the “right” meds. I called into work the entire week because I literally could not get out of bed during the day, but was up all night. I reported these symptoms early to my docs MAs but they said not to discontinue the zoloft until I had a chance to talk to my doctor in a couple of days.
I started hearing things. Whispers, nothing really clear, but enough to get my attention. I started feeling like people were watching me, even though there was no one in the room but me and my wife and she was asleep. I heard banging coming out of the closet of our room. I literally had my phone’s flashlight on all night looking for where the fuck that banging was coming from. Turns out, fucking nowhere. One night, I was standing on the porch vaping (no cigs since 3/30/19, yay!), and I swear to fucking god I see a bald dude standing in our back yard. I scream “Yo what the fuck are you doing”, run up to where he is standing to see what is going on, and there is nothing but the same old statue of Mary that has been there for years. For two days I felt a presence right above my shoulder. I couldn’t explain it.
I took the zoloft for a grand total of a month, 3 weeks on 25 mg, 10 days on 50 mg before I discontinued and switched to prozac for 10 days. None of my symptoms subsided, in fact they lasted all of May and into the first week of June. Mind you, this entire time I am on OFLA, trying to fill out massive amounts of disability paperwork, keep my appointments straight and have enough energy to fight hallucinations for side effects of the anti-depressants.
My counselor explained that I had something called and SSRI reaction, which is very very rare. He said he does not know, but it may have something to do with my mother and genetics, but testing of both me her and possibly my sisters would have to be done to confirm. Seeing as I am estranged from them, pretty hard.
After the prozac, the medication hunt began in earnest. Eventually we landed on using gabapentin off label and cloneazepam (yes, I know its addictive but it is literally the ONLY thing keeping the panic attacks at bay right now).
But ever since we found a combination that might work for my anxiety disorder and OCD (my doc had to call it Adjustment Disorder with Mixed Anxiety and Depression for some reason, I think so she doesn’t have to lock herself into a diagnosis and limit her treatment options, I mean if I were to venture a guess), I have had to start the hard work of unpacking my life, my childhood, my relationship with my parents, and my beliefs about myself, and that, friends, is much harder than I ever gave it credit for.
My last session with Mike was...intense. There was so much from my childhood that I didn’t remember. How my parents got fed up with dealing with my emetophobia and threatened to randomly lace a food item in the fridge with epicac. The time my mom drove me to the hospital, berating me about the expense of treating some “bullshit fear” when I could simply get over it and save her the trouble, the relentless mocking of my ritual behaviors, my fear responses, my avoidance techniques. Gagging in my ear. Forcing me to watch my sister throw up to “cure” me. My parents openly talking about bankruptcy right in front of me because of “stupid medical bills” then when I start having a panic attack saying “what is it, that were poor because of you?” Having my room tossed when my parents were pissed at me, open preferential treatment of certain siblings over other siblings. I had never thought of it as abuse, in fact for most of my childhood I admired my parents restraint for never hitting us. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that you don’t have to physically harm someone to scar them. My parents treatment of my emetophobia as a child is directly linked to the circumstances I find myself in today. I really don’t want to blame them for everything wrong in my life like some weird Dr. Phil case, but I feel REAL trauma from that sort of thing. Eventually Mike and I migrated away from my parents handling of my emetophobia and on to other contributing factors to the illness, well, at least in Mike’s estimation.
We started unpacking the extreme amounts of homophobic bullying that is the context for my social phobia which Mike believes is the source of both my emetophobia and OCD. I am still not sure I understand the connection yet, or convinced that I have “social phobia”, but Mike seems to think it plays a big role in my negative self talk, which is directly related to the beginning of panic attacks.
My mom came out as a lesbian in 1994, and admitted to my dad that she had been cheating on him with one of her coworkers. My dad was a fucking absentee drunk so I don’t feel a lick of sympathy for him. When my mom came out to me and my sis, I was confused, but given the amount of fucking fighting that had been going on, I welcomed the change, but didn’t fully understand what was happening until I was older.
Word got out when I was in middle school that my parents were “queer” and the bullying, snide remarks, and bullshit was relentless, even from staff at the school. The 90s were not a nice time to gays and lesbians in Salem, and my parents, family, even me got a huge amount of shit thrown at us for years. “You’re family isn’t real” “What about a father figure, every family needs a father” “do your parents have dildos? Do the like, use them (giggle)” The chants of “HEY FAGGOTS HEY FAGGOTS HEY FAGGOTS” as my siblings and I got on the bus. A guy slammed me up against a locker and punched me in the chest saying he was doing “gods work”. Lots of FAGGOT scrawled across my locker. I can hardly imagine what gay kids went through. One time my family went to a park in west salem to escape the heat of the summer. The park had a nice little creek so we thought it would be fun to have a family trip. A red truck pulls up and 3 skin heads with weapons pop out and start screaming at us. They had, apparently, seen my parents holding hands. They chased us to our van, and luckily we got away with our lives. The sheer amount of toxic homophobia contributes to the greater mosaic of my deeply entrenched anxiety. At this point in my last session with him, we were really getting into the weeds. As I said, I have a hard time thinking these things are interconnected when I have separated them for so long, but he makes a convincing argument that my emetophobia and social phobia brought on by early childhood bullying harmonize and make the illness as it expresses itself today. Add in a chemical imbalance and presto, you have me. Given the SSRI reaction, he said it could take months before we even find the right combination of medication and therapy. Thats his theory, and its convincing.
So here I am, caught in the lurch. Not at work, too much panic over being trapped, too much pressure from management to push out my friend who I suspect is in the early stages of dementia. I am furiously filling out leave and disability paperwork. My short term benies have run dry, my long term disability is waiting on an investigation into whether or not this is a “pre-existing condition” meaning did I talk to my doc about this in the 90 days before I was insured (thank god, I didn’t). I am broke, still having panic attacks. Still suffering from insomnia (its almost 3 AM). Depressed and worried and anxious. I just applied to go back to school to get my MSW online like Ellie, but I am worried that this is going to stop me. And that takes me up to today: I was depressed, moody, anxious despite my pills. I was feeling angry and really down on myself, so I decided to do my counselling homework and write this.
I am not writing this because I want to win some sort of victimhood award. I don’t talk about myself and my past this much because I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. I don’t want people to coo and say “what a bad life” because, honestly, despite the shit, there were good times too. There were mistakes I made. I am not blameless in this. I write this in an effort to make the anxiety flow away from my brain into my fingertips and onto the screen, and once I hit publish, its like its gone. No longer in me, but vanished into the ether of the internet. I honestly don’t expect anyone to read this, its like 1000 paragraphs long. Its not about audience this time, its about the physical act of releasing this guilt, this anxiety, this negative self image that I have cultivate for so long. Its about becoming a new me, that doesn’t hate himself, that doesn’t fear the unknown, but embraces it. Its about renewal. I know that this isn’t what the site is designed for but it is what I am using it for.
My counselor suggested that I end my entry with a mantra, something I could hold on to in the midst of a panic attack, so here goes:
The publish button released me from this stress. I no longer need it to survive. I can thrive on my own without it.