High Anxiety

Yeah, kinds like that.

So, I had my first anxiety attack this last week. It wasn't fun.

I was fine, physically, but mentally I thought I was going to die. I spent the better part of the evening convinced that my wife didn't love me because she wasn't taking me to the hospital. Every thought I had kept turning into the most negative version of itself it possibly could. And nothing could seem to penetrate.

Logic didn't work. Talking it out was useless. I just knew that everything was going to end in disaster. Luckily (?), my wife has dealt with anxiety issues her entire life. She was able to see what was happening and love me through it.

As I started coming out of it, I remember thinking, "Wow, that's how she feels all the time." I had really thought that I was being compassionate before. I would listen. I would try to tell her that her fears were irrational. "Look, sweetie, that's not really happening. And those things aren't nearly as bad as you're making them out to be."

None of that helps when you're in the middle of an attack.

Now that I've experienced several (I had three or four more that week), I've started to be able to recognize them as they start building, and my wife's given me a lot of help to know what to do to stave them off. Diaphragmatic breathing, sensory grounding, meditation and medication can all help.

But then we added another part to this.

As part of my cancer stuff, I have pain, nausea and trouble sleeping. The medications for those things tend to be highly addictive with a lot of side effects. So... I've been using THC at times to help. I tried CBD, but found it completely ineffective. It works for some people, but apparently, I'm not one of them. I take low enough doses that I avoid getting high (I don't enjoy that sensation AT ALL), but just enough to help me out.

Well, my wife went to Seattle on a trip with her sister, and while she was there, she picked up some edibles for me. There was a scene at the airport that deserves its own blog post, too. But she brought them home for me just in time for me to take some the night after one of my treatments.

I don't know if it was a particularly potent strain, or if I was just super sensitive to it, but I went OUT OF MY GOURD. I mean, it was bad. Bad enough that my wife took my phone away from me so that I wouldn't talk to anyone. Want an example of what that looked like? I wrote the following on that day:

"So, I'm high right now. Like, seriously high. So high that I can barely see straight. This is a result of the chemo. They call it chemo brain. Seriously. Chemo brain. Like it's a good thing for everythone in volved. In case you missed that sarcasm, it was totally thered. Tghere is nothing good about c hemo brain. NOTHING AT SLL. You can't package it sell, it market it, give it away. IT IS THE WORST THING ON THE PLANET. I promise you. you will feel it and die. You can't think straight, you can't remember things for more than 20 seconds at a time. No one likes you. It feels like death warmed over, expect with little pricklys all over your face and sometimes you die. Or you feel feverish. Or you get all feerkepmt. that's german for ****ed.

I can't even right now."

That's how bad it was.

And the anxiety was amplified during this whole episode. That can happen with THC sometimes, apparently. I was sure that everyone was talking about me behind my back, and that I couldn't trust anyone. The thought process, again, lacked logic. But this time it was heightened by me being high.

It was one of the worst experiences of my life.

People talk about bad trips. This was a BAD TRIP.

I can't for the life of me see why anyone would want to feel that way. I'm starting to realize that I may be much more of a control freak than I thought I was. I don't like the feeling of not being able to keep from saying or doing things.

So, more fun experiences, thanks to my cancer.

Each one of them, though, has helped me to be more compassionate. The anxiety helped me to better understand my wife's feelings in the past. The nausea and exhaustion mimics how she felt when she was pregnant.

And the bad trip? It helped me to understand what it feels like to truly be out of my mind.

I guess I'm learning.

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In our next episode, we talk about how cancer effs up your social life.

Next post.