Still getting over my cold and still have a lot to write about. Unfortunately, Tom did get hit with it after all. Aw, just when we thought he’d escape it, too. :( He started feeling “off” last night and is lying down now. This is something I definitely have mixed emotions about. I love the idea of him spending more time at home if he needs to call out of work, but hate to see him suffer. It really gets you on the third or fourth day. 

I hope Stacey didn’t get it either. Speaking of her… I can now quickly go over what we discussed. She didn’t remember me when I called her the day before our meeting, but once she pulled up my file and saw me, she remembered me from last May. So much for swearing I’d only see her once, as I jokingly said to her. You would think by now I’d have learned that A, one should never say never. And B, never assume something’s over for good. 

Like anxiety attacks. Yeah, that shit I still deal with on and off. Haven’t had any major attacks since last Tuesday, but my heart did race me awake following a gruesome nightmare (I’ll get to that later) and I took a lorazepam to help me get back to sleep for the first time since Wednesday or Thursday night. 

I know some have wondered if it could be my thyroid medication, but the doctors, Stacey, Tom and I are sure it’s not because I went months on 75s without incident and then there’s what the numbers say. On 88s I was on the low end of normal. On 75s I’m on the high end of normal. Also, when you’re having trouble due to levothyroxine the symptoms are both relentless and brutal. I had a lot of other symptoms when I was “T4 storming” that I’m not having now like lung tightness and other things. Plus, if it were the medication, it wouldn’t give me a few days off here and there. You just don’t get breaks when that’s the case. It’s also unlikely to be the thyroid itself because the thyroid is being treated. 

We believe this is anxiety caused by the anxiety that the meds originally were indeed responsible for on the higher dose. It was the most terrifying experience of my life that was truly torturous and traumatizing. It wasn’t something that was just “annoying” or “uncomfortable.” It was utterly horrifying and unmanageable. That’s why my dose was lowered. But the memories and the PTSD are still there, so when I’m alone or when I feel the slightest feeling I find strange, the anxiety has a chance to rear up. 

I am hopeful that my “trauma training” with Stacey will help keep me from needing a daily anti-anxiety regimen. She and Tom both feel it won’t come to that and I hope they’re right. Sometimes I just don’t have the kind of confidence in myself that others have. I’m human. I have good and bad days both physically and emotionally like anyone else, and sometimes life gives me a little bit more than I can bear. It’s frustrating and even depressing too, because my life would be so ideal if it weren’t for this awful on-and-off, highly unpredictable anxiety. Even though there are times I know it’s more likely to bite, it’s still unpredictable. It can get you anytime, anyplace, no matter what good or bad may be going on at the moment. That’s the scary part. The asthma attacks I suffered regularly when I smoked were much more straightforward and obvious. Even living in poverty was a no-brainer as stressful as it was, but this is much more complex. There is no simple cause and cure. 

Backing up a bit… traffic into Rocklin wasn’t bad at all when we went to see her. On the elevator, a young, tall slim (doctor or nurse?) with a blond ponytail made friendly chatter with us about the weather. She sort of reminded me of Alyssa. 

The waiting room was dead and we didn’t have to wait long at all. The first time I saw Stacey I was impressed with how much more knowledgeable she seemed than Dana, and I was even more so the second time around. Another new “trick” I learned from her was the importance of breathing through my diaphragm versus my chest. This is relatively simple for one who’s had singing lessons. Even Tom gets this much being a trombonist in the Air Force once upon a time. She wants me to lie on the floor for ten minutes twice a day to help reinforce this type of breathing (because it’s impossible to breathe into your chest this way) which is to help prevent hyperventilation and use up the adrenaline quicker. Light activity can help with that too, but the hardest part, as she pointed out, is resisting the urge to basically hunker down. You want to hide under your covers, but you also want to run for help, too. Fighting the body’s fight-or-flight response is the ultimate challenge. No matter how much your logic knows you’re not in danger, you totally react as if you’re definitely doomed to die. 

She did say a couple of things that weren’t exactly fun to hear. She pointed out that one could go ten years without an attack just to be hit with one after all that time. Once you get an unfortunate taste of these things, you’re never guaranteed to be forever free of them. All you can do is hope to lessen them and cope with them better. I could live another 30 or 40 years, so to think of being under the threat of these things that long is a bit disappointing. On the bright side, they say that just like all good things come to an end, so do the bad things. So hopefully, just like other problems I’ve had in life were resolved some way or another, this one will be too. She gave me a site to go to that has a self-help course. 

The only other unnerving question she asked was if I trust my doctors to be thorough and not overlook any possible heart issues. They better be! But yeah, I think I trust them. With all the different doctors who have listened to my heart and who know my family medical history, someone would’ve caught something by now if something were amiss. 

Daily medication is still an option but due to how drowsy and habit-forming that can be, I’d still prefer to give Stacey a little more time to help me help myself and just use the lorazepam as needed. If I’m still having problems after the trip, then I’ll consider a daily plan. God, I hope I don’t have problems then! But I’d be more worried about my sleep than actually having an anxiety attack while I was awake. 

I removed the flannel sheets from the bed and put the regular ones back on, since the flannels keep you warmer and I overheat enough as it is with the damn memory foam topper, even with a so-called cooling mattress pad. I think part of my heart racing me awake has to do with overheating and not just anxiety. Maybe even the perimenopause. Again, that’s what makes this so tough is that it’s a very complex thing. There’s usually not just one cause/cure. 

As he was pulling out to go to the store yesterday one did start to get me, but fortunately, I stopped it within seconds. Same thing… I started to feel really warm and a bit shaky, I ripped off my robe, and then I took slow deep breaths with my tummy. I just wondered if I’d have been able to stop it that fast had my mind known he wouldn’t be back in less than an hour and would be gone all day. So yeah, I’m a bit worried about him returning to work tomorrow as well as how I’ll sleep tonight. Hopefully, I’ll sleep in a bit so I won’t be aware of being alone for as many hours. 

I still shake my head in disbelief at times. I can’t believe I’m dealing with this shit. I never had this before last year. I have always loved spending time alone. I focus and work better on things that way. But now I’d rather have someone around even if they were the type that can’t shut up and was always distracting me. 

Anyway, I still have more to write about, but this entry’s kinda long, so I’ll sign off by saying that traffic on the way back was a nightmare! Really, why do people have to creep just because there are more than just a few cars on the road? 

Later… 

With the trip being about a month away, we were looking online at different excursion options. We’re taking a loan out from the 401K and allotting ourselves 6K. We’re thinking we’ll do mostly ocean activities in Cozumel and Roatán. Then when we return to Mexico we’ll mostly shop in the town of Majahual, which Tom can’t pronounce to save his life, haha. 

I’m sure we’ll snorkel like we did in Maui and Lanai, but they have this really cool “personal” submarine where you wear what looks like a space helmet and you ride around underwater on what looks like a little motorcycle of sorts. The water only comes up to your chest. That’s $75. For $100 you can go parasailing, but I’m not sure I fancy the idea of being 600’ above water. We just might go for it, though. It’s not every day that we get the chance to visit the Caribbean Sea of Central America. Honduras is Central America, anyway. I glanced at the surrounding countries on Google Maps. Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Belize are some of the neighboring countries. 

For $500 you can rent your own private boat for 4 hours and enjoy catamaran sailing, snorkeling, etc. So there are lots of possibilities. 

The new kettle I got from Prime Now works great. Love how the drivers are GPS’d so you can see exactly where they are in real time. 

Next door had more company than I’ve ever known them to have, but they were quiet. All I heard was people getting in and out of their cars. If this were Phoenix with the freeloaders next to us we’d also have hours and hours of screaming kids, basketball games, barking dogs, blasting music, shouting adults and trash and traffic galore all within 15’ or less of our windows. 

Now for last night’s brutal dream. This wasn’t the usual nightmare I have that deals with captivity, poverty and even medical drama in light of my own recent ordeal. Instead, I was in a swimming pool on what appeared to be a college campus. There was a good-sized grassy hill in front of the building and the pool was by the front corner of this area. I was the only one in the pool for some reason. It went from day to night in seconds and I decided to get out of the water now that I could no longer see the few bees that were floating about its surface. Clusters of students were still scattered about the hillside. 

Then a bright light suddenly came on that rotated in circles. This was on the opposite front corner. I knew right away something bad happened, but it took a moment or two before I spotted some people lifting a vehicle off a young black girl. She was bleeding horribly and I realized the poor thing might not make it. 

This was the first time I awoke overheated and with my heart pounding. I had to take a lorazepam to relax enough to fall back asleep. 

From there on out it was just snippets of senseless stuff… Tom and I in a tiny pizza parlor… Tom annoying the blond chick behind the counter by mashing a marshmallow into the head of a nail… me going outside to get something from the wrong car… me nearly running into a black girl who joked about something I didn’t hear… and then him asking me to be sure I could find our lottery ticket if we won on the 5th.