In yesterday’s therapy session, I got a dose of Chinese medicine which is known as emotional tapping. It can be used for anxiety as well as other things.

I was calm for several hours before the appointment, but a few hours before leaving I noticed the “butterflies,” as I call them, begin to kick up just under my ribcage. I tried to breathe them away and I tried to will them away, but they just wouldn’t dissipate. They came to a peak during the wet drive to Stacey’s office. It got so intense that I felt myself tearing up in frustration again. Like I said before, it’s a horrible cycle where you get anxious and then you get depressed because you’re frustrated that you got anxious.

So we parked the car and ran through cold wind and rain like you wouldn’t believe, and soon Stacey brought us to her office, which stunk like shit. It smelled of old fast food.

Just like learning more and more from my current endocrinologist has proven how worthless my old and endocrinologist was, the more I learn from Stacey, the more I realize that Dana wasn’t very helpful and all. At least not for me.

Anyway, I told her how up-and-down things have been for me and that we really suspect the main culprit for my anxiety, which sometimes reaches epic proportions, is mostly due to perimenopause. Even she has had similar symptoms. Well, it may not be any one thing, and the extra levothyroxine definitely had a hand in fueling it, but I think most of what I’ve been feeling recently is due to menopause setting in. I was supposed to get my period yesterday and I don’t feel like it’s even close. I don’t think they’ve stopped altogether yet, but I think by the time I’m 55 that will be it. It’s exciting but every bit as torturous as I’ve always heard it is.

Sometimes I feel so bad that I fear I’ll never get better. As I told Stacey, I never had fear and anxiety like this even when my life was horrible. My sleep is still shitty, too. Even when I’m not waking up with my heart racing, I still wake up a lot, and a lot of the time I feel tired. As much as I’m looking forward to our upcoming vacation, which will probably be booked this weekend, I dread how exhausting it may be for me. As Tom said, though, vacation is about relaxing. If I’m too tired to do any of the excursions, we can just lay around on the beach, at the pool, or even on the balcony of our room. We’re probably going to go with Royal Caribbean which only goes to Mexico, instead of Princess, which goes to both Mexico and Honduras because they have more rooms available, but I’m getting off-topic.

Back to Stacey. She is a very easy-going woman who seems very understanding, compassionate and knowledgeable. I honestly didn’t think she would be able to help me at first because what’s causing my anxiety is physiological. But then as Tom pointed out, being overweight is physiological yet exercise helps it.

The emotional tapping seemed silly to me at first and I really didn’t see the point in it, but it is surprisingly more helpful than you might think. You tap a series of spots on the body 6 or 7 times (hands, head, around the eye, under the nose, chin, chest, and under the arms) while you recite a positive phrase such as, “Even though I hate this anxiety, I love and accept myself.”

You can personalize your statements if you want but I prefer to keep it simple. Things got funny at one point because I misunderstood at first what she was asking me to do when she asked me to pick a word. Well, I picked rats since I love rats. This would have had me saying, “Even though I hate these rats, I love and accept myself.” LOL

When she asked me what my goals were for the future, I was totally stumped as to what to say. I really don’t have a clue. I guess it’s just to survive and be happy and healthy. At this age you just don’t see the world through the same eyes you saw them through 20 or 30 years ago. The things that were new and exciting back then just don’t thrill you like they once did. My goals and dreams have become a lot more simplistic than they used to be. I would just like for us to retire someday in either Hawaii or Florida, with Florida being the most likely given how expensive Hawaii is.

I told her about my three-day stint with Lexapro and various things that are going on (mostly my work and hobbies), as well as our upcoming trip. She wants to see me before we leave, so I have another appointment on the 21st.

I left her office without the “butterflies” that I would have killed with lorazepam. I still may need lorazepam to help me sleep better at times, but I’m hoping that I will need less and less of it until I eventually don’t need it at all. I still prefer natural remedies whenever possible.

After we left the building we treated ourselves to burgers and fries from Carl’s Jr. and next time I want to try their beer-battered cod sandwich, even though I shouldn’t be having any of that shit. It’s been a month, though, of mostly healthy eating, and everybody deserves a break every now and then.

I felt great for the rest of the day. I just had a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep. I was tired for several hours after I first got up, and I was also pissed because they turned our water off. Tom crashed at 5:30 PM and I got up at 8 o’clock. That’s when I discovered the water was off. When I saw there was no message from him about it, I knew they had to turn it off after he went to bed. So I slipped a note under his door telling him not to flush his toilet until he had to take a dump because the water was off. These toilets will not flush if you pour a bucket of water down them like regular toilets do.

Well, he got up to pee and found the note. This was at 11 o’clock and he’s been up ever since, the poor guy. At one point he drove around the park to find where they were working. It was by the lake. He said there were 4 trucks there and he could see them carrying big pipes and all that. Usually, when there are water outages it’s only for an hour or two. But this time it was off for over 7 hours, maybe more.

Fortunately, the water was turned on in time for him to take his shower before leaving for work, and then I showered as well. Now the dishes are running.

After he left I did the emotional tapping twice. I will run through it once or twice every few hours even when I don’t feel anxious, and then there’s that lifetime supply of chicken I was sure to get because the tryptophan in it is calming.

Before emotional tapping, you want to rate your level of anxiety on a scale of 1-10 before you start and try to get it as low as you can. I was about a 7 when he left and I brought it to 5. Then I fixed myself something to eat and spent a half-hour on the Bowflex, and I would say that right now I’m about a 3.

My only other complaint – we both could complain about this one – is that we just can’t stop coughing. I first got sick before Christmas and I still have coughing and congestion. My voice was so raw after leaving Stacey.

I sure have been getting violent in my dreams a lot, or close to it. In last night’s dream, I was walking somewhere and was thrown in jail due to a misunderstanding that had to do with someone who was testifying in a high-profile case. It happened to be a Friday, however, and no one could be reached to explain things.

I was in a large room with several other inmates when a female guard was leaving the room. I urged her to help me. She said something about a simple misunderstanding. As she was about to pull the door shut, I tugged on it and shouted, “So I’m supposed to sit in jail all weekend due to a fucking misunderstanding?!”

Knowing the guard would feel challenged by my going off on her like that, she did exactly what I hoped she would do. She re-entered the room so I might have more time to convince her to help me.

One of the other inmates came between us to protect the guard from my wrath because the guard was petite, possibly even smaller than me. Even though I never actually struck her, she ended up hitting the floor and I awoke from the dream worrying that I would then be hit with an assault charge.