Panic Attacks, Anxiety Disorder, and Weird Brooklyn Accents

I went out for a bit tonight with my best friend J. I had a really good time - for no real reason, but we just talked and got into this complete & utter girl girl girl talk: waxing, and have you ever had sex with a really hairy guy kind of stuff. Cracked me up, it was awesome, and the really hysterically funny thing, which I heard at the time but didn't mention, is that for some unknown reason, we both were talking really fast, in Brooklyn accents. I swear. Two South Carolina girls, whose normal voices would cause most Brooklyners to faint, were having this intense discussion in complete New Yorkese. I don't have the faintest idea why, but it was so funny, and we didn't even talk about it at the time.

One of the things we talked about fitted neatly into this thread, which I came on when I got home & decided to keep drinking and being online, when in a sane world I would have gone to bed (okay, I'm drunk) but anyway, I'm now thinking about panic, it's role in my life, and how it works, where it comes in, etc. Which is also partly about M, and his freakout on Strattera, which was so akin to my freakout on Wellbutrin. J.'s horrible boyfriend was there for a bit tonight, we talked about it - his son went to the same hippie school where M. goes, and he is on Ritalin & Wellbutrin (not the son, the boyfriend)and so we talked about dopamine, neuropinephrine, etc. Our thesis is that Wellbutrin & Strattera work on the same part of the brain, and M. has clearly inherited my tremendous mood sensitivity to such. That would probably be why the shrink looked so interested when I said that Wellbutrin had made me nearly catatonic - and why, FUCK, if it was so important, didn't she FUCKING ASK ME about what I had taken and how it had affected me? I am furious at myself for not volunteering the information - but how the hell was I to know? Gah. Now I'm going to put my son on Ritalin, should I say that I hated speed? Well, hated is too strong - speed was okay, I had some fun snorting black beautys back in the day - but it was never my drug of choice and meth was horrible, horrible, horrible - like angel dust/greens, gross and miserable and also, yes, panic inducing. But how do you know? When I was 17 and had 4 teeth pulled, the dentist used gas and it was awesome. Gas was great fun in balloons at various shows in my 20s. So when I went to the dentist for this miserable periodontal work 4 weeks ago, I asked for gas. He put the mask on and within 10 minutes I was FLIPPING out - pulled the mask off. And he said, in a very urgent voice "Do you have anxiety disorder?" and I said, "yes, yes" and he immediately gave me straight oxygen and said, "No, you should never have gas, it's completely contraindicted for people with anxiety." Note that he didn't ask BEFORE they gave me the gas.

On to panic. J reminded me of when I was on Wellbutrin, and I was walking down the street with her, turned to her and said, "I am freaking out, I can barely keep on going." And she said, "You looked so normal, I was really surprised, but then I could see behind your eyes that you were just lost." I had forgotten that specific day, but I immediately remembered it. You don't forget that shit. You never forget it for long enough.

The first serious panic attack I had was the day after my wedding, and I ended up in the emergency room, curled in a ball, hyperventilating to a point where I couldn't even feel my body at all, and the evil country doctor hissed at me: "What drugs are you ON?" Nothing, hangover, my period, the stress of catering my own wedding - and marrying a man who had already been unfaithful to me, who was mean as a snake (be fair - he was also as sexy as they come, and we tried, we both tried). So that is how I started learning about panic attacks, and how they feel, and whence they come.

They come from fucking nowhere, is where they fucking come. Actually I overheard these two girls at a bar once discussing them, and the one girl had a theory that they have to do with smell, that when you are a very small child something traumatic happens to you, and even though you don't consciously remember it, the smell of the room you are in at the time is lodged in your memory forever, so anytime you smell it again, you go into panic mode. If this is true, then I was horribly traumatized in a chamber of commerce boardroom, because while my triggers are many, and wildly spread, there's one sure one: I can absolutely depend on a corporate type meeting in a hotel conference room to trigger one.

Okay, I'm going to have to come back to this. I wanted to write a whole thing about how to deal with anxiety disorder, and I'm going to, but not tonight. Tomorrow is supposed to be a snow/ice storm and I'm ready; I'm so ready, in fact, that there is no way in hell it's going to happen. So ciao & goodnight, y'all nonexistent readers, hee hee.