why i have not blogged in a while

i have been suffering from numerous panic attacks for approximately the last month or so. sometimes, i have a panic attack after doing something or at a certain place or in a certain situation. after one of my most recent blog posts, i was quite angry at hillary clinton. i had actually not had any sleep at all the night before, since it was the night hillary clinton won primaries in rhode island, ohio, and texas. the march 4th primaries. and i had no sleep that night and was very upset. i ended up in the emergency room the next day with a panic attack, and they actually had 2 cops take me there, since i had called 911 and it was a mental health concern (a panic attack), and apparently nowadays the police answer all mental health calls, rather than sending an ambulance. that did save money, but the police did scare me, since they had guns, and i had a panic attack and thought i might be going crazy or dying. you see, ambulances cost a lot of money and they bill you. the police did not send me a bill for taking me to the emergency room, and i am grateful to them for that. since march 5th, and that major panic attack then, i have had some more problems. i scheduled a meeting with my psychiatrist the next monday (march 10th). on march 10th i was feeling that my life was falling apart and panic attacks were ruining everything and i was totally losing control of my life, that panic attacks were ruining my life completely, and i felt totally helpless. so i got put on a new drug, an ssri (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor), and since i complained that my benzodiazepine anti-anxiety drug no longer seemed to work, he decided i should gradually get off it. 2 days later (march 12th), things seemed worse than ever, the new drug was not working at all, and it turned out i really needed my benzodiazepine anti-anxiety drug, despite the fact that it had been gradually becoming less and less effective. so i called him on the phone that day and he said i could actually increase my dosage of the benzodiazepine drug. but i was having more and more problems with insomnia (most nights i would get maybe 4 hours of sleep, different hours each night, or day, or whenever i managed to catch sleep, with no regular schedule, and the harder i tried to control my sleep, the less i could do it and the less sleep i got), and i was having trouble eating (i would lie awake in bed most of the day trying to sleep, and not leave my room to eat or go to the bathroom unless absolutely necessary). increasing the dosage of the benzodiazepine drug helped for a while. but then on sunday march 16th, i was increasing the dosage of my new ssri drug that i had started the previous monday, according to the plan he had laid out 6 days earlier. and the insomnia and problems eating got worse. i started to feel nausea and feel like i was unable to eat without throwing up, but i did not actually throw up because i just avoided eating until i felt like i could hold it down. and of course, all month long, along with the increasing insomnia and uncontrollable anxiety, i developed more and more diarrhea, so food would go through my system quite quickly and not get digested much. on wednesday march 19th, after another night with zero sleep whatsoever, after not having gotten more than 6 hours of sleep in 1 night for several weeks, and having worsening panic attacks that eventually turned into nonstop anxiety 24/7, i was scheduled to meet with my psychologist (not psychiatrist), but i tried eating some food in the morning, and then i threw it all up. i could no longer eat or sleep, and my life was completely out of control. so i called up my doctor’s office, my psychiatrist, and my psychologist. i scheduled an appointment at my doctor’s office to check out my physical health. my psychiatrist told me to stop taking the new ssri drug immediately and that it was probably behind my insomnia, nausea, vomiting, and nonstop anxiety. and i told my psychologist that i wanted to go back to the emergency room, but he convinced me to go to his appointment first instead. then, when my mom was driving me to the psychologist (because i did not feel up to driving, obviously), i decided that i really did need to go to the emergency room after all, and my psychiatrist had recommended it as a good idea, as had the nurse i talked to over the phone at my doctor’s office. so, i had my mom drive me to the emergency room instead, and used her cell phone to call up my psychologist and cancel the appointment at the last minute, after agreeing that i would be at that appointment maybe an hour earlier over the phone with the same psychologist. this time, the people at the emergency room actually seemed to solve the problem. they gave me a double dose of my anti-anxiety benzodiazepine drug, and put me on a new drug as well, one called “vistaril” that i can take 3 times a day for anxiety or i can take 2 pills at bedtime to fall asleep if i haven’t taken any of them all day. i immediately began using vistaril to fall asleep that night, and also got off the new ssri, and i was feeling much better the next day and the next few days, getting much more sleep, having much less anxiety. this 2nd visit to the emergency room on march 19th sure did the trick! and it was exactly 2 weeks after the 1st visit. in the last day or two, my anxiety has started to return, and i am not getting quite as much sleep as right after i started this new medicine to help me sleep. but i am getting 6 or more hours each night, around the same time each night, so that is still much better than before, when i would get 4 hours, maybe, at some random time during the day or night when i would finally run out of energy. anyway, i have been avoiding blogging the last few weeks because i found that politics and political news has been a major contributor to my anxiety, and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and started my very bad anxiety attack on march 5th that put me in the emergency room after i called 911 since i had hypochondria and thought i was dying. but lately (at least prior to the most recent emergency room visit solved things) it has seemed that pretty much anything causes anxiety. whenever i took a shower i would have my heart race and i would often get the urge to suddenly escape, like i needed to get out of the shower and was in danger. and a few times, i actually did run out of the shower, sometimes out into the hallway, and then suddenly ask myself, “what the hell just happened? what the fuck is wrong with me? am i going insane or am i going to die?” going to my job would stress me out and i would get panic attacks at work, and always have to control myself to avoid public embarrassment in front of all my co-workers (we all work in small cubicles and there are like 50 of us all there at once in the same large room, sitting at our cubicles typing away like monkeys). and i was afraid of writing anything on this blog, especially anything political, because that kind of stuff has upset me so much lately. however, lately, the political news has started to seem more reassuring. like the fact that barack obama is virtually guaranteed the democratic nomination and hillary clinton has almost no chance whatsoever of winning. i am still worried a bit that hillary clinton will continue her pointless attacks on barack obama and damage him enough so that john mccain wins in november. but her campaign increasingly seems like it is in its last throes, especially with geraldine ferraro and james carville making fools of themselves with their remarks, and hillary clinton being discovered to be a liar about a whole host of things, not just nafta (she claims to have opposed it when she actually supported it strongly in the 90s), but also a visit she had to bosnia (she claims to have come under sniper fire and had to run from the plane into a waiting vehicle, but video footage of her calmly coming off the plane with chelsea and being greeted by a little girl shows quite the opposite occurred). and i was concerned about rev. jeremiah wright, barack obama’s former pastor, undermining the obama campaign, but it seems that barack obama’s speech about race last week was so amazingly good (at least according to the pundits) that it basically cancels out the negative publicity from the jeremiah wright scandal. in any event, it is pretty much mathematically impossible for hillary clinton to win now, the same way it was for mike huckabee when he stayed in the race for so long despite john mccain having way more delegates than him. hillary clinton has been reduced to a faith-based mike huckabee-style campaign based on denial of reality, except of course, she resorts to negative attacks on the presumptive nominee of her party and mike huckabee did not, so she is actually worse than mike huckabee. and i still have an eliot spitzer bumper sticker on my car! i tried to peel it off many times in the last week or two, but it just does not come off. it seems to have melded with my car at a molecular level, and it is now part of the car. so i crossed out eliot spitzer’s name several times with a black permanent marker, since i could not get his stupid damn sticker off my car. the sticker says “spitzer paterson: bring some passion back to albany”. very embarrassing to still have that on my car. but i am okay with it. i don’t need to let things like that worry me anymore, because i can move on with my life, i can eat and i can sleep, and i can decrease the number of panic attacks i have and their severity. i can get my life back together. there is no reason to worry about politics. after all, i have survived over 7 years of having george w. bush as president. nothing could possibly be any worse than having him as president, so the future looks brighter, no matter who takes over. now i have been a bit concerned that we are having complete economic collapse, but i have started to view that more optimistically as well. i have lived through previous recessions and i can hardly tell the difference between recessions and economic booms, except for what i hear in the news. in everyday life, it does not affect me too much, since i am not involved in the stock market, in construction, in mortgages, in banking, or any of the other industries affected by this economic downturn. gasoline does cost more than ever before, but that is the only real thing i have noticed about the economy affecting me. the company i work for is not having any problems at all, and they are making more profits than ever. and my boss is understanding and knows all about my anxiety disorder. so, things are not that bad. sure, my health insurance does not cover mental health at all, so i have to cover all the costs of psychologist and psychiatrist and emergency room visits related to mental health myself. but, i have another insurance policy besides by crappy health insurance that hardly covers anything that i pay monthly premiums for: i have my parents, i live with them, and they can bail me out if i can’t afford mental health services on my own, by sharing some of the cost with me. of course, i do want to be financially independent and not rely on them, but i do not want to go into debt and have a negative net worth. so ultimately, i want a better-paying job. but for the time being, i have pretty good job security, my boss is nice and understanding, and my employer is a company that is doing fine in this economy. my health insurance does cover stuff related to physical (not mental) health, so if i have problems with my physical health, i should be fine as far as paying for it. and anyway, whenever my anxiety gets out of control, i can just take a benzodiazepine pill to calm down. and i have learned that the physical symptoms of anxiety are not dangerous to me, and i am still basically healthy. so as long as i continue to believe that, i should not have hypochondria that makes me think i am dying, at least not too often. i just need to bear in mind that i am young and physically healthy (and have gone down from obese to overweight thanks to my recent food deprivation). sometimes my anxiety does get out of control. but usually i deal with it pretty well, and am able to control myself, and keep from doing things like calling 911 or screaming at the top of my lungs or running around like a madman. i have had a lot of panic attacks, and only really lost control of myself badly in a very small percentage of them. and that was only when i lost control of my beliefs, and really started to believe that i actually was in danger. as long as i can continue to believe that i am safe, the anxiety will probably not be so bad that i lose control of my behavior. usually, i deal with panic attacks quite well, and do not let them get to me too much, and i allow myself to move on instead of letting the negative thoughts about medical problems or dying or losing control or going crazy to take over and make me actually believe those catastrophic thoughts. usually, i deal with it quite well. and i think i will probably be better in a month or two and stop having so much anxiety, and so many panic attacks. and i will be able to eat and to sleep. i might even start exercising! exercise sometimes causes anxiety for me, so it is one of the many anxiety-causing things that i have been avoiding lately, but apparently exercise only causes anxiety because i am not used to the physical sensations when i am exercising and afterwards, and some of them are similar to the physical sensations i feel during panic attacks. but if i learn to distinguish between the 2, i should be able to end this false mental association between exercise and anxiety. i have already been able to end my anxiety attacks that happened every time i took a shower, and now i can take showers without panicking at all, and even relax a bit during showers. and i used to find social situations and talking to people to provoke huge amounts of anxiety, but that has gradually gone away pretty much completely over the last few years. even these last few weeks, i do not find social situations to cause any panic anymore... other things have always been the cause of the panic. so now i am posting on my blog again, kind of just to show that i can do it without causing any unnecessary anxiety. and it seems to have worked. i feel fine right now. and now anyone who reads this blog regularly knows why i have not been posting lately. so it is a win-win situation.