3 My Life Is Killing Me

February 2007

So there I am at midmorning, shooting across a major arterial along with everyone else who speeds across that road: at 55 mph in a 40 mph zone being passed by fellow drivers like I’m standing still. I get to a stretch where there’s no place to pull over and Oh My Lord. . . .  Suddenly the head is spinning, the chest hurts, I think I’m going to pass out. Am I having a heart attack? A stroke? Am I (God help me) going to kill someone else in the moment that I croak over? 

A stroke. A heart attack? Whichever, I am going to die and I’m going to crash someone with three small children bouncing unbuckled in the front seat and I’m going to take all four of them with me. Can’t slow down or stop, otherwise one of my harried fellow drivers will plow into my car, killing me and probably killing him- or herself. This is the Wild West, you understand, and all those pickups and SUVs are driven by wannabe cowboys talking on cell phones.

After a mile or so, I spot a break in the concrete curbing, hit the brakes, and swerve into a neighborhood. Stop the car, open the door, sit perched on the driver’s seat with my head between my knees. A walker strolls by and warily refrains from asking if I need help. Gotta love those urbanites. 

Ten or fifteen minutes later, the dizziness and pain subside. I use my cell to call a friend: no answer. My son: no answer. Should I dial 911? Last time I did that they insisted on hauling me to an inner-city ER, where after four hours of suffering with acute appendicitis in Third-World conditions, I got exactly zero attention, same as the young woman who had been sitting there for six hours while miscarrying. Should I drive to the Mayo Hospital? Long way . . . who knows who I could kill during that trip. What the heck. I go home.

The day before this happened, some mild puttering around the yard made me feel so exhausted I had to sit down. But I’ve come to ignore events like that—most are products of a fevered imagination. And I avoid doctors as much as possible, having learned over the many years of my lifetime that what doesn’t kill you usually goes away by itself, and what does kill you generally can’t be helped. This episode, though, is pretty spooky.

By early afternoon, I still feel light-headed and my heart is still banging painfully. Semi-Demi-Exboyfriend, learning of this over the telephone, urges me to go to the Mayo, where my regular doctor practices. A neighbor drives me, and soon I’m lying on a gurney with bleeping machinery showing a heart rate of 120 and blood pressure through the roof.

Eight hours later, a cardiologist announces the verdict: not a heart attack, not a stroke, nay not even chronic hypertension. What ails me is stress. 

Stress.

Stress? The ordinary pains in the tuchus of daily life are giving me heart attack symptoms? Wha-a-a?

He forks over a prescription that he says will calm my nerves and tells me to see my regular doctor as soon as I can get in.

The Rx, as it develops, is for an addictive drug. There’s the frosting I need on my cake: an addiction to a prescription drug. I decide heart palpitations are the lesser of those two evils.

A few days later I meet with said regular doctor, an internist who has overseen my healthcare since 19 and aught-68.  I tell him I’m not taking an addictive drug to allay a few neurotic symptoms. He says, well, he would never have prescribed that, because it’s addictive. He writes a prescription for Zoloft and tells me to come back in six weeks.

Suspicions now fully aroused, I look up Zoloft in Worst Pills, Best Pills, a favorite hypochondriac’s handbook. It’s not addictive; it’s just habit-forming. And what happens when you try to taper off the stuff? You get to enjoy flu-like symptoms, dizziness, uncoordination, nausea and vomiting, lethargy, muscle pain, and chills.

Not only that, say the authors, but “the length of time it takes an antidepressant to work can overlap with the time of spontaneous recovery. . . . The  majority of people lift themselves out of depression with friends, or activities such as exercise, work, reading, play, art, travel, and spiritual resources” (234).  In another chapter, they quote World Health Organization experts asserting that “Anxiety is a normal response to stress and only when it is severe and disabling should it lead to drug treatment. . . . Discussion of the problems of sleeplessness and anxiety and the drawbacks of drug therapy will often help the patient to come to terms with his other problem without the need to resort to drugs” (181).

Ohhh-kay. Apparently I’ve talked myself into this little spate of misery. Can I talk myself out of it? It doesn’t seem to be life-threatening. The worst that can happen is in six weeks I’ll still be palpitating, head-spinning, and hyperventilating, my doctor will yell at me, and I’ll have to start taking Zoloft then.

What happened next. . .