Ativan to the rescue. No, really.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash.

When last we met, I was bellyaching about how horribly I was feeling. Sweating, panic attacks, the inability to catch my breath, the whole nine yards. Many of you sent me messages offering ideas about what might be ailing me beyond my anxiety (aka, the Big A.). Thank you. All definite possibilities. And all panic attack-inducing.

I spent a lot of time on WebMD looking into each suggestion (A-fib and Hashimoto’s Disease, among them), and scaring myself silly. Why do I go on those sites? I can still hear my previous doctor telling me to stay away from Google which worked about as well as his telling me to stay away from carbohydrates. Pass on the pasta? I don’t think so.

Tooling around WebMD provided no answers, which gave my anxiety anxiety. Clearly it was time to call in the big guns.

The next morning I made an appointment with my new doctor. Actually, she’s not a doctor. She’s a nurse practitioner and I love her. She sat there patiently listening to my list of ills and the diseases I thought I might have, taking notes and nodding and, when I was completely out of breath and thought I might need a paper bag to breathe into for the rest of the visit, she said, among other things, “So in the past when you’ve had this breakthrough anxiety, did you take anything for it?”