Saturday’s supposed to be the easy, fun day. The one where you just relax and do whatever you feel like.<\/p>\n
I spent most of the day\u00a0nearly paralyzed with anxiety.<\/p>\n
Every thought leads to a fear. In the shower, I move very slowly, afraid of falling. I watch Tom warily, because I’m afraid he will up and leave me. Even in the condo, a dark corner spooks me. On the road, I tense up every time we get within 15 feet of another car, afraid we’ll hit it.<\/p>\n
Death of a thousand fears.<\/p>\n
These anxiety attacks come on mostly without warning. Most times, they are small enough that I can handle them with some deep breathing and herbal tea.<\/p>\n
Some are much worse. My fears grow to\u00a0apocalyptic proportions, and they are crippling. They block off all my\u00a0confidence to do anything<\/em>.<\/p>\n I have always been a bit nervous as a type, but it never kept me from doing things that I wanted to do: backpack solo in Africa, work with journalists in the Middle East, ski down a mountain.<\/p>\n Since my ruptured\u00a0brain aneurysm and surgery in November, these fears and attacks<\/a>\u00a0make me freeze in place.<\/p>\n It’s similar to PTSD, the doctors told me, a biochemical response to trauma.<\/p>\n In some ways, it feels like a very logical response too. When you’re perfectly healthy and then one day\u00a0your brain just blows up, it makes you less confident in the future.<\/p>\n Although today was bad, overall the trend since surgery has been positive, and I know this anxiety\u00a0will be gone someday. I stopped having crying jags after a few weeks, and I haven’t taken Valium since my first two weeks out of the hospital.<\/p>\n Tom is sweet and supportive as an angel. We got out of the house and went for a drive, enjoying the loveliness of a June day.<\/p>\n There were dark clouds hovering, but the thunderstorm never hit.<\/p>\n Today’s penny is a 2015, when it all started.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Saturday’s supposed to be the easy, fun day. The one where you just relax and do whatever you feel like. I spent most of the day\u00a0nearly paralyzed with anxiety. Every thought leads to a fear. In the shower, I move very slowly, afraid of falling. I watch Tom warily, because I’m afraid he will up … read more A thousand fears<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318,320],"tags":[67,491,493,1042,504,20,577],"class_list":["post-8367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","category-shelter","tag-67","tag-anxiety","tag-brain","tag-ptsd","tag-recovery","tag-tom","tag-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8367"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8373,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8367\/revisions\/8373"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}