It is not that I am incapable of trusting medical professionals, it’s that every time I go to see one, they inevitably do something to me which makes me not want to go back...
I am overweight. Morbidly so, if you believe the BMI charts. I’m six feet tall and well over three hundred pounds. Just large enough to have ankle problems and to not fit comfortably in airline seats. Believe me when I say that I am aware of this fact. Medical professionals seem to think that no one must have told me before that being overweight is bad or perhaps they think that hearing them tell me that I need to “get serious” about my weight is all I need to be transformed from a state of sickness to a state of health. And of course, everything is due to the weight: nothing else matter, no symptoms I report are seriously considered on their own merit, because “Well, you know…you’re really very overweight”. They give you that look like you’re not worth dealing with, as if you should know already that, as a fat person, you don’t have the right to be healthy, and that being forced to deal with you is far from the highlight of their day.
But he did deal with me, albeit reluctantly. I just wanted to know if my panic attacks might have a physical source before I sought psychological treatment for them. That’s it. And maybe wondered if I could get a sleep aid to help me break the insomnia.The nurse asked some questions, confirmed that what I was talking about sounded like possible panic attacks, and took my blood pressure. It was 150/100. Her eyes got wide and she looked at me with that fake reassuring smile people give small children to try and convince them that things are okay when they’re clearly not.
“I don’t know what those numbers mean,” I told her.
And it’s true: I didn’t. Because blood pressure had never been something I’d actually dealt with before—not anymore than to be told all my life that mine was “a bit high”.
“Well…” she took a deep breath and then sighed, “given the stress you’re under it’s probably not dangerous because blood pressure does go up with stress… but normally, a blood pressure, sustained, this high, is not good. It’s getting into stroke territory.”
I don’t know what a normal person hears when a nurse says that, but in my anxiety ridden brain, all I heard were the words “stroke territory”. After realizing I looked scared, she quickly excused herself from the room assuring me that the doctor would be in shortly. He spoke to me only for a few minutes before filling out slips for me to go get lab work and an EKG. He met me back in his tiny office and didn’t even bother to come all the way in or sit down with me.
“So…lab work won’t be back for a few days, but you’re EKG is normal,” he said leaning against the counter.
“So I’m not going to die from this?”
“Well, not today,” he said, in a way that heavily implied to me, in my half-psychotic state, that he hadn’t put tomorrow out of the realm of possibility, “so I guess the question is, did you come to me because you just needed that reassurance or did you expect me to do something about all of this?”
“Well,” I stuttered, “I don’t know…what do you think?”
That is why we go to doctors isn’t it? I mean, tell me if I’m crazy, but is it not a normal expectation that the doctor will make that determination?
“I think you need to get serious about your weight,” he sighed with exasperation, “and stop making excuses for yourself. But if you’re spinning your wheels with this anxiety thing, and it sounds like you are, there are products that can help with that—if you’d be willing to try them.”
I nodded and he scribbled a prescription for Celexa. He said nothing about the drug or what it would do to me. He didn’t discuss side effects verses benefits. He didn’t even wait for me to read what it was before he started out of the room. I got the prescription filled on my way home, and, worried that I was the only one who seemed to care if I died or not, I also picked up a blood pressure monitor. At home, I tried to look up the information I had not been given by my doctor. I read all there was to read about Celexa and determined that it was an antidepressant that was also used to treat panic disorder. I was a bit concerned about the dire warnings listed telling me not to stop taking the drug suddenly—it’s a four week process to wean someone off of it.
But…I figured that the doctor did prescribe it. So he knew the risks of the drug and must have decided that they were minimal in my case and that having to wean off of it later was a cost worth the short term benefit. I felt a little bit uneasy, but I took it as directed.
Should have’s are dangerous because we use them to blame ourselves and others use them to blame us for things we cannot rightly carry blame for. Yes, by conventional wisdom I should have asked more questions. Yes, by my mother’s own warnings, I should have listened to my instinct. Yes, by sheer logic, I should have waited (as my doctor should have waited) for the lab results to come back first. But “should have” doesn’t always apply when you are not in a state of mental competency: and I was clearly not competent to make those decisions. I was scared and anxious and desperate. And the doctor is the one responsible for the “should haves” when his patient is not in a state of competence to do so herself.
I was fine for the first two hours— then everything went all to hell.
SSRIs (this category of drug) do not affect everyone the same way. Instead of a calming me down, it did the opposite and I quickly took the train to crazy town once it kicked in later that night. I noticed the tingling first—up and down my arms and sides-- the same sort of tingling you get from putting your tongue on a nine-volt battery. A normal, right thinking person would have simply chalked it up to a side effect of the medicine and made a note to call their doctor the next day. But in my paranoid, anxiety ridden brain, I jumped to blood pressure being the reason for any symptoms I felt and I convinced myself it was a sign of a stroke or heart attack beginning. After all, it was now after midnight, technically it was tomorrow, and he never said that I wouldn’t die tomorrow.
I found myself checking my blood pressure—it was lower than it had been at the doctor’s office, which was reassuring, so I tried to go back to bed. But moments later, the tingling was a slight nerve burn sensation, and it was impossible to sleep through, and I was up checking my blood pressure again. And I kept checking. Repeatedly. Because the numbers kept going up. Soon, it was higher than it had been at the doctor's office. I found a chart online which showed normal to high blood pressures and compared the numbers I was getting to the chart. Eventually, it hit the upper range of stage 2 hypertension. That’s as high as most of the charts online go. I surmised, that yes, indeed, I was now dying.
This led to a panicked call to a friend and a 2am emergency room visit, where an emergency doctor was openly frustrated with my daytime physician for not explaining things to me better. See, there are actually four stages, and stage 2, while not good for you and definitely the point at which you need to see a doctor and start making changes to diet and exercise, is not deadly in any way shape or form for an otherwise normal 28-year-old. And it would have to be one's average blood pressure to even warrant as much attention as I was giving it.
“It’s not good to have your blood pressure this high,” he told me, “but only in the long term. Because over time that will weaken your heart and yes, later in life, you could be at a risk for stroke. But you have years before that will happen, not days. You have plenty of time to make lifestyle changes. I recommend a low sodium diet, 20min of walking each day, and between those two things you’ll lose a few pounds and be fine and have no more problems with your blood pressure. Even just cutting out the sodium and caffeine will bring it down ten points or more.”
“So 167/107 won’t kill me?” I asked, glancing nervously at the monitor I was hooked to, wanting to make sure I was really okay.
He smiled, “Miss, there’s a woman in the room next to you whose blood pressure is currently 280/140. Your body is flexible. The blood pressure spikes you see in your numbers are moderate at best, they are concerning from a long term health stand point, but they aren’t dangerous. Get this anxiety thing under control first, then worry about your blood pressure. If you need to feel like you’re doing something, start cutting back on sodium and caffeine and you’ll see an improvement.”
Why can’t all doctors be like that? Why can’t they all inform instead of chastise? Why can’t they all educate instead of resorting to scare tactics?
There were other symptoms that I experienced while at the hospital, however, enough to convince him that I was having a negative reaction to the drug. His recommendation was to immediately stop taking the Celexa. He explained how the drug worked and further explained why I felt physical symptoms from my psychological anxiety in the first place—to paraphrase what he told me: basically, the brain only has so many resources to process all the complicated nerve signals of the body and when our brains are preoccupied with severe anxiety and stress, our ability to do so is hampered. Signals get crossed and symptoms are felt even when there is no cause for them. Focusing in on those symptoms causes more anxiety which in turn makes the symptoms worse. It’s a cycle of negative feedback. Celexa and other SSRIs are, in theory, supposed to help break that cycle. But having severe side effects only agitates things further and makes the drugs not worth the trouble.
“And no more checking your blood pressure,” he cautioned, “it’s just going to make you feel more anxious and that will only make it higher and so on. You’ll always end up working yourself into a worse state than you started in.”
I was relieved to finally have someone tell me what I most needed to hear: it’s psychological. Disconcerting and scary, but not physical and, ultimately, not life threatening. I stayed at my friends house that night because I was still too anxious to be left totally alone. As I lay in the dark of her living room, staring up at the ceiling where the LED charging light of her laptop made a frail halo of blue light, I suddenly realized that, in all the confusion, I had missed the Zep Tepi beginner’s class chat. I didn't worry about it, but I was annoyed. Then, that got me thinking: what I really needed was a medicine I couldn’t get in a doctor’s office.
Now that I had determined that there was no real physical danger, there was no need for a physical remedy. Meds were not the solution to my problem. This was grief; this was a wound of the mind and a wound of the soul. It wasn’t a long term, chemically based, anxiety disorder; it was a short term reaction to a specific event. All I had needed my doctor to do was rule out the possibility that it was more than that.
I sighed. What I needed to do was what I should have done instead of taking the anti-anxiety meds: I should have lit a candle and sat in shrine and asked Them for help. Because doctors can’t heal your soul. But gods can.
“So how do I fix this?” I asked Them softly, “How do I make this stop? I feel like I’ve lost myself. I feel hollow and wrong.”
And I did. I couldn’t tell if it was the medication or the anxiety, but I felt detached from my soul. I felt like I was trapped in my skin, unable to reach anything deeper inside of me. I felt like I was only my body, that I lived only in my flesh and that my inner world was somehow lost to me.
I tried to sleep, but my body was still racked by the side effects of the drugs and the eclectically pulses going up and down my arms kept my attention despite the fatigue I felt. Suddenly I was startled by a weight on my chest and a shadow blocked out the blue light against the ceiling. One of my friend’s three cats had come and curled up with me. He purred loudly as he settled in. It was a calming feeling and focusing on the purr instead of the tingling in my arms helped me doze off.
I don’t recall the dream in its entirety. But I remember still being in the living room at my friend’s house, sleeping in my dream as I slept in life with the cat on top of me. Except, in the dream, there was something between me and the cat: it was a rectangular object, balanced on my body, and the cat sat atop it. It was sometimes thin and sometimes thick. Sometimes light and airy, sometimes like stone. Sometimes flexible and sometimes stiff. It changed so frequently that I simply accepted all its properties as being true all at once. Eventually, the cat stood and looked down at me over the edge of it. A voice spoke from somewhere beyond what I could see.
“It lays the foundation of a house of Bast.”
Suddenly I felt something give and the plate was pushed into me, as if the weight of the cat had punched it though my skin into the hollow interior of my dream body. It startled me awake and I found the real cat still lying on top of me peacefully. When he saw that my eyes were open, he calmly licked my chin. I sat up and he jumped to the floor indignantly and watched me. I looked through my blankets, trying to find the “barrier” he had been sitting on, convinced it should be there somewhere since nothing could really go inside me. Then I realized that the barrier had been part of the dream as well.
“A house of Bast?” I asked aloud as I thought on it.
Why that? I had never had any contact with Bast before. As I pondered what it meant, I realized that the dream had left more behind than an odd phrase: I still felt the symptoms of the drug in my blood, but I felt it clearly in my body—my soul, my mind, were separate underneath it. I was myself again. My being was out of my flesh and back in head where it belonged, the two were still undoubtedly connected, but connected the way they were meant to be—in balance. The hollow “space” inside me as gone, filled again with the familiar essence of my other souls, and there was something warm and tight wrapped around that inner me, a barrier and pathway—connecting, yet keeping everything in its place where it belonged.
I thought on it for a while until the feeling of that difference faded and I couldn’t remember how it had felt to not be normal. My mouth was dry so I got up and flicked on the light so I could get a drink from the kitchen. When I came back into the room, I happened to glance at the entertainment center next to where I had been sleeping and noticed the little altar. My friend is a kind of spiritual pagan, and like me, she keeps spiritual things out in her environment. In this case, an object immortalizing a beloved feline that passed a few years ago, and on top of a box behind it, a statue of Bast.
I remembered it now. I had bought it for her in Las Vegas at the Luxor—before I became Kemetic—because I knew how much she loved her cats. The altar she had made with it was homage to her pets. Bast had pride of place as her personal touchstone for protecting her four-legged companions.
The reason for the dream suddenly made sense— I had been sleeping under an image of a Name and had prayed for help before going to sleep—but the dream itself… I had not known Bast as a healer, a protectress yes, but protection? From what? The drug perhaps? And then there was that phrase: foundation of a house of Bast…what did that mean?
I don’t claim to know. But I suppose it at least gives me something to research today while I wait for this drug to wear off.
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