A few months ago I decided to put the brakes on increasing the dosages of my anxiety medications. I had come to the point where I needed to either lean more heavily on meds or change the way I was doing things so I could keep the dosages as they were.
I’m a believer in medication. I want to be clear about that. Two medications in particular—Zoloft and Buspirone—have been transformative for me. Zoloft helped me to stop drinking, and Buspar helped me to stop crying when life got very heavy and very sad.
The drug with which I struggle is Ativan. It’s a rescue drug for panic attacks. My relationship with Ativan is about 20 percent love and 80 percent hate. It will stop a panic attack for me and even prevent one that is swelling and about to burst inside of me. That’s good. But it makes me crave sweets, makes me drowsy and ultimately erodes my ability to handle stress. I also feel like a failure almost every time I need to take one. I shouldn’t, but I do.
Meds are an important part of how I cope with panic disorder, but I didn’t want them to become the most important part. So I decided it was time to strengthen my anxiety management muscles.
I started slowing down and looking at what was going on when I felt the need to take an Ativan. What was happening? Just how big was this thing that was causing me to unravel? Is this unbearable panic or bearable anxiety? Was there an exit in sight? Could I get away from this?
Slowing down in the middle of an anxious situation was new for me. My default has always been to do something. Act. Fix it. Fix it now. Fix it and make it go away. When I began to do the opposite of that, I started getting somewhere.
My mother is in end-stage heart failure and is receiving excellent hospice care. People in this stage of the disease process often develop a very heavy, productive cough, the result of fluid build-up in the lungs. I will tell you that hearing my mother cough like this is extremely hard for me because my mom is and always has been a very strong woman, and I love her very much. There’s nothing I can do to stop it. I can’t make her struggle go away, but I can make my anxiety about it go away. With an Ativan.
One early afternoon as I was making Mom’s lunch, I heard her coughing as she was getting up from resting in the morning. It was the first time I had heard her struggling with the cough at midday. I knew what this particular coughing spell meant. The disease was progressing.
I felt my chest tightening as I stirred her tomato soup in the little sauce pan and flipped her grilled cheese sandwich. Eventually the coughing subsided, and I took her lunch into her. As I went back out to the kitchen to make her a cup of coffee, a voice inside me said, “You lived through that.”
Something made me repeat it to myself: You lived through that. It was as if I was teaching myself how to cope with the anxiety and sadness. Without an Ativan.
When you struggle with an anxiety disorder, there is so much focus on your triggers and what you can’t handle. I’m learning that if you slow down and give yourself credit for the difficult things you can and do handle, your ability to manage anxiety starts to improve. So I’m doing that more and more now.
In the last couple of months I haven’t had to reach for the rescue drug nearly as often. When I do reach for it, I am using it for its intended purpose. Will it always be this way? I don’t know. All I know is that as I sit here at the end of this day, writing this blog post after tucking Mom into bed, I lived without Ativan today. And I’ll take that.
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