When my world was blown apart

My world was blown apart when I moved Robert to Daylight Senior Living and Memory Care. This final breach threw my world into chaos. Robert had walked beside me for over 42 years and now he was gone. I had been working since I was 16 years old and now I was not.

Completely adrift

Every touchstone, every would-be rudder that kept my life on course had been lost to me. I was drifting on an open sea, unclear when I’d see land again. 

When faced with a seemingly intractable problem, I take action. Until we act, until we change something in our world, there is no additional information available to us. By acting, we uncover new or different evidence we can use to evaluate our options. (And, yes, sometimes action means gathering data from experts.)

Do you mean it?

Make a decision, make a change, and get behind it 100% and the feedback will be rapid and illustrative. Go full bore and you’ll know soon enough if you’ve made the right decision. At least that’s what I thought. 

But there are times in our lives when we struggle to find our equilibrium for months or years. Some events hurt us so badly that we really can’t recover on our own. Painting the bedroom and moving furniture around won’t fix what ails us. This is where I found myself after I moved Robert out of our home. I’d done everything I knew to do, and I was still a mess.

A complete mess

Each night I tossed and turned in restless sleep. Every day my gut lurched in a sick, semi-nauseous state. I spent my days alone. No one came to rescue me. Robert would not get better and return.

I did all the things I was supposed to do. I exercised, I saw people, I ate well, and yet, my stomach continued to churn. As soon as I was conscious each day, I was sick. I hated my new normal.

My driving pursuit became how to make the sickness stop. “Please make this go away,” I messaged my primary care physician for a referral to psychiatry.

Fix me now, please

I didn’t want talk therapy. A long drawn-out path to recovery wasn’t going to cut it. I needed immediate relief. Or as close to immediate as I could get without landing in a locked ward with a nervous breakdown. 

The doctor prescribed antidepressants. Six weeks later, I found myself back on a video call asking for more relief. The antidepressants had not alleviated my sickness. The physician’s office prescribed a “complementary” medication. Still no relief. I felt a debilitating anxiety.

Another six weeks later, after driving across town for grocery shopping, I found myself outside Trader Joe’s unable to enter the store. Bile rose in my throat. I couldn’t go inside. I called my psychiatrist’s office and left an urgent message. Then I sat on a concrete podium outside the store for 45 minutes waiting for a call back.

The Zombie life as an option

Finally, on the line with a PA in psychiatry, I shared that my emotional state had completely upended my life. I could no longer function. I needed something for the anxiety that had overtaken my being. Antidepressants had not returned me to a functional state. I didn’t trust myself to drive home.

The PA had nearly emptied her toolkit of medicinals. As a last gambit, she prescribed gabapentin. This drug is prescribed as an anti-convulsant. Gabapentin is also prescribed, off-label, to treat anxiety. It works by suppressing the activity of nerve cells. So this is where I had ended up? I had to stop feeling to function?! I could choose to be either a wreck or a zombie?*

What?! Hell no!

I started a course of gabapentin, but after three days, I stopped taking the medication. Why? Because I decided that burying my distress was not a long-term solution. I decided I just had to walk through this pain, feel it all, and trust that I’d come out whole on the other side of it. 

Talk therapy to the rescue.

. . . . .

* I do not fault anyone for taking a different path than the one I chose. Hard times call for extraordinary measures. Caregiving and loss are debilitating.