GOT ANXIETY?

At the ripe old age of thirty-one I decided to live alone for the first time.

At eighteen years old, I moved out of the house I had grown up in and began a cycle of living with boyfriends and roommates that continued into my early thirties. After a bad break-up I decided to step-out, and face the world, solo at last.

I found an apartment on Cherokee Ave. in Hollywood. A small one bedroom / one bath that allowed dogs, I had a Lab Retriever and a Chihuahua at the time. The neighborhood was brimming with transient addicts and tranny hookers that would wander the streets at all hours looking for some depraved action.

Although it was supposed to be a secured building, the front gate didn’t latch and often there were sketchy ganged-out teens loitering around the garage. A freaked-out friend had given me a small bottle of mace that she suggested I carry when walking the dogs. I took that mace everywhere - to the laundry room, to the mailbox, down to my car, I even slept with that bottle of mace on my nightstand.

A few weeks into my solo girl-power sojourn I started to feel more anxious than usual. I had been battling anxiety forever, taking Celexa since I was twenty-five. One late night I was in my bedroom with the door locked (as if the pin bolt would somehow protect me from home invaders) worrying about earning some much-needed extra cash. I was a casting assistant’s assistant who now needed to buy a larger bottle of mace and maybe even a taser gun. It was fun living alone, right?

Anyway, I needed a second job, so I prowled Craigslist and immediately stumbled upon an ad that seemed to speak directly to me.

It read: Anxious, Need Extra Money?

The advertisement turned out to be for a clinical trial for people who suffered from anxiety. Perfect! I called the center first thing in the morning. They explained that I would have to stop taking my current medication, then they would give me a physical along with a full blood panel to ensure that I was healthy enough to participate. This was amazing! A physical, talk therapy, new meds and a paycheck? What a win, win situation!

Two weeks later I had the physical and with a clean bill of health they sent me home with a week's worth of pills that may or may not be Gabitril (it was a double blind study) so I was either getting the Gabitril or the placebo (sugar pills). I was told that the medication must always be taken with food. A few times when in a rush to get to work, I slipped up but didn’t notice a difference.

About 3 weeks into the study I began suffering from acute anxiety, it was worse than ever and I was slipping into insomnia. Leni, (one of my closet friends who also suffers from anxiety) and I were spending the day together thrift store shopping. I told her that I was convinced I was on the sugar pills and was feeling awful and thinking about quitting the trial, finding a new doctor and getting some real medication.

She said that her brother, Theo – who we were meeting later for dinner - had recently started taking Gabitril and found it very helpful. Theo told me the drug was helping, his only complaint was when he took it on an empty stomach, it made him feel as if, “my head is floating off my body". Well, I never had that feeling and now I was certain I had been taking sugar pills. I asked Theo for his Psychiatrists number.

On my drive home it started raining. By the time I got home it was pissing down. Lying in bed, locked in my room, staring at the bottle of mace on my nightstand, I started to feel like I couldn’t breathe. I needed air, I tried to open the window but it wouldn’t open. In fact not one of my six windows would open. I called a friend who lived nearby, hearing the panic in my voice he offered to come over with some WD-40 and pry these ancient bitches open. Success! Finally fresh air, I managed to get a few hours of sleep.

I called Theo’s doctor at 8:00am sharp. Luckily he had an opening at the end of the day. Yes! Tired from only getting a few hours of rest, stressed out from an exhausting day of work, dredging across town in rain soaked rush hour traffic and trying to find parking in Beverly Hills… I burst into tears as soon as the doctor asked what was wrong.

I told him the whole story and he agreed that I was most likely on the sugar pills. Not only did he think Gabitril could be beneficial for me but he also prescribed two types of Xanax (the regular kind along with the XR time-release which would hopefully prevent the panic feeling) and he gave me a prescription for sleeping pills.

He then offered me two options for treatment. #1. I could see him weekly for talk therapy along with taking medication, or #2, I could see him every other month to check in about the meds. He told me to think it over and we made a phone appointment for the following week. I left his office and headed straight for the nearest pharmacy where I filled all four prescriptions.

That night I started the Gabitril, and I took a sleeping pill.
The next day I felt better than I had in weeks. Over the next week on all my new meds I was feeling pretty good. I was back to my pre, post, late-anxiety self.

The morning of my phone appointment I was feeling great, hell I had been sedated for a week! I went into work early that day to call the doctor before anyone came in. I rang him at 8:30 as I was asked. When he answered the phone it seemed obvious that I had woke him. He sounded groggy and asked me to hold a moment. I heard shuffling and coughing and when he returned I told him that I had decided to continue with the option #2. His response was beyond odd, he replied, "I have to be honest with you, I am not sure how the jury will feel about this. Jury's are more sympathetic when the patient is seeking therapy." WHAT? What the hell was this man talking about?

I said, “Excuse me?” He said, “Wait, who is this?” I told him who it was and once again he asked me to hold on. Again with the shuffling, I could hear drawers opening and closing. He said,” Oh, I had the wrong paper work in front of me, yes that's fine, let's get together next month. Call my office and make an appointment.”

Even though I was high as a ten-year old’s fuckin’ frisbee, I knew this guy was off… way off.

But the thought of finding another plan to curtail my anxiety, was, well, anxiety inducing. So I tried to stick it out, but when I went to the pharmacy to pick up the good doctor’s refills there was a second medication, something for depression. I told the pharmacist I never asked for that medication, but he seemed surprised and suggested I contact my physician. When I saw the doctor next, I asked him about it and he said he thought I wanted something for depression. When I told him that never happened he just said, “Well that’s fine, don’t take it then.”

The good doctor continued to fill my prescription, without seeing me, for the next year!

My Man, Shua

Last year I was dating this guy named Joshua. We had been living together for a few months when he invited me to go to Ojai to visit some old friends. The plan was for us to stay with his friend, Astrid, and her much younger live-in boyfriend, Sage.

Upon arriving at Astrid’s house, she came rushing down the driveway in her Stevie Nicks hippie-witch finest and threw her arms around my boyfriend and screeched “Shua! It’s so good to see you!” Sage ambled out in his wooden clogs to greet us and gave a brotherly shout-out to… “Shua!”

Whoa? What? Who? I turned around to see this mystery man. Maybe someone was standing behind us in the patchouli? No, they were indeed talking about my boyfriend. Funny, I’d met his parents, sister, grandmother, friends, business associates, and his neighbors… “Shua”? Nope, never heard it.

When we settled in and had a moment alone, I plopped down in the comfy hemp beanbag chair and asked Josh why they were calling him by this “Shua” name, as it seemed odd to me. He said, “That’s what they call me here in Ojai.” As if that answer made any kind of sense.

Getting to know Astrid was interesting to say the least. She suggested that Josh and Sage bike over to the local farmer’s market to pick up some ingredients for dinner. She opened a bottle of organic, sulfite free Pinot Gris and began to grill me. She asked for details about my life, about how Josh and I had met and then about - big surprise - our sex life. I couldn’t tell if you she genuinely was interested or jealous. When the men returned, she abruptly changed the subject and the four of us prepared some sort of raw vegan meal that ended up making me feel a little queasy.

While lying in bed under a suffocating cloud of sandalwood incense, Josh told me that Astrid had basically slept with everyone she knew. He told me she had some kind of crazy sex drive and couldn't really control herself and that's why her marriage had failed years earlier. How comforting. I wondered aloud why he was telling me this, when it occurred to me that maybe she had in fact slept with him. I asked, "When you say she has slept with everyone, does that include you?" He simply answered, "You say that like it’s bad.”

Um, let me think.

Well, this one time in college I slept with this skinny Goth guy named Blue-haired Gary. For the record, I wish I hadn’t, but that’s a different story - anyway, we all have a past, the point is, I didn’t invite Blue-haired Gary to shack-up with us in our apartment! And if I ever would’ve suggested such a thing, I’d have fucking cleared it first with my boyfriend.

So yeah, a little heads-up would have been nice.

The next few days were more than awkward. Here I was staying in this woman's house, who had at one time been my boyfriend’s lover and all over town people were calling this man a weird name I’d never heard before. Ojai is a small and precious upwardly mobile community northeast of LA that attracts comfortable shoe wearing hippie millionaires, disaffected rich kids, and wanna-be artisans. It’s filled with crystal shops, metaphysical healers, massage gurus and even pet psychics, “Honey, do you think the hamster needs a shrink?” I couldn’t help but wonder, who was this guy I had fallen in love with and why did it take this life-coach infested place to make me realize how different we really were?

I later found out that Schua <ə> is actually something in the dictionary; it's a kind of non-vowel, a neutral sound between two consonants that kind of sounds like a flat "e". When I told Josh this, he became excited at the thought that maybe he should just use this unpronounceable, strange and confusing <ə> as his signature.

When he asked me what I thought, I watched him for a long moment.

“Perfect.”