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CAREGIVER LETTERS & STORIES

Anxiety Disorders - The Caregiver

continued:

This letter was written in response to another letter in which the support person was having difficulties.

Hey Doug...

Wow... If you have a clone somewhere, it would have to be me! I have the same problems just as you described yours, with a few exceptions. Let me lay them out for you.

I live in a very small community in the western US, and I don't live "in town". I live several miles from town, up a mountain and through the woods. We both work at a small hospital in town. Very political organization (which causes MUCH stress all by itself). I moved here a few years ago in my mid 30's and very single. I met my wife and what can I say... I just popped and fell head over heals in love with this wonderful, caring, beautiful, sexy, smart, sensitive woman that just does it for me (apparently she must have felt the same cuz she married me, thank God).

When we first met, she was seeing a counselor and taking medication for this panic/anxiety thing. At the time, I never noticed any strange (to me) behavior or anything out of the ordinary except that she was mildly co-dependant and was afraid to drive on the highway. No problem, I thought. I love to drive and when the blizzards come in, we shouldn't be on the road anyway.

About 2 years ago, we purchased a "mini" ranch and decided to live our dreams. We got horses and chickens and dogs and all of the standard ranch stuff. We live kind of remote, and a very basic lifestyle, without many of the frills and benefits that most of you take for granted, but we didn't care. We love to look out the front window and see the elk grazing, and the foxes that come in to steal our chickens and not seeing any neighbors or cars or honking or yelling. Its quiet except for the sounds of nature. Very relaxing when you get off work.

After we bought our dream we decided that because we were rapidly approaching the big "40's" and we wanted to have a child, everything was right with our world and we had better get started. First, she had to get off the Xanax because of possible birth defects. No problem, we took it slow and before long it was over. No more Xanax and it didn't seem to bother her to get off them and I didn't notice any real personality or emotional problems.

She got pregnant in July and carried our child through the worst winter ever recorded in our area with blizzard-after-blizzard and times when it was 40 below for weeks at a time. Nobody plows our road and sometimes there were drifts of snow that were 20 and 30 feet high. We mostly went around them and for months we made our own roads to get in and out, depending on which way the wind was blowing. Many people that lived near us just moved out because it was too much, but we stayed and I got a book on home birth/delivery just in case (by the way, on the humorous side, I asked our OB doc where I could find a good book on home birth and she said "in the trash").

Well the time came and I cranked up the Dodge during a horrible blizzard and the snow was over the hood of our already "monstorized" (high off the ground) ram charger and we made it in and the baby was born in our little hospital in march. The delivery was incredible and very simple (even my wife said so) and we took our new BEAUTIFUL son home. Life was, and still is, good and we were blessed and still are.

When our son was about six months old, something happened and our son started having a focal seizures. I remember the first time when my wife called me at work and was out of control. She was holding him and he went into a seizure and then went limp and she thought that he stopped breathing and was turning blue. She dropped the phone and jumped into the jeep to fly down the hill to our hospital, and I jumped into the truck and met her halfway and we flew to the hospital and he was admitted.

Turns out that the limp and color was due to the seizure and he was just sleeping after the seizure because they are so draining. He seemed fine after he woke up and had a blast at the hospital and got tons of attention. We work with all of the hospital people everyday, so he got extra fun grabbing glasses and pulling earrings off of the nurses that were constantly holding him. Smiles the whole time.

By the 2nd day, still no more seizures and no apparent cause for the first. The doc comes in and says if there are no more that we can go home that evening. No more and I am holding him playing with his feet waiting for the doc to discharge us that evening. The doc is on his way down the hall and wham he starts having another seizure while I am holding him. I will tell you it is quite a shock seeing your perfect little boy jerking all over. I handled it ok and the doc came in at the tail end of it and I held him to the side so that he would not choke and then it was over.

Doc said that I did fine and he was just going to sleep it off. I put him in the crib and left the room to find my wife who had run out of the room when it started. On the way, I started thinking about things and everything started to hit me and I just lost it. I cried and fell to my knees in the hallway and just couldn't stop crying. Being a computer guy for the last 20 years kind of made me have a logical thought process and seeing him, and realizing that this just wasn't some "General Protection Fault" fluke, I became very emotional.

It was serious and something was very wrong. I tried to pull myself together and went back to the room and the nurses were putting an I.V. in his little arm and the doc was telling me that they need to get him to another hospital in Billings. Working at this hospital, I know that when we transfer somebody to "Billings," it means that the patient often dies. I lost it again, just couldn't seem to get it together, but my wife, Mrs. Anxiety, was like a rock and helped me pull things together for the long trip to Billings. She rode in the ambulance and I drove the truck behind them. It was a long drive to Billings even at 80 mph. I can't tell you how alone I felt during that drive by myself. I alternated between crying and praying and offering myself to the Lord so that he wouldn't take my son. I remember asking the Lord to just crash this truck if it meant that my son might live. I was ready to die right then if the Lord would agree to take me, instead of my son.

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Well, needless to say, I got to Billings in one piece thanks to the only radio station I could seem to receive. It was a Christian station (which I don't usually listen to Christian radio). I was looking for any C&W station that I could get, but the Christian station was it. I started listening and I know that God was talking to me through it. I found all sorts of messages that seemed to be meant for me alone and opened my mind to them and found comfort. All of this from me? Mr. Atheist!

Anyway back to the subject. We got to Billings and he never had another seizure and some doc told us after a week of tests that it seemed to be a liver thing that seemed to be healing and we went home, Happily. We had made it back from the dreaded Billings with our son. That is when things started to go wrong with me and my wife.

My normally happy, smiling wife had started having these anxiety attacks where I was the bad guy instead of the husband/partner. It got violent for awhile, where she was very abusive, verbally saying things like we never should have gotten married and f**k you, and I don't love you, and I never loved you bla bla bla.

The attacks would last for days at a time where I was some sort of enemy and was constantly under attack form my sweet loving wife. She would get violently angry with me if she had to stay home alone with our son, or if she might have to drive somewhere by herself. She would say things like "you don't have any idea what I am going through, or you don't even know who I am or how I feel," and then would be mean or would not even look at me for days. It was like I was alone in our house with people in it. There were times that she would not even acknowledge my being there for days at a time.

I started to realize that it wasn't me, but that the thing with our son kinda triggered this anxiety thing again. I started looking for help. It helped working at a hospital and pretty soon I found out from medical people that had known her for 15 years that this had happened many times before. They asked me if she was taking any medication or being seen by anybody and I told them no. They said that I needed to get her in to see her old doc again.

So home I went with the idea that I would ask her as tactfully as possible to consider getting checked out by doc so-and-so. Boy was that a huge thing. She was in total denial and would not go back. I didn't give in though because I wanted my sweet wife back. I took all of the abuse and anger (which was really fear) that she could dish and continued to take care of our son and did my best to keep my attitude together. I treated each day as a new chance to get things on the track towards treatment. I kind of treated the problem like a huge snow drift. If you can't drive through it, find a way around it. I kept telling myself that there is a way, even if I have to move the drift one snowflake at a time.

It would take love and courage and patience, but every snowflake that I managed to move meant one less to deal with. There were times that the entire drift fell in on me and I had to start over, but I didn't give up and eventually I was able to make a path through to her and get her back to treatment. Now she is on a different med (Paxil) and some counseling and a whole lot of love from me, and things are getting slowly back to normal (what is normal?).

I can't tell you how wonderful it is to see that loving smile again or that incredible feeling when we become one in bed. We are becoming totally emotionally/physically/spiritually connected again. Life is good and we are a family again. We still have bad days, and I believe that we always will, but now there seems to be some sort of balance. I would take many bad days for one smile, or touch, or sparkle from her eyes.

I think that you need to decide in your heart (not the logical brain) that you WILL or WILL NOT deal with whatever her troubles are and take things one day at a time. I have come to believe that there is no total "cure" for this thing, just understanding. Its kind of like a cold, we can only treat the symptoms, we cant cure the cold. There were, and are, many times that I say to myself "f**k this. I have had it, there are lots of fish out there, I don't need this kind of crap, nobody can treat me this way." I think of leaving and sometimes I just want to slap the woman (not that I would). Then, when I calm down, I realize how much this woman means to me and I convince myself that the larger the mountain you climb, the sweeter the victory's are. Don't quit man. Be the rock that you promised when you took your vows.

Its okay to run sometimes, just make sure that you come back. There always seems to be an easy way out of our troubles, but the easy way isn't always the best way. "That's what makes us men," my father used to say.

So try a little research on the problem. It will help you to understand the problem. Its okay to push her, I think, but make to sure to push the love also. It will make things easier for her to swallow. Make sure that she knows that you are her rock no matter what. Also kind of make it a game for yourself to "save" her when the car breaks down. Remember that she is calling her knight in shining armor and maybe there might be a reward for saving your damsel in distress. Sometimes a call for help can turn into an intimate encounter that you wont forget, but you can't tell the kids about.

Most of all though, try to loose the logic thing when dealing with the wife. I have that problem and it is hard for me to turn off sometimes. Remember that if you are dealing with an emotional wife, be an emotional man, and when she is being a logical wife, be a logical man. If you adjust to her, she will adjust to you also. Maybe not overnight-- but she will.

Most important though, take time for yourself to get away from the situation for a day sometimes. In order for you to be strong for her, be strong for yourself. Everybody needs a little healing/quiet/whatever time for themselves. You have to be true to yourself before you can be true to others.

Anyway, enough rambling. Good luck

Shaw

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