Stress tried to kill me

[Cammy]

We have been going through extreme periods of severe anxiety the past month or so. During the daytime, while awake, I am able to use my mind to control the panic and self-talk that leads to panic and anxiety. However, when I am trying to sleep, in those moments when the mind must be let go off, then we wake up with an electroshock of adrenalin coursing through us driving our heart rate up and blood pressure with it. We went through days of zero sleep because of this. In the middle of this mess we had a dental appointment. They took our blood pressure and refused to proceed with the root canal. The BP was 200/110 mmHg - this is what adrenalin and cortisol can do when allowed to run non-stop through the human body. Ending up at emergency, the doctor finally gave us permission to increase our Mirtazepine from 15 mg to 45 mg per night, plus an additional 1 mg Clonazepam twice a day. It worked... BP has settled down a lot and we are able to sleep. We now are being fast-tracked to see a new P-doc for medication suggestions and a psychologist for as long as I need to see her. Stress like this is a killer. Blood pressures that high lead to strokes and heart attacks. I am lucky that nothing horrible happened this time.
The worst of all of this is that the anxiety runs all across all of my personalities. No one personality has ownership of the anxiety. I can't escape into a particular personality that is immune to this or has special armor plating. There is no escape. We are also without a host right now. No host, and yet this anxiety seems so very specific to an individual, but unfortunately it runs throughout the entire system from young to old. This sucks and is serious. The anxiety and panic is beyond all of our coping mechanisms - we have tried everything we know to outrun it, but cannot. We are entirely grateful for medication right now to make this better and make it possible to survive without a stroke or death. Our hope is that by attacking this issue from a medical side (medication) and from a psychological side (seeing a psychologist in order to gain new coping skills such as a CBT course), we will gain improvement so that eventually the drugs can be weaned off. Each of our personalities has serious bad thinking habits that lead to anxiety and panic. The hope is to learn to think in such a way as to prevent anxiety and panic, and then to move into this new personality. It's kind of like decorating to taste before moving the furniture in. There is nothing to say that this is going to work, but stress is a silent killer and besides that, it doesn't feel very good to be in that state of mind for any amount of time. Had this have gone on, there is no doubt it would have done terrible damage to this body, perhaps even killed it. These past few months have by far been some of the hardest we have ever gone through in our entire lives in terms of sustained severe anxiety and stress. It will be SO nice to see light at the end of this long dark tunnel. I am so very, very, very grateful for medication at this point.