Dark Night of the Soul
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The days immediately following my trip to the ER were filled with anxiety, terror and uncertainty.
I suddenly had a huge burning ball of anxiety in my stomach that wreaked havoc on my life. To complicate matters further my mental acuity had plummeted. I was no longer able to process my thoughts as fluidly which only increased my anxiety.
I remember most days it being a struggle to keep food down and most nights sleep not coming. I tried to continue earning money at poker but is became clear that playing an intellectually exhausting game was no longer a viable option given my current state.
I was at a loss and was so drained from dealing with the fall out of my hospital trip. My body and mind felt in complete disrepair. In a desperate measure I started taking a benzodiazepine or anti-anxiety pill by the name of Klonopin. Initially the Klonopin provided a little relief but it became crystal clear that, given my low functioning state, that moving home would provide me the space in which I could begin healing. I came home to my very confused family in Midland, Texas. No one was sure what to make of my situation, the least of all myself.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t until I moved home that things began to get really dark.
Once at home my condition worsened and I felt justified in keeping on my Klonopin regime. I was having panic attacks nearly every other day and leaving my bed was a major accomplishment. Eating was very challenging and what little sleep I did get was during the middle of the day.
Often times, when my caring and very concerned sister who also lived in Midland would come over with my Nephew, I didn’t have the energy or stability to even leave my room. I would hear my nephew knock at the door and then my sister tell him that his uncle wasn’t feeling good and needed to be left alone. What hell realm had I entered?
What had I done to deserve this? were questions I was always asking myself. It didn’t even feel real, it was so dark. I was staying up all night with severe anxiety and depression as my constant companion. I was in tears every day screaming to my parents that I wanted out. That I wanted so badly to kill myself. It was heart breaking, but true.
Thankfully, I’ve been blessed with patient and caring parents who were there every step of the way with me. I wasn’t drinking or smoking pot because intuitively I knew that they wouldn’t help my situation, but I was smoking upwards of a half a pack of cigarettes a day. I had never been much of a cigarette smoker prior to this event. I tried a psychologist and a psychiatrist. I will just leave it as Midland, Texas is a difficult place to find help. Actually, the truth is I was beyond help at this point and the suffering I was going through was just something that I would have to endure one way or another. I remember feeling 10 levels below what I thought somebody suicidal might feel. Suicidal thoughts and fantasies were also my constant companions at this point.
When I forced myself to walk around my parents neighborhood from time to time I just remember how depersonalized I was and how I felt completely disconnected from everything. Several times I would barely get to the end of my parents street and then everything would start spinning and I would get very weak and have to turn around. I would come home and collapse in to tears in my room and promise myself to make it through one more moment. So many times during this period I was moment to moment.
I felt utterly trapped in some torturous hell realm and I had no feelings that it would ever lift. When my sister from Seattle that I hadn’t met until we were both adults came to visit I was possibly at my lowest point. I could sense how unsettled my condition was making her feel. She was trying to give me loving advice but I just wasn’t able to explain how helpless I was feeling.
One day when she was visiting I was starting to get tired and I actually felt like I could get some sleep. I decided to take half of a Klonopin that way I would hopefully stay asleep. I crunched it up so it would go in to my system faster. 15 minutes after taking it my heart started going in to crazy palpitations. I was tossing and turning and waking up every 10 minutes soaked in my own sweat for the next 12 hours.
The harrowing experience didn’t conclude after I woke up. I realized that I could no longer take Klonopin as the side effects were becoming worse than what it was intended to treat. Quitting the Klonopin was a near impossible task. I would lay in bed shaking as my mom would supplement me with a few ounces of a smoothie here and there.
When I started to feel like I was going to start having a seizure we decided to check me in to a drug detox center called The Springboard Center.
I am getting uncomfortable flashbacks just writing this. Eeek. I slept for the better part of 4 days and was released. While I was there a very empathetic Native American man who was a nurse at the facility asked me if I wanted to go on a walk with him one morning. During the walk he really listened to me. Like myself, he was at a loss as to what was happening.
I just remember one exchange that gave me hope when I was commenting on all the biological consequences of what had happened to me in Las Vegas he responded, “At the same time the brain is a spec of dust that we don’t know anything about.” Once home I was bed ridden for another couple of days. After about the 3rd day I slowly started to feel more human. It was a miracle!
I could go to the grocery store and apply for jobs and hit the driving range with my dad. Maybe the cloud was starting to lift! For about a solid week it seemed like I was making a recovery. And then out of nowhere the dreaded cloud re-emerged. I was unable to get out of bed on Thanksgiving day to join my family. I came out of my room that evening and laid on the living room floor and cried to my parents. I kept telling them I’m not doing so well. I can’t even leave my room any more.
They were supportive as always and kept encouraging me. I began reading about binaural beats and how instrumental they were at healing depression and anxiety due to how effectively they reprogrammed your brain waves. I went to Best Buy and purchased a nice set of stereo headphones to increase the potentiality of the sound tones.
