I’m going to be honest. I’ve been out of my mind the past few months. Seriously, feeling like my brain is completely out of control… A week ago, I found myself crying – and shouting in the mirror, “Who am I? How did I become this person?! HOW IS THIS MY LIFE?” And here’s the thing: Everybody has issues, but my life is pretty freaking awesome when I take time to recognize it. This thinking I was having was NOT logical, and I knew it.
My level of fear, anxiety, moodswinginess, and so on – it wasn’t fair. To my kid, my husband, or myself. But at the moment, I’m starting to wrap my arms around it all and reign it in, so that control is within my grasp.
The (at least partial) fix to the crazy appears, for now, to be progesterone.
I’ve been having issues ever since my son was born (19 months ago). As a mom, I’m more anxious than I’ve ever been, watching out for every possible way my perfectly created son could get injured on a daily basis. I definitely had postpartum depression in the early months. I took progesterone for a while, then stopped when it seemed like I was doing better.
Enter the car accident that was, as I call it, the exclamation point at the end of two years of continual stress – and the thing that finally pushed me over the edge into sheer panic. It happened 10 days after my son’s first birthday, five days after my husband started a new job, and four days before Christmas. After that, I couldn’t drive without bursting into tears, even on some of our local, rural roads. I wouldn’t go more than a couple miles away or so if it snowed, and certainly wouldn’t get on the highway.
Chiropractic helped my back a bit – at least knocking out the acute symptoms of not being able to lift my leg into a pair of jeans, or not being able to turn my head. After a schedule that kept me from more treatments for a while – and after finding myself pulling off the road to cry a few times – I turned to psychological counseling. The diagnosis: PTSD and generalized anxiety.
Counseling helped quite a bit, but there was still something more coming up. I couldn’t block out loud noises; I was convinced utter devastation would occur if I forgot something from my son’s diaper bag for two hours out of the house. I was going farther and farther down a deep hole – and often finding it very hard to breathe down there. After spending about two solid days living at absolute panic level, demonstrated by hyperventilating and crying, I dug up my bottle of progesterone again.
I woke up the next morning feeling like a different person: mellow, totally relaxed, not worried about much of anything. And this was on a day that we took the kid out for a whole day, hours from home.
It’s been a week, and thankfully I’m breathing more… breathing easier… breathing more correctly. I’m still working on a lot of things, and this isn’t over, I’m certain. But for now, I’m so grateful to simply be less anxious than I was a week ago.
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