After a very brutal six months on acne medication when I was 15 and after seeing the effects of one of my high-school buddies being overly medicated, I sort of went through life trying to avoid medications when I felt it wasn't necessary.
After I broke my leg, I had to detox from painkillers and muscle relaxers. It was one of the worst things I've ever gone through. Even worst than the surgery. Cold sweats, phantom pains my body would produce so I would want to take more, crying for no reason, nausea. I can see why people move on from pain killers to heroin. Once the dosage doesn't do it for you anymore, you will do anything not to feel the way detoxing from them feels.
I found a local south city doctor through an old friend of mine at Wells Fargo. My old doctor was fine. I liked him, he tended to tell me to do Yoga to fix most things. I liked that he didn't immediately jump to pills. And that worked for me when I was in my mid-20s. I felt like everything was still in front of me, so no matter how hard things were, I would bounce back. I was invincible!
Well, as I got older, I realized sometimes you can't yoga your way out of things. Sometimes you need enough pills to justify having a weekly pill container. And I could not get my doctor on board. "No no no, what you need to do... actually, hold on" starts writing on what I think is a prescription pad, hands me a piece of paper, "this Yoga you can find on YouTube for free. Do this three times a week."
There were times where I also felt like he did un-necessary tests because I had good insurance. I know he saw a lot of people that couldn't really afford a doctor, so I thought maybe he was using my insurance to offset some of their costs. But our incredibly messed up medical industrial complex is too big a topic to take on right now.
Been searching for a new doctor for a couple years now. Insurance changed once or twice and generally just couldn't find anyone that looked promising.
There's been something in the back of my mind that hasn't felt right in five years. In all honesty, it was when I was laid off at Wells Fargo. There was some sort of betrayal by a mega-corporation. One that while I worked there I knew was against everything I believed in. But when you have student loans the size I did and medical bills the size we did, it's very easy to justify selling out for a steady paycheck to barely pay the bills.
I won one of Wells Fargo's most prestigious awards. Roughly 50 people out of 88,000 employees get this award, and I did it by working overtime, rebuilding their entire documentation library.
In the back of my mind though, I knew thanks to the Wells Fargo 2020 initiative, there would be layoffs. It was marketed as if we were going to build the strongest team possible, but everyone knew it meant that they were going to cut and slash staff from the several companies they gobbled up during the 2008 financial crisis.
But I thought I could outwork the layoffs. I would be a survivor.
And then one faithful Tuesday, we all called in for our team call. When an HR rep was introduced on our call, we knew what was happening, but not to the severity it happened. They shit canned the entire department. All 12 of us out of a job because we trained up our replacements in the Philippines so well, that the wheels of capitalism saw a way to save the company a couple hundred of thousand of dollars in salary and benefits by getting rid of us.
I never recovered from that. I've carried this sense of anxiety and betrayal with me for the past five years. It's been a tightness in my chest and shoulders. And it's shown itself in full blown anxiety attacks where I think I'm having a heart attack.
I started with therapy back in November. That's when I started realizing how depressed and stressed and burned out I've been. I've been able to trace it to events in my life that I sort of survived through, but never dealt with.
I found a new doctor and she's great. She talked to me for 45 minutes. She had most of my family history memorized from the questionnaire I filled out. We talked about my top concerns, discussed my day to day life, all while she poked, prodded, and wrote various numbers down.
Her immediate assessment is I have Anxiety, Depression, or ADHD. Maybe all three, maybe one of them is causing the other two. We don't know, but luckily there is a wonder drug which is prescribed for all three and doesn't have any side effects.
She took my blood and sent me on my way with my new prescription.
Smash cut to a week later, I get an email saying, "Yo, we called in a prescription. You need to go pick it up and chuck a handful of them into your mouth on the way home. You've got high cholesterol and you may have a heart attack if you keep these levels up."
It's been a few months on this cholesterol drug, I've been generally eating healthy, working out like crazy, I've lost 12 lbs since my last doctors appointment.
I have my follow-up blood work this week. I'm feeling pretty good about it. My chest is generally less tight. I haven't had an anxiety attack since January.
The doc says most of my cholesterol is likely related to genetics based on my weight, how I eat, and how much I work out. So I'm sort of hoping science can win against my DNA.
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