Focussed On The Future

The day after my previous post the nasty thoughts went away, a sure sign that the paxil is starting to work. I still sometimes worry about my various problems, real and perceived, and they may make my gut knot up briefly, but I no longer obsess over them and I can move on to other thoughts more easily now. Most importantly, the nagging thought that I'm incapable of handling anything has been banished.

The bad morning cramps have also cleared up. I still suffer from digestive distress most of the day but it's far milder than what I was going through before and I'm able to function fairly normally. It is a bit tiring, though, so I'm spending more time in bed. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the remaining "pang" is caused by the paxil, as opposed to lingering anxieties, in which case it should gradually fade away over the next couple of weeks.

I'm now into the shaky side effect, where my whole body feels like it's vibrating. It's almost comical when I try to stretch while yawning as my body jerks spasmodically. Sounds worse than it is. It's not particularly debilitating, though it does make my voice tremor a bit, particularly in the morning when it's at its worst. I remember going through the same phase the last time I went onto paxil and it should pass in a week or so as well.

It's surprising what a difference a little pink pill can make to the way I think.

Before the paxil: "I'm spending all of my time at work on regular duties X and Y, but there's still project Z that's falling behind. I can't keep up. I can't possibly do this job. They're going to fire me!"

After the paxil: "Let's spend a couple of weeks meticulously recording the time I spend on X and Y, calculate how much that leaves for Z then pass that info on to my boss and see how he wants to handle it."

Oh the strange and mysterious workings of brain chemistry.

A little over a year ago I stopped taking paxil. While it had helped with my problems with anxiety it never really did anything for my depression. In the 11 years that I'd been on paxil I had learned other ways of dealing with anxiety so I decided to give them a try.

After the initial mood swings I settled down and things were pretty good for a few months. Then, slowly, the anxiety started to return. At first I could chalk it up to one-off events and, most recently, to an enormous amount of stress at work. But that's all several weeks behind me now yet my levels of anxiety have only grown and become more frequent. For the past two weeks my gut has been in a near continuous state of turmoil and I often feel like I'm on the verge of vomiting. Tonight I was having dinner with a friend when I broke out into a cold sweat, something which in the past has presaged a panic attack.

So tonight, when I got home from dinner, I went back onto the paxil. When I was coming off of it, a year ago, I found that at a quarter does I didn't experience any ill side-effects, so I'm starting out at just a quarter dose. Hopefully that will be enough to rein in the anxiety. I should be able to tell in a couple of weeks if it's working.

Last Saturday I went out geocaching and did not have an enjoyable time: I only found one of the three caches that I searched for; when the batteries in my cellphone started to run low I discovered that the recharger for the truck was missing and my backup battery pack was dead; it started to rain (albeit lightly) when I got to the third cache; worst of all, I got lost in the woods.

The third cache was located on the northeast side of Mount Hayes above an old clearcut. The trail leading up to it was mostly overgrown and marked with occasional bits of yellow or pink flagging tape. When I reached the cache site I was exhausted from the climb, dispirited by the lack of power for my cellphone (which doubles as my GPS unit) and annoyed by the rain. I only searched for the cache for 10 or 15 minutes before giving up in frustration and heading back down. Somewhere along the way I followed the wrong set of pink flagging tape and ended up on an even less used trail which eventually petered out, leaving me stranded on the wrong side of beaver pond, in an area I didn't recognize.

Now I have to say that there are worse things than getting lost on the side of a mountain. At least you know which way is down. And in my case I knew that so long as I kept heading down, sooner or later I'd run into a road. I had a compass with me and I'd hoarded the remaining power in my cellphone so that I could get a final GPS fix on my location before it died. So it wasn't like there was any chance of me wandering in circles until I died of starvation.

Still, it did make me nervous. All alone in the woods, not sure of the way out, with sunset just an hour away and no way to call for help.

My ordeal did not last long. The GPS fix I'd gotten had told me that the main logging road was only about 300 meters away, on the other side of the beaver pond. I had no idea how far the pond extended to the south but I could see a rise at the north end, so I circled around to there and almost immediately came upon a small tertiary logging road which wasn't on my map but ran in the right direction. I followed that and about fifteen minutes later was back on the main logging road.

So as wilderness survival epics go, mine was tame to the point of being housebroken, but it nonetheless left a bad taste in my mouth and contributed to overall pall which hung over the outing and it was a week before I finally got around to logging the one cache that I did find that day.