A Series of Importunate Events II

The series of mini stay-at-home-adventures continues tonight as the work proceeds on the laundry room floor. It is already after nine and the guys--my husband, his brother, and our nephew--have been hard at it since about seven-thirty and they just called a restroom alert: if you need it, speak up or hold your peace (or do they mean ’piece’ or ’pees’) for at least another hour. So it will be past ten-thirty before I get access to the front room and the Internet tonight again. I guess I better get started on this. Wasn’t much in the mood to try to think, let alone compose readable prose, with all that racket. Those power screwdrivers sound like dentists drills on steroids attached to jackhammers! I don’t think earplugs would help much. They would just silence the sounds that give context to the high decibel sounds and the jarring thumps and that would subject me to a series of heart thumping startle reactions.

There is no happy choice here for someone with Panic/Anxiety Disorder. I’m not handling it as well tonight as I was the last couple nights and not nearly as well as last Friday afternoon when I slept through most of it, waking to take note of a noise but dozing back off with little trouble. For the first time since the week of my Dad’s funeral last October, I’m tempted to take a chip off one of the Zoloft tablets left from the last time I had the prescription filled in 2001. But I’m not sure I remember where I put them after I got back from Longview. Besides there are less than a dozen approximately 25mg chips left from when I split the remaining fifteen or so 100mg tabs the week I realized that a refill anytime soon would be a miracle and if I didn’t start a controlled withdrawal immediately I would be faced with a cold-turkey withdrawal in fifteen days anyway. That was the second week of September 2001! I should save the few I have left now for times when I am required to be in a high-stress situation that includes social interaction and/or walking the public streets unescorted. Those occasions when others are depending on me to perform adequately or my life depends on me performing more than adequately.

It just occurred to me that it is a pretty good sign that I haven’t even had to think about looking for those chips since I got back to Phoenix just before Thanksgiving. That is not a lightweight realization. Go read my December archives if you need clarification of why. Especially this one. And consider that the typical holiday stresses and social expectations followed close on that. Hmmm. I need to contemplate on the variables involved. That can’t have just happened. Something that I have been doing differently on a fairly consistent basis for the last seven months that I had not been doing for much of the previous twenty-plus years? The only thing that pops out in my mind is the two big bottles of B vitamins--a B complex and a B6--that were my Dad’s that my Mom encouraged me to start taking for my high BP the week after he died and then sent home with me. I need to get online and Google Vitamin B and anxiety.

I could have been online several hours ago now. Shortly after I wrote the first paragraph of this, my screen froze while I was switching back and forth between two word processor windows one of them this post and the other a copy of an email I wrote my mother last week that related some of the events I am trying to retell here. I needed to refresh my memory on the fine detail. But the slow window turnover that started plaguing me a couple days ago and which I know is a signal that it’s past time to restart finally caught up with me and forced a control-alt-delete restart. I knew that was coming and intended to restart before tonight’s session but hoped to get the post written first. I made myself return to it after I completed the reboot and then got moved out to the living room. I’m thinking of making it another rule to have something ready to post before I allow myself to sign online each night. I don’t write as well on the fly unless something I just read has stimulated me to rant. And even then the fear of being knocked off line by bossy ole AOL whenever I spend more than five or so minutes without clicking on a link keeps me too distracted to write. Yeah, they give me a warning but I have to uncover the AOL window to get to the ’yes-I-want-to-stay-online’ button and it sometimes takes so long to appear that they preempt my choice.

This post did not go where I set out to take it. I had intended to relate one of the series of importunate events from last week. Well two actually but one followed on the other and was a direct effect of the first so I was planning to combine them into one story. So I guess there will be yet another post in this series. Well at least I won’t have to dither around about what to write about.