Sunday, May 21, 2006

B and J and E and Me

The only thing I kept doing was yoga. Everything else fell away. As long as I kept doing yoga, I could ride the small amount of goodness I got from it, at least until lost my shit again.

An observation about a class fom sometime in January...

I went to yoga today but was aware of only about half of what I was doing. I just felt so tired of doing. I didn’t want to do anything.There was all this crazy sadness going on, too. B., who has been in that class for something like ten years, and has always occupied the same spot in the row ahead of me since I’ve been there (5 years now?), is about to undergo chemotherapy for the third time. We meditated on her health. We are supposed to do it again tomorrow at 1 when the chemo begins.

And J., a woman maybe 5 years older than me, she is having a very hard time. She is usually an animal in class, always going for the hard stuff. She kept lying down, and Denise, our teacher, went over to her at one point. The two of them had a hushed conversation, and Denise said, "It’s fine to just sit here and try to be happy for everyone else. That’s a very advanced practice.”

Quite.

And there I was, sunk in my own random depression, literally sandwiched between these two suffering women. When it came time to do handstand, I just scooted next to E., who never does handstand, and said, “I’m not doing this today. What do you usually do while everyone else is in handstand?”

“Nothing,” she laughed. “I just observe.” E. is seventy and suffers from arthritis and some other things she hasn’t shared with me. She’s a tiny, bony woman with wispy grey hair. She walks four miles a day (I spot her all the time around the neighborhood). She asked me why I wasn’t doing handstand today, and I said I was on medication that is making me dizzy.

I started taking Paxil last night, right in Dr. Clark’s office. I also got a script for a nice anti-anxiety drug, for those times when I think I’m going to have a panic attack. I am so happy to have drugs. I am so looking forward to being functional again.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are a supremely strong woman!

Anonymous said...

Sure. The anti-anxiety drug is alprazolam, also known as Xanax. When I take it I reminded myself of Ross on the "Friends" episode where he freaks out because someone at work ate his sandwich, and his doc gives him some medication to quell his rage. Someone asks him how he’s doing, and he grins and says, “I sure don’t care about my sandwich anymore.”

So, the anti-anxiety meds don’t make me high or loopy, they just make me not care about my sandwich anymore.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and I take it as needed. It starts to work in about 20 minutes and lasts for 4-6 hours. I try not to take it unless I really feel like I can't function. During those times, I'm way more functional on it than I would be off it.

A great time to be on it would have been during my driving-home-in-the-dark-with-my-kids episode (see "No Breakdown Lane"), where I started to lose rational thought. Didn't have the rx then, but that's exactly the kind of thing I now have it for.