One Year Later: A Letter to Myself

Ugh, I know. ANOTHER post about my youngest kid. Even I'm getting sick of how much I talk about Henry. But today is a special day. So, indulge me. 

I can never resist showing off a picture of my dude. Those CHEEKS. That double chin! That button nose! Those plump little lips! I am ALL ABOUT those delicious lips! MUAHMUAHMUAH! But I digress. 

One year ago, on November 7th, I thought my life was over. 

I remember that day in bits and pieces -- but the pieces I do remember are sharp. We had gone in for an anatomy scan, to learn the baby's sex. We waited in the waiting room with the other mothers, giddy, debating the different reasons why we thought it would be a boy or a girl. We made bets. We shook on them. I can't remember any of them now. 

The nurse called us in and Lou carried June back into the ultrasound room. It was dark and cool. The nurse squirted some goo on my belly and our son popped up on the TV screen. In high-definition, no less. We all stared, in awe, while the tech took measurements. Every so often I'd blurt out, Do you see that? That's his face! Do you see his little face? Is that a penis? That's a penis right there, right? Pretty sure that's a penis. Definitely a penis, I said, trying to get the ultrasound tech to check the sex. 

And then the doctor walked in. Shook our hands. Stared at the screen intently and sighed. And then. And then. The most agonizing moment of my life. Had the doctor burst through the door and roundhouse kicked me in the neck, I could not have been more stunned. And hurt. 

Our son, he told us, had a defect called Spina Bifida. Something was wrong. Something had not formed properly. Fluid on the brain. Malformation. No cerebellum. Increase of stillbirth by a factor of five. Prematurity. C-section. Clubbed feet. We don't know. We don't know. There's no way of knowing. Over and over, the bad news just kept coming. It crashed over us. By the end of his spiel, I almost couldn't breathe. 

I didn't want to terminate, per se -- but I definitely wanted to be un-pregnant. Somehow. I bit my tongue, almost asking can I try again? Can I get a do-over? Can we fix this? Simultaneously, I seethed at the staff, smoldering with a protective fury. Just dare mention termination to me, I thought, just try. I felt like jumping off the table, ready to fight anyone who would suggest I abort -- but at the same time feeling weak and wanting immediately to be done being pregnant. To have this go away. I remember feeling weighted down, weak and hot, sweaty and starting to shake, hopelessly trapped because I couldn't run from the "problem" -- the "problem" was inside of me. It was inescapable. Inevitable. I felt doomed. 

I felt my life was over. 

That grin. THAT GRIN. What was I saying?

Here's what I would say to myself if I could go back: Your life is over. It's over in the best possible way. The life you had is done, and the person you were is dead. And it's an immeasurable blessing. 

You're stronger now. Words like shunt and hydrocephalus used to cause you physical pain. Now you throw them around like you're talking about what to cook for dinner. Just the thought of leaving your baby in someone else's care -- a doctor's, a babysitters -- used to set you on edge. Now you have a month in the NICU under your belt, and you have a new confidence and respect for nurses and doctors, because you've seen the miracles they can work. You can delegate. Do what you gotta do, you say to them, instead of peppering them with questions and wringing your hands in terror. Instead of crying and thinking I'm supposed to CATHETERIZE a baby? How the hell is that going to happen?, you just do it, like a boss, on the changing table in the bathroom of a Barnes and Noble, and move on with your day. You don't think to yourself anymore how will I ever possible handle all of this? Because you've handled it. You've walked through hell already. You've survived. You know that there are going to be other "worst days of my life" in the years ahead. But you also know that you have a resovoir of inner strength that is deep and wide, and you're a fighter. 

But you're also weaker. When you hear of a mom whose kid was in the NICU, your heart drops in your stomach. You ache right along with her. The smell of antimicrobial hand soap brings tears to your eyes -- it reminds you of the NICU. You wince when you see videos of yourself in the days leading up to the ultrasound, because you were so happy in those pictures and had no idea how badly you were going to be hurt. You see kids running around on a playground and you cringe -- your stomach knots in on itself. Who will Henry play with, you wonder, when all the other kids want to run around? Will he be stuck in his wheelchair, by himself? When you see pictures of children in other countries who have Spina Bifida -- children who don't have the same access to medical care, kids who -- unthinkably -- have no mommy to speak for them, the pain you have for those children is so real, so visceral, and so sharp, it takes your breath away. You feel pain differently. You hurt more. You're wounded.  

 

So yeah, in a way, your life is over. Because you're not the same person. Your soul, your mind -- everything has changed. Even your body boasts a new and impressive scar, still red and angry-looking, a vertical grin across your pelvis. But would you go back, if you had the chance, and give any of it up? Would you ask the doctor for a "do over"? Would you try to fix it? 

Hell to the no. 

You're stronger than you ever thought possible. You're more resilient than you had ever imagined. You're older, wiser, and much less likely to take things -- especially health -- for granted. You're a better person, because of this child, because of this so-called defect, than you ever would have been without him. 

And the best part, is that you get to be a mother to this new, round, squishy little person. You get to fall in love with a new little person all over again. You get to delight in his tiny voice, his babbling, his cooing, the geewwwww he makes when he doesn't want to eat his baby cereal, the little frowny face he makes before he starts to cry, the soft tufts of his hair, his fat, impossibly smooth cheeks. You get to be gifted with a million of these little pleasures, these little moments, day after day, for as long as God allows him to be in your life. 

What a joy, what a gift. Thank you, God. Not only for this precious person, but for this new mother I've become. 

I would not go back and make it "better." I would not trade it for anything. 

My Big Dumb Debt Story and What I've Learned

I've never written about personal finance here before. But why the hell not? I write about my kids, my marriage, my hypochrondriac freakouts. This isn't so much a "mom blog" as it is a "I'm-ignoring-my-toddler's-temper-tantrum-may-as-well-blog" kind of blog. So I'm just gonna write about whatever. Including our student loan debt and our struggles to get out from under it. Cool? Cool.

And post funny pictures of chickens because obviously

My name is Sarah. And I have student loan debt. When I graduated from college, the number was astounding -- almost $62,000. My husband was smarter than I and got more scholarships, so his debt load was smaller, but still substantial -- about $30,000. Thankfully, my husband's debt (if you want to qualify it as "his debt" and "my debt") is already gone. One of the reasons I love my husband so much is that he works hard for what he wants. He's steadfast and dependable and when he sets a goal for himself, he hustles to get it accomplished (sexy, right?) When he graduated college in 2007, he moved back in with his parents and threw nearly all of his monthly income at his debt load. He paid off his debt in just over two years. By the time we left on our honeymoon, he was completely debt free. He was responsible. Sexily responsible.

I, however, was not that responsible. Until I graduated, I gave absolutely no thought to how much debt I was taking on, or how much it would cost me per month to repay. The thought hardly ever occurred to me. All I knew was that I was going to college, and college cost money. The government was offering money, so I took it. And I would figure out how to pay them back later. How I would ever pay back sixty grand with an English degree, I never bothered to think about.

I realize that now. 

I don't think I could have given any less thought to my debt load if I had tried. I went out of my way at every step to avoid talking about debt or how much my college was costing me. When my dad told me flat-out my sophomore year that I should consider transferring, I was like but dad, this school has free breakfast during finals! This school is the BEST!. When other students would live off-campus to save money, I just lived wherever was closer to class. And the entrance counseling for federal aid? LOL. I just clicked and guessed and tried my hardest not to absorb anything it was telling me. I didn't get the terms I was agreeing to, I didn't know how I'd pay it back, and I tried my hardest not to think about it.

My reaction to the loan counseling: TL;DR

Denial. It's a helluva drug.

So I'd have to say the first lesson I learned from my extraordinarily stupid foray into student debt, is that you have to treat debt like it's a communicable disease. Do anything you can to avoid it. Work late, work overtime, live off campus -- live in a box, for God's sake. Just don't take on debt if you could ever possibly help it. And I could have. If I had gone to a cheaper school, or had applied for more scholarships, maybe I could have escaped with less debt, or maybe none at all, since my parents paid for some of my schooling. But I did literally no thinking ahead and just applied to whatever school had the major I wanted. (I ended up switching majors like four times anyway, so that criteria was pretty useless in the end.) Actually, scratch that -- I applied to my college because it had my major, but I enrolled because I liked the campus, the school was in the middle of a big city I wanted to explore, and there was a statue of Mother Theresa in one of their lobbies. Not kidding. I thought it was a sign from God, and maybe it was, since I met my husband during our time at the school newspaper. Still -- don't do what I did. Don't base one of the biggest investments on your life on the fact that you like its lobby.

Seriously cannot believe I just wrote that sentence. 

Anywho. If taking on debt is a necessity, and there's nothing you can do to avoid it, and you've done everything possible to minimize it as much as you can, then for the love of God, do what my husband did and throw as much money as you can at it, as quickly as possible, to crawl out from under it. The minimum payment is not your friend. Before we were married, Lou made probably $2k a month, if that. And every month he wrote a check for at least $1500, and usually more like $1700 or $1800. He paid his phone bill, bought his train ticket to work, and we occasionally went out for Thai food. That was it. His debt was gone in two years, and he saved thousands of bucks in interest as a result.

If I could do it all again, I would do what my little brother did. Our parents were generous enough to pay for a portion of our college; they saved up some money and divided it among my brothers and I equally. To this day, I still don't know how much he gave me, because like a dumb ass, I never bothered to ask. Money was taboo and I didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, so when my dad said I could afford a year or two at Loyola, I enrolled with no questions asked. Awesome, I thought. I'll ride on whatever my dad gives me, and then sign up for loans when it's gone. And that's exactly what I did. Don't ask, don't tell.

Jake, on the other hand, learned how much my dad was planning on giving him, exactly, to the cent. After high school, he delayed college for two years while he put himself through community college and worked full-time at Burger King to pay for school. He got all of his core credits completed for cheap, with his Burger King earnings, and all the while built up his photography portfolio in his spare time. When his core was complete, he applied for a scholarship at Columbia with that same portfolio, and won it. Between my parents' generosity, the school's scholarship, and his unbelievable hustle, he was able to go to his dream school and graduate with almost no debt. Jake had a plan, a budget, and ambition.

Meanwhile, I'm like

When I got married, I got the balls to look up my loan amounts on the National Student Aid website, and boy was that a rotten surprise. I think the final total was somewhere around $62k, although I was too buy puking and passing out to really let it sink in. Ouch.

Right in the net worth. 

I felt awful. My husband had worked so hard to pay down his debt and he had done a fantastic job. Now he was $60k in the hole again. I had buried my head in the sand instead of taking on an extra job and throwing extra money at it to bring down the total, and now we were both stuck paying it off for years to come -- maybe even decades. Oh hell no, I thought. I want babies. I want a house. Ain't nobody got time for this. I had my epiphany about four years too late, but at least I had it: Student debt sucks. Any kind of debt sucks. We had stuff to do. A life to live. Babies to raise. And Sallie Mae didn't factor into any of that.

Me and Sallie Mae. She's a harsh mistress.

So, Lou and I started throwing money at Sallie Mae like a cheap stripper. Every cent we made went right to her, and we hated it, but we made incredible progress in a very short amount of time. After I finished school and got pregnant with June, my parents invited us to live with them so that we could pay down our debt, and we accepted graciously. Two years later we're still living here, still throwing money at our loans (we actually paid the minimums for a year, so we could save up for a second car) and I'm psyched to say we have "only" $23k left to go. Right now Lou and I are doing everything possible to save more and pay everything off quicker -- I clip coupons, I make my own laundry soap, I cloth diaper, I freelance. And Lou as I write this is working overtime at his office, on a Saturday, so we can get that much closer to living our dream as homeowners. I'm proud of how hard we've worked and how far we've come, but we came by these successes the hard way.

So. Student debt blows. And I have a lot of it because I didn't make the smartest decisions. Don't do what I did. Plan. And save. And work your ass off. Pay more than the minimums. And get rid of it as quickly as possible.

I'll be over here, paying off my own debt, rooting for you.

We Need to Talk about Antidepressants

The fall of my senior year in college, I had a nervous breakdown. Until recently, I didn't even know what happened to me could be considered a nervous breakdown. When I hear that term, I think of a padded cell and a 5150 hold. I think of a complete psychotic break -- like running around the streets naked and smearing feces on cars, or something. That didn't happen with me. Instead, I spent a week huddled under my electric blanket, feeling like my heart was going to beat out of my chest, convinced I was dying of Swine Flu, crying and eating cereal and watching Frasier on an endless loop. This was triggered by the PTSD I developed after studying abroad the previous semester.

Accurate. 

A "nervous breakdown," according to MayoClinic, refers to a stressful situation when someone is unable to function in day-to-day life. It's really helpful for me to read that definition out loud to myself. It helps me realize, to this day, that yes, things were that bad. Until recently, I kind of just referred to that time in my head as the week I binged on Lifetime Original movies and drank a lot of wine and missed a lot of class. As it turns out, I wasn't just "having a bad week." I wasn't just "feeling stressed" or "feeling sick." I had completely ceased to function in the world. I had a full-on nervous breakdown. And maybe had I known I was careening toward a breakdown, I wouldn't have been so reluctant to start taking some medicine.

Pretty much verbatim what I told my roommates and coworkers

So after my full-on, hiding-under-the-covers nervous breakdown, I finally admitted that yeah, maybe I wasn't doing so well with just therapy and a bottle of wine. And perhaps -- just perhaps -- I needed to kick it up a notch.

Up until that point, my therapist had been cautiously suggesting that I try an anti-depressant. And for months she had respectfully nodded and hadn't pressed me when I all but laughed in her face. Well, I didn't quite laugh in her face, but I made it clear that the thought of taking medicine was ridiculous. Hello? I thought. Haven't you been paying attention? I freak the fuck out when I have to urinate, and I've been urinating for my entire life. If I start getting weird symptoms because of these pills, I'm going to have a heart attack. I'm going to start obsessing every time I take them. I'm going to start feeling imaginary symptoms. I'll over-think every twinge, every cramp, every unfamiliar ache. It'll make my anxiety worse. So for months we'd do a cat-and-mouse where the subject of meeting a psychiatrist (for medicine) would come up and I'd awkwardly try to side-step. And by side-step I'd be like:

But after that week in October, I felt like it was very literally my last option. Either I could take some medicine and hope that it worked, or I'd cease to function like a normal human. And that kind of panic -- that flu-like feeling of sickness -- is simply unsustainable. I'm not saying I was suicidal. But I really don't know how much more of that I could have taken. So when I went crying to the campus nurse about how I had the Swine Flu and all my "Swine Flu" symptoms turned out to be anxiety induced, that blessed nurse scheduled a therapy session for me immediately. And from there I saw the psychiatrist.

Psychiatrist guy gave me two things -- and I feel like it's important for me to tell you what they were, at the risk of sounding like a druggie, because every week or so I'll get an e-mail or an instant message with someone asking me about anti-anxiety drugs and what they're like. There's a definite undercurrent of shame, and fear, and, well, anxiety about what the side effects are going to be -- which was totally my preoccupation before I started trying them. So. Psychiatrist guy (who looked curiously like Tobias Funke) gave me xanax, which has short-term effects and calms you down in the midst of an anxiety attack, and started me on Zoloft, which is an anti-depressant. Basically, untreated anxiety or PTSD feels like you've got your hand on a hot skillet and you can't take it off. You're expected to function as though everything is fine, but inside you're thinking HOLY SHIT THIS HURTS I CANT FOCUS ON ANYTHING ELSE BUT THE BURNING IT BURNSSSSSSS!!!! Xanax is like splashing some cold water on the skillet -- a temporary relief, but your hand is still on the skillet, and it'll heat right back up again in a few minutes. Zoloft is like someone coming up behind you and turning off the burner -- gradually, the anxiety goes away, and you start acting and feeling more like your normal self.

Seriously. Can you tell I was an English major? 

So I started the zoloft that day. And I'd be lying if I said I had about a million tiny little anxiety freakouts and IBS flareups wondering what the side-effects would be. And I did get side-effects -- nausea, primarily -- for a few weeks until it started to kick in. And boy, did it kick in.

About a month after I started taking it, sometime in the first week of December -- about ten months after the incident that spurred my PTSD -- I woke up one morning and I felt lighter. Physically lighter. My limbs were looser. And the biggest difference was that I could breathe. It was a totally unparalleled feeling and I'm sure I looked like a complete dumbass, because I would just walk around campus and take deep, long breaths, sucking all the cold air into my lungs that I possibly could. It felt wonderful. I hadn't even noticed until the anxiety went away how completely crushing it was. A weight had literally been lifted, and I felt joyously free. Right in time for finals. And then winter break.

When I went home for winter break, the primary feeling I felt was utter bliss. I'm not kidding. It always really irks me when people refer to anti-depressants as "happy pills," because they make me functional, not happy. But this period was the exception -- I had been living under the crushing weight of PTSD for so long that I had forgotten what it felt like to just feel normal. I could take big, deep breaths. I could  hear the doorbell ring or the blender turn on without hiding under my covers. I could wake up and actually feel excited about the day, instead of dreading all the millions of little noises and random events that would trigger an episode. I spent the whole winter vacation in my parents' house, absolutely blissed out, reading books and lying on the couch and just feeling like I had gotten my life back. I could talk about my anxiety triggers without actually feeling triggered. I could think about India without feeling like I was dizzy or short of breath. I could ride in a car or a train without willing myself not to jump out of it. It was heaven.

Oh, it felt so good

I kind of sound like a druggie, don't I? Obviously, anti-depressants aren't for everyone. And Zoloft, specifically, is not for everyone, I'm sure. I wasn't high or anything, but getting your life back after ten months in hell? Oh, it was wonderful. I couldn't breathe deeply enough.


And then -- I got depressed.

Stay tuned.

A Henry Kind Of Update

Wow, are you tired of reading about my panic disorder yet? Let's switch gears, shall we?

We are coming up on one year of Henry's Spina Bifida diagnosis.

Last year on November 7th, during our gender ultrasound, everything changed. We learned that our precious son had Spina Bifida, and despite being a writer, I cannot convey my devastation. Or my panic. My first reaction went from no no no no not doing it lol sorry to how am I going to deal with this? Paralyzed? Incontinent? Wheelchair? Shunt? Surgeries? The possibilities were infinite and completely overwhelming. Foremost in my mind was the certainty that because my son had a "birth defect," our lives would be miserable and tinged with sadness from here on out.

So, are they? Are our lives sad and burdensome and full of suffering?

Judge for yourself:

As you can see, this poor child is miserable.

One of the things that terrified me before giving birth to Henry was that there was really no "face" of Spina Bifida. If you did a Google images search of Spina Bifida you would see a) aborted or stillborn fetuses, b) gruesome meningocele lesions, and c) pictures of John Cougar Mellencamp because apparently he has a very mild form of SB called occulta. You can see why this was such a confusing time for us. When we'd try to "research" Henry's birth defect on Google, there were few families we could look to as an example, despite Spina Bifida being one of the most common birth defects in the world. I can't find it now, for the life of me, but when I googled "spina bifida stories," the first one I came across was a little girl who had actually died during her myelomeningocele closure as a newborn (something that is very, very rare). Needless to say, I was all:

So nearly a year later, I am happy to say that Spina Bifida has a new "face" for us, and hopefully for everyone we know. It's a seriously cute face that is perpetually smiling, with super chubby cheeks and huge blue eyes. I don't know where I keep getting these blue-eyed children because my family is Italian as hell, but I digress. 

I struggle with telling people what Henry can and can't do at this age, because I fear that they'll think of it as some unbearable hardship. Henry has had two surgeries in his young life -- one to close the opening in his back, and one to put a shunt in his head, in order to control his hydrocephalus. Although he can sit up mostly unassisted and meets pretty much every developmental milestone, for some reason he still has not been able to roll over on his stomach by himself. (His hips are at a weird angle, so it's hard for him to maneuver himself onto his stomach. It's one of our goals for physical therapy.) He'll need surgery and casting to correct his (adorable) clubbed feet. I'm not sure when he'll crawl. His prognosis for walking is good, but it's not a given. We don't know if he'll walk with assisted technology or use a wheelchair. But he can definitely move his legs purposefully and he has feeling in his legs and feet, which is a far cry from what our doctor's initially told us he would be able to do. 

Aside from the doctor's visits and learning how to navigate the healthcare industry, this kid is surprisingly low maintenance. Recently we learned (for a lot of complicated reasons) that we're going to have to start intermittently catheterizing him throughout the day. What I expected to be super inconvenient and devastating and a huge pain in the ass was really more like 

meh. whatever. 

Basically, from here on out, we have to stick a tube in his pee-hole four times a day, and it's surprisingly not a big deal at all. Funny, because when I was pregnant with Henry, the thought of catheterizing a baby scared the shit out of me. I would think about it and get cold and sweaty and immediately overwhelmed. It was firmly in the category of "things I couldn't do." And guess what? I can do it. I'm still practicing, and sometimes I mess up, but it doesn't hurt him. In fact, he actually seems to like it. Sicko. 

I think even now I have what I'd call "able-ist" leanings. When people ask me how Henry is, I immediately say "he's totally like a normal baby!" I try to distance him as much as I can from his perceived defect, because I just can't stand the thought of someone thinking he is lesser-than or deficient in any way. I have to stop saying he's "normal," because he isn't. He's got a shunt and now he has to pee through a pee-tube. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that you wouldn't know that just by looking at him. He has a disability, but he's not miserable. Our family isn't miserable. Managing his disability is sometimes a lot of work, and a lot of doctor's visits, and a lot of phone calls to the doctor's office to get referrals, and that's a headache. But at worst, it's a mild annoyance. 

Believe me when I say we are blessed to have this child. He has made my life better in every conceivable way. And if I had to choose between having this child with Spina Bifida and not having him at all, I would go back and pick Spina Bifida again, and again, and again. 

October is Spina Bifida Awareness month, and this is what I'd like to contribute: If there's anything you need to be "aware" of, it's that Spina Bifida can be hard. It can be grueling and annoying and complex. But it can also be full of joy and blessings.

 It's not easy. But it is so, so worth it. 

What a Nervous Breakdown Looks Like

IV. Fall Breakdown

That fall, after suffering through a kidney stone obstruction, coming home early from my semester abroad, and having weird anxiety symptoms for the next six months, I went back to college on the north side of Chicago. I was still having panic attacks, but in my mind, there was nothing else to do but grit my teeth and get through them. I still didn't really fully understand what was causing them.

I was glad to get back in the swing of things. I was still having weird bouts of anxiety where I would feel like I'd have to run away and hide in a cave somewhere. I was still having shortness of breath when someone would ask me how my semester in India had been. I didn't want to travel very far outside of my campus-work-apartment radius, in case one of those bizarre attacks came on again. And if a cab honked too loud or my doorbell rang, I'd have to run to the bathroom so I didn't literally shit my pants out of anxiety. But other than that I was getting back to normal. A new normal. I felt frustrated because whatever happened in India had happened months ago. It was no longer a part of my life and I wanted to move on. I felt like my mind had moved on -- but my body hadn't yet.

I started seeing a therapist at the Wellness Center. I'll call her K. K was very calm and sweet and talked about her kids and husband even though she didn't wear a wedding ring which confused me to the point of distraction. I told her I had been struggling with anxiety and slowly we began to unpack all the shiz that had gone down in Bangalore. More than once, she'd raise an eyebrow at me.

"This doesn't sound like run-of-the-mill anxiety," she'd say. "It sounds like you went through something incredibly traumatic. Maybe you're having PTSD?"

"Yeah, I guess, or maybe something else," I'd say. I knew, deep down, that if this were a "serious" diagnosis and not just some run-of-the-mill panic, I'd have to go on antidepressants and I couldn't stomach the thought of having side effects. I couldn't stomach the thought of being on medicine for something like this. Medicines were for sicknesses. I wasn't sick. I just wanted to move on. I was just biding my time until my body caught up with my mind. My mind had moved on. I wanted to put all of this behind me. There was no way I was going on drugs.

One week in October, everything changed.

My mom called my phone when I was waiting in line at the campus cafeteria. "You want to know something crazy?" She said, mid-conversation. "Steve [our neighbor] thinks he might have Swine Flu."

In an instant, everything went still. I felt my stomach drop to my knees. I felt a warm rush of anxiety crawl across my skin, very much in the same way it would crawl across my skin four years later, when we got the news that our son had Spina Bifida. I had just seen Steve over the weekend, and he hadn't seemed sick. I vividly remembered taking a sip of his wine to test it out.

At that point, my biggest fear was that something would happen regarding my body that I couldn't control, and I would have to go back to the hospital. Now, in my anxiety-riddled mind, my worst fear had come true. It was inevitable. The virus was already inside me. And the most terrifying part was that I wasn't showing any symptoms now, but inevitably I knew I would be. I didn't know when. Or how. But surely in the next two or three days, it would attack. I'd have to go back to the hospital. I would wake up in the middle of the night, sick and incapacitated, and have to navigate my ass all the way to an unknown hospital -- again. I had to fight to keep from vomiting right there in the cafeteria line.

And hadn't I heard that Swine Flu was potentially deadly? Hadn't a few people died from this thing? I fought off a fresh wave of panic. I could die. This could be my last week alive.

I got off the phone as quickly as I could and high-tailed it back to my apartment. I climbed into bed, got under my electric blanket, and willed myself to fall asleep as fast as I could. It was the only way I
could shut off the thoughts that kept forcing themselves inside my head. I slept for hours and woke up exhausted. Here it is, I thought. It's beginning. Swine Flu. 

I didn't go to class the next day. What was the point? I was going to get the Swine Flu symptoms any minute, and I had to be ready once it hit. I stayed in my room all day and watched Frasier. I felt sick. I got a headache. Swine Flu is starting, I thought. Here it is. I was nauseous. I had the chills. I packed a bag in case I had to go to the hospital, and waited. It wasn't serious enough for me to head to the hospital yet, but soon enough, it would be. I couldn't take the chance of getting suddenly sick in class, or on campus, around a hundred other people -- that would be humiliating. So I just sat in my room under the electric blanket and watched season after season of Frasier. I emerged once to go to the Dominick's across the street and got a huge bottle of wine, some pierogies, and a romantic comedy. I watched the movie back to back for the next twelve hours.

Meanwhile, I had exhausted the supply of xanax my doctor had given me a few months before.

I believed so many lies when I had anxiety, and writing this, I think that's one of the saddest things about the whole situation. Anxiety lies. I knew -- I knew -- that if I called the doctor back and asked for more xanax, the doctor would think I was a drug addict. Or a scammer. I cried. I can see now, in hindsight, that my brain was truly sick. Only a crazy person would think that a terrified twenty-year-old, who had carefully rationed 20 pills of low-dose xanax for the past six months could possibly be a drug addict. And knowing my doctor, who is a wonderful, kind-hearted woman, that would have been the last thing she would have thought. She would have helped me. But I was convinced otherwise. People would laugh at me. I'd get in trouble. They'd call me a liar. I couldn't call the doctor. I was trapped.

Instead of calling and asking for more xanax, I just bought wine. But in my weird, altered reality, if I drank before 5 pm, I had a problem. Never mind the fact that I had been holed up in my bedroom for the past few days, crying and watching The Proposal, waiting for the Swine Flu to kill me. I bought wine as a cheap substitute for xanax -- something to calm me down -- but I vowed that I wouldn't drink it before it was socially acceptable. Five o'clock.

For the next three days, I did nothing. I stayed inside. I cried. I waited for the Swine Flu to kill me. I watched Frasier on a loop. And I white-knuckled it until exactly 5 pm, when I would emerge from my room, pop open a bottle of wine, and drink the entire thing by myself. Totally rational, I thought. I mean, what else could you do, when you were waiting for the Swine Flu to kill you?

Here's the scary thing: Normally, I could drink half a glass of wine before I started to feel woozy. Get more than a couple beers in me under normal circumstances, and I'd be climbing in my roommate's Ikea wardrobe yelling about going to Narnia. But not this time. Now I was in such a heightened state of hyper-arousal, it took three or four big glasses of wine just to get me feeling like my 'normal' self. I didn't feel drunk. I could drink two bottles and barely feel it at all. It should have been a big red flag that I was going out of my mind with anxiety, but it barely registered. I was just doing what any normal person would do if they didn't have anti-anxiety medications and they were twelve hours away from dying of the Swine Flu. Right? And it wasn't like I wasn't functional, right? I mean, I could wait until 5 to start drinking. So I was fine. I was in control. Right?

The terrifying thing about anxiety, too, is that it completely changes your brain. You think in a way that's not rational, that's totally illogical, that's completely unlike how you'd think normally. That fall, at my school, three students died in unrelated ways, all within a two or three week span, right around the time I was convinced I had the Swine Flu. One died after a long battle of leukemia. One after a horrific bike accident. Another I think had some infection. This solidified my belief that I was going to die. I was next in line. Death was hovering over my school like a cloud, and the fact that three students died in random ways unrelated to each other made it even more sinister. Like Death was just picking kids at random. And now I had the Swine Flu. I was definitely next. I literally didn't leave my apartment unless it was absolutely necessary -- I was next to die, after all. It didn't matter if it was Swine Flu or something else -- I could be crossing the street and get hit by a truck. It was going to happen, in one way or another. There was no way out.

About four days after I had received the phone call from my mom, I woke up at midnight shaking. Okay, here we go, I thought. Swine Flu for real this time. I went in the other room and threw up. I had awful diarrhea. I was freezing, aching. But to my surprise, I didn't even have a fever. From what I heard of the Swine Flu, or any Flu, you had to have a fever. The thermometer's broken, I thought, because OBVIOUSLY I had the Swine Flu. I suffered through the symptoms until the next morning, when I dialed the college wellness center and told them what was going on.

"I have the Swine Flu," I said, crying. "Can you give me Tamiflu right now or should I just go to the hospital?"

"Hold on," the nurse said, after hearing my symptoms. "If you don't have a fever, you don't have the Swine Flu."

"That's wrong, because I definitely have the swine flu," I insisted.

"Honey, people who have the Swine Flu say that their body aches so bad their hair hurts. What you're describing doesn't sound like you've got the Swine Flu."

"I PROBABLY HAVE A SLOWER-ACTING STRAIN," I screamed. Was everyone in the world incompetent? Would I die alone, in my apartment, and have nobody find me for weeks after?

Somehow, the nurse was able to finagle me into calming down and coming over to the wellness center for an appointment. I don't remember how I got there. But I remember very vividly sitting in the doctor's office and crying and mumbling about Sanjay Gupta and how he got the Swine Flu and almost died and had to go to the hospital and so I just don't want to go back to the hospital so if you just give me Tamiflu I can go back to my apartment and hide under the covers, okay? OKAY?

The nurse held my hand, and what she said next shook me.

"I can tell you right now, you don't have the Swine Flu," she said, and her eyes were very sad and very kind. "By any chance, do you have problems with anxiety?"

I was floored. How could she possibly know that? I mean, sure, I was a little nervous, but who suffering from a deadly strain from the Swine Flu wouldn't be nervous? If you asked me, I was handling this pretty goddamn well, considering I was at death's door. I walked all the way to the Wellness Center and I was still alive, despite the Swine Flu decimating my healthy blood cells, slowly shutting down my organs.

"A little bit, I guess," I told her. Was this bitch going to call an ambulance or what? "Why do you ask?"

"I think all of this is anxiety-related," she said, and dug out a small white bag filled with losenges and tylenol. Seeing that bag, it hit me. I didn't have the swine flu. That wasn't something you'd give someone with the Swine Flu. That was something you'd give a hypochondriac who was convinced she had the swine flu, to assuage her panic. I deflated like a balloon. My face burned with shame.

"I'm going to pop in next door to see if your counselor is available," she said. I hardly heard her. She disappeared out the door and I burst into tears.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Crippling Anxiety (Part 3)

III. After

(Part I is here. Part II is here.) 

The flight home could have been a lot worse. I took a five (ish?) hour flight from Bangalore to Dubai, and met my uncle at the airport, who was coincidentally traveling on business. Together we flew from Dubai to New York, and from there, Chicago. I kept passing "shards" on the way there, but it wasn't as  excruciating as it had been on campus, back in India. I mustered the courage to look in the airplane toilet after I had peed, on the flight from New York to Chicago -- still blood, but not nearly as much as there had been. The symptoms were going away. Was I recovering? Instantly, I felt a rush of shame. Was I getting better?

Could I have stuck it out in India? Was I a total pussy, deciding to give up and go home? Should I have just waited it out a few days longer? Embarrassment flooded me. I realized that other than a nagging ache in my back, I was able to navigate three international airports on my own, with no problems, without once getting a sudden "kidney stone attack." Before I could barely walk across campus. And now I wasn't peeing as much blood as before. I wasn't throwing up. I was a little nauseous, but otherwise ... I was able to travel mostly by myself. I probably looked like any other passenger, except for the slight limp in my step. What a total privileged princess I am, I thought. I get one tiny kidney stone and I throw up a few times and I high-tail it back to the States, where people speak English. What does that say about me -- that I'm only comfortable in a place where I understand the language, and the doctors wear lab coats? What kind of racist, privileged bullshit is that? 

Shame was a major component of my recovery, which meant it was a long time before I could muster up the courage to talk to a therapist. Surely it couldn't have been that bad, I kept thinking to myself afterwards. I stopped passing shards like, the instant I boarded the plane back home. And then when I got back to my parents' house in Chicago, I was almost totally back to normal. I probably could have stuck it out a few more weeks and have been totally fine. I could have finished out the semester. What a total pussy I am. Cut and run. But when I'd think about taking a return flight back to India, I would break out in a cold sweat. I would have to  put my head in my hands and take deep breaths to keep from feeling like I was falling. I would run to the bathroom and have instant, IBS-style diarrhea. Hell no, I'd think. If going home makes me a pussy, so be it. I'm not going back. I got out. I'm out. I'm okay. 

I had returned home in the middle of the semester, in the middle of February, so I was in a limbo at my parents' house until school started up again in the fall. Talk about culture shock -- I had gone from a wet, sweltering, hot, city where you literally could not escape from honking cars and barking dogs, to a large house in the middle of the Chicago suburbs, deafeningly silent in comparison and surrounded by snow. I spent the next couple of days just hanging out on the couch, happy beyond measure that I could snuggle up to my then-fiance-now-husband instead of lying naked by myself on a gurney in an Indian hospital. I went to my doctor's office (where I could understand what everyone was saying, where everyone washed their hands and wore white lab coats, where it was five minutes away instead of twenty minutes by rickshaw, where I could just get in the car and go instead of having to haggle and be harassed by an autorickshaw driver). They checked me out and told me I was better. I was better. I was normal. What was I supposed to do now?

I got a few part-time jobs, nannying and babysitting, and cobbled them into a full-time work schedule. I worked and saved. Friends and co-workers and acquaintences back at college would text, or call, or message me on Facebook, and go, um, did you come home from India? What happened? Are you okay? How was I supposed to explain everything? I'd start by saying Oh well I woke up one morning with this excruciating pain-- and then suddenly I couldn't breathe. It would feel like I had an elephant sitting on my chest. I'd get sweaty and have what my doctor calls trampada a la puerta -- a sudden urge to run to the bathroom. The gag reflex in the back of my throat would start to itch. I learned to abbreviate what had happened in the shortest way possible. "Oh, I got sick," I said. "Long story. Hospital. Surgery. Had to come home." Any more explanation than that, and I would start to feel faint. Sometimes I would relay parts of the story to friends or family who would ask, and after telling them about getting cathed, getting prepped before surgery, having surgery, even the ordeal of being in pain and trying to get to the hospital -- and I would have to lay down afterwards and take a nap. I was wiped. The only thing that helped me feel better was lying in bed and turning my electric blanket to its highest temperature. And sleeping. It was the only thing that shut off my brain. It was my only respite.

I had begun to experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

It was months before I went to the doctor, months before I even knew that there was any reason to go to the doctor. My mother, who I was living with and who had a history of anxiety as well, noticed my weird symptoms and told me to get myself checked out. Really? I'd say. I'm okay, though. Aren't I? I'd make plans to go into the city and visit friends, and then come down with all these flu-like symptoms. Chills. Body-aches. Even a low grade fever. I'd cancel plans and within an hour, I'd feel back to my normal self. That's weird. I thought. But not a reason to go to the doctor. Probably just some bug I'm fighting off. Any time I'd travel, or be in a situation I couldn't immediately get out of (like dinner with friends. Like riding in a car or traveling on a train) I'd come down with these weird flu symptoms. And if I went to dinner anyway, or rode in a car against my better judgment and decided to ignore all these "flu" symptoms, I'd start falling down a rabbit hole of pure panic. Hyperventilating. Uncontrollable crying. Immediate diarrhea. Shaking. And crying some more. What was wrong with me?

There were other triggers too. And slowly -- very slowly -- I noticed a pattern. Sudden, loud noise? Panic attack. If I had to pee and couldn't immediately get to a bathroom? Panic attack. If I was stuck in a traffic jam and couldn't "escape" if I needed to? Panic attack. I had a constant urge to escape (even if I was in the craft section of Michael's or something) and if I couldn't immediately escape from any given situation (like if there was some fat chick blocking the exit at Michael's) I would need to run to the bathroom and hyperventilate/cry for the next fifteen minutes. After a while, there wasn't much that didn't trigger a panic attack. It was hard to go outside at all. After all, pretty much anything triggered an attack. And once I had a panic attack, I was literally immobile. I realized it was a lot easier to just stay inside. I could avoid most of the triggers there. Or I could turn off my brain and sleep. Or I could stay under my warm, wonderful electric blanket and watch TV shows where there was virtually no conflict and no loud surprises. Nothing that scared me. Nothing that hurt me. No reminders of India. Or the hospital. Or anything medical. Or anything unexpected. I watched a lot of House Hunters.

I had begun to experience agoraphobia.

Eventually, I went back to the doctor. They gave me some xanax, and that helped, for a while. Ultimately though, everything got a lot worse before it got better.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Crippling Anxiety (Part 2)

II. Recovery

A nurse was shaking me awake. The procedure was a success. We pulverized the stone. She said. They had inserted a scope up my urethra and did something to the kidney stone -- blew it up, or something? -- and now it was gone. I would continue to keep passing "shards" of the stone for the next few days, they told me. Sure, okay, I said.

 I was groggy from the anesthesia, but I instantly felt better. That I'm-going-to-pee-my-pants feeling was gone. And after I had been wheeled out of recovery and back into my room, a kind nurse helped me wobble over to my "English" toilet and let me pee for the first time in three days.  It stung a little, but that was normal, they told me, because of the scope they had stuck up there. I looked into the toilet and there was blood. Not streaks of blood, not spatters -- the entire bowl was dark red.

That's normal, the nurse told me. I still felt faint. She helped me wobble back into bed and I laid in the dark feeling nauseated from the anesthesia. I threw up a couple times. But I felt lightyears better than I had felt in the past day. I had been in the hospital about 18 hours at that point. The nurse gave me something to put me to sleep. My two friends stayed the night with me in my room, and called my mother every few hours to update her on what was happening. I'm certain that the entire experience, as hellish as it was for me, was way worse for her.

---

They released me the next day around noon. I was a little sore, still, but the stone had passed, and there was no need for me to be hospitalized any more. I could pee on my own. I still peed blood, but again, they said, it was no big deal. It should taper off in a few days. There was still a lot of it.

In Bangalore, we walked everywhere. Our campus was large and vast, and for some reason there were a lot of wild birds everywhere. The walk from the main gates of the campus back to the girls' dormitory took maybe fifteen minutes. Getting anywhere on campus, from point A to B, was a fifteen or twenty minute walk. On the walk back from the hospital, my classmates approached me, horrified.

We heard you went to the hospital?! They said. Are you okay?!
Oh, I'm totally fine! I'd say, brushing it off. Toooootally fine. I had a procedure and they blew up my kidney stone like the Death Star and I'm all good now. And I thought I was.

The next day, in my lower back, I got a tingling pain, very slight, in the place where the kidney stone had lodged. Within minutes, it had evolved into an agonizing ache, and in another minute it was so painful I had to lay down on my back and take deep breaths. I was at a mall when this happened. Oh God, I thought, the stone is back. I have no way to get to the hospital. I'm all by myself. I can't even move. What am I gonna do? 

The pain subsided after a while and I was able to hobble back to my dorm room, terrified. I didn't know what had just happened, but it felt like an attack. It had come out of nowhere, and was crippling, and I had no idea if it would happen again. I decided to skip class that day, to rest up, in case whatever it was came back.

It came back a lot.

On my way to class, on my way to the dining hall -- wherever I was going for the next four or five days, I would randomly get this stabbing pain in my back, and a paralyzing fear would grab me. If I was on my own in the city or on campus, and I had this pain creep up on me, I'd be stranded. I'd have to lay down on my back, or sit on the ground and breathe through it.

Meanwhile, my Indian phone was running out of minutes, and I had to take an auto-rickshaw across town to buy a calling card with more minutes. I couldn't walk across campus -- whenever I walked anywhere, that stabbing pain would come back -- so my phone minutes just petered away. My laundry was piling up -- and in India, we did all our laundry by hand. Literally. We took it up to the roof, lathered some soap on it, beat it against a rock, and hung it up to dry on a clothesline. It was hard work. I could barely pick up my laundry basket, so the laundry kept piling up. Students at the University bought food at the supermarket across town to keep in their dorms, or ate in the cafeteria at the edge of campus, or both. The few times I had tried to walk to the cafeteria, I had been besieged by the stabbing pain and had high-tailed it back to my dorm room. I mostly ate some leftover biscuits I had been keeping in my room, so I wouldn't have to leave my dorm. I didn't change clothes, because I couldn't do my laundry. I didn't go to class, because the kidney stone pain might have flared back up. The stones are coming back, I would think, whenever the stabbing back pain would creep up on me, like a pocket knife slowly inching into my back. I'm going to have to go to the hospital again. I'm going to need surgery again. Eventually I couldn't leave my room. I kept a bag packed next to my bed in case I had to go back to the hospital. I was in a near-constant state of pain or waiting expectantly for the pain to come back. I was a hostage.

Meanwhile, I was still peeing blood.

The hospital had given me a prescription for some medicines when I had left. I had to take the perscription to a pharmacy and have them fill it. I couldn't tell what it said, because of the handwriting. I managed to decipher some of it and looked it up on Google when I got back to the dorms. One of them was a medicine that made me pee. Another was a painkiller. Another I had no idea. Was I allergic to this medicine? I had no idea. They hadn't asked if I had medicine allergies. Would it interfere with the meds I was already taking -- the anti-malaria pills my doctors had given me back home? Nobody knew. The doctors didn't ask if I was taking anything else. They didn't seem to care. Neither did the pharmacy guy -- who, by the way, was like, just some fucking dude in a garage. The first time I went to the pharmacy to fill the perscription, it was closed. I came back a few hours later, still closed. The guys outside the garage-like building told me the pharmacist was on his lunch break and to come back later. I did. He was there. No lab coat, just some dude in jeans, with his friends hanging outside his shop, talking on their phones and making jokes. Was this real life?

Here's a good example of what an Indian pharmacy looks like. (I got this from Google images.) As you can see ... it's just some fucking hole in the wall.  Don't bother asking the guy who runs this any questions about any of the medications, because he has no clue. 

After five or six days of this, still peeing blood and having this random, paralyzing pain, I went back to the emergency room. I was exhausted. Terrified. I was a prisoner. I sobbed to the emergency room physician that I was still peeing blood -- a lot of it -- and I thought I was still passing stones. They wouldn't stop. I couldn't go anywhere, or do anything. I couldn't function. Or get groceries. I had lost five pounds. I hadn't been to class.

I couldn't understand what they were saying, their broken English. They did the Indian head bobble at me -- which, if you've ever been to India or talked to an Indian person, you know that this head bobble means exactly nothing. It can mean yes, or no, or maybe, or anything, really, it's just a gesture. I don't know what that means, I kept telling them. Is that a yes? A no? Do I have kidney stones again?

I can't believe I found a gif of this.

They did some more x-rays. No stone. I cried and cried. Please just tell me what's going on, I begged the physician. I literally have no idea what this pain is or when it's going to sneak up on me next. The physician patted my head and told me I just needed some tea. Then put her hand on my stomach. Then she started to pray. In tongues.

Make no mistake -- I'm a big believer in the power of prayer. I have felt it work many, many times. That time, however, was not a time I felt it work. And that was not a time I appreciated being prayed over. Is this real life? I kept thinking. Is she a real physician? Did she just wander off the street and put on a lab coat? I laid there on the gurney and just cried harder.

After she worked her voodoo, they discharged me with more prescriptions. I was passing kidney stone shards, apparently -- remnants of the original big-ass kidney stone they had already blown up -- and it should be over soon. I should stop peeing blood any day now. It wasn't and I didn't.

I filled the perscriptions at the pharmacy when the pharmacist decided to randomly show up (there were no hours of operation, the pharmacist dude just came and went whenever he felt like it). What the hell were these medicines, and what did they do? Hell if I knew. Side effects? No idea. One was a painkiller. I tried to google the rest. No results. I had no information, even from Google, because the only English websites about these medicines were sites like the FDA, which didn't recognize the names of any meds because they weren't American medicines. Great.

The next day, I was so nauseated I couldn't stand up. I made myself puke in my private bathroom in the dorms so I could end my misery, but I was still just as nauseated as before. I couldn't eat -- not that I had groceries anyway. Some friends brought me some strawberries and I puked those up too. I was still peeing blood. A lot of it. Every time I looked in the toilet my heart would start to pound, and I'd get this warm, tingling wave of anxiety all over my body. One day, I just stopped looking. Somehow, I managed to crawl out of bed and I went back to the hospital. There was an on-campus doctor at the university, but he only came every other wednesday (or every wednesday, I don't remember), so it was either lying on my dorm floor, puking, or back in the hospital, trying to figure out what was going on. So I went back to the hospital.

Oh, said the physician, when I told her I had been severely nauseous. That's a side-effect of the medication. I'll give you another medication you can take. 

LOL, I thought. There's no way I'm taking anything else you give me. I lied and told her I was fine and got the hell out of there. I lied and told her I had stopped peeing blood days ago. Before, my choices were the Indian hospital where nobody knew what they were doing and some freak voodoo bitch was trying to poison me, and my dorm room where I had no clean clothes, no food, and no contact with the outside world since my phone had run out of minutes a week ago. I'm getting out of this hell-hole, I decided. I'm going home.

Immediately, I ambled back to my dorm room and tried to buy a flight home. Lots of websites were blocked at the university for some reason, and I couldn't access any travel websites. Because terrorism, or something. The next day I went to leave campus and go to an Internet cafe where I could purchase a flight, only to be told that nobody was allowed to leave the campus because there were mobs of people just randomly attacking women all over Bangalore. Is this real life? I called my parents, who had to jump through a bunch of hoops to purchase an international ticket (because again, terrorism, or something), and finally -- finally -- about ten days after this nightmare had begun, I was getting out of there. I threw everything in my suitcase. I threw out what didn't fit. I hired a cab and hugged my friends. And I started the 30-hour journey back to Chicago.