MY LIFE IN TRAUMA-INSIDE AND OUT: PART III

I made it two days and was shaking almost uncontrollably. I was not drinking alcohol, and I had no pills to control my panic disorder. I lasted for two days and on a Sunday, I had to go to work at a home improvement store that was a 45-mile drive away. I unbelievably made it through my shift at work, but on my drive home, I was hit by something that I truly did not understand and was incredibly scary.

It was like a sandstorm went across my vision while I was trying to drive home. I remember pulling off to the side of the interstate, but everything then went black. My car had been totaled into a telephone pole along side of the road much farther down from where I had pulled off. Thank God that I had not hurt anyone else, because I didn't remember anything from when I pulled off to the side of the interstate.

I received my 5th concussion from this wreck and had sustained a broken back. A friend had seen how badly I was shaking, from panic and not having my pills, earlier and had told a family member. Of course, their first instinct was to blame this whole thing on drinking and probably still believes it to this day.

I was then in a house trying to take care of my parents and I was injured myself. I had quit drinking at the time and the doctors had wanted me to wear a special brace for my broken back to heal. I could not help my parents the way that either of them needed by wearing this, and I stopped wearing my brace so that I could cook, clean and do some outdoor chores. This caused my back to not heal correctly and it is now almost excruciating at times and has impaired my movements to this day.

I was very angry. I had been on a medication for 30 years and could not get a refill because of a govt. regulation that I did not even know existed. All because it was filled legally and in a timely manner in another city 240 miles away. I wasn't trying to take advantage of the system. I was only trying to get the medication that had helped me live through this life for the last 30 years. Why was nobody willing to work with me and why was I now being punished for it? To make things worse, I was not being believed and chastised by my own family for things that were untrue and that I didn't do.

I could not handle the situation anymore and took a job in the city that was 45 miles away. I had been the only one trying to care for my parents, but I was also being persecuted by others who were doing little to nothing to help. Perhaps tearing me down made them feel and look better.

Because of the pain in my back, the anxiety that I still was dealing with, and the hard job that I wanted to excel at, I started drinking once again in the evenings. My body was not used to drinking again after quitting for several months and I found myself getting drunk much faster and much more intensely. After 6 months at my new job, I was let go from a good paying position.

My mother had to be placed in a nursing home and we talked my father into moving into the city to be closer to her. I, once again, moved in with him, to be the main cook and bottle washer. My main family doctor at the time wanted me off the Xanax that had worked well for me for almost 30 years. When I could actually get my prescription of them anyway.

Some people think that Xanax will just take off an edge of anxiety. For me, it was like erasing a cliff that was in front of my path. I had tried every pill thrown at me by pill pushing doctors, but none of them worked as well as Xanax did for me. However, forget about my past medication use, this doctor decided that this pill was horrible for me and put me on several different pills to make up for that one pill that was working.

I have now found out that this certain family member was speaking with several of the doctors that I was dealing with, without my consent or knowledge. He was being bossy and telling them untruths about me and trying to control what he thought was right for me. He had no right to do so, but it didn’t stop it from happening. Once again, I was being ignored and not believed. It was maddening and made me incredibly angry.

That action by my family member only pushed me into becoming a closet drinker. Alcohol would lower the fear, anxiety, and the dread that would affect me every day. Especially with having my anxiety medication cut down from a 1mg pill, 3 times per day to a .05 pill, once per day.

I felt like I was losing my mind and some of the additional pills that this doctor had put me on was making me horribly weak and lightheaded. He had even put me on Potassium and Lasix pills to give me more electrolytes because he said that my body was incredibly low in this category. He also put me on a large dosage of Propranolol and Gabapentin. This had never been the case before then, and he alarmingly told me for a year and a half that if I quit taking any of these pills, “You will die!!!”

I was getting serious bouts of diarrhea and I kept getting lightheaded, dizzy and weak. I ended up in the hospital many times during this period. The doctors in the hospital always glancing at my medical records and gave me even more Potassium and this other large retinue of pills. Once again, nobody would listen to me and the pills were only making my health worse. They even put me on an IV of potassium and made me go through a blood transfusion. I felt like a human pin cushion, and I still felt like total crap that had been left out in the sun.

My father had a steep ramp that ran from the floor of his garage to the door going into his home. A person had to build up a pretty good rate of speed to climb up this steep ramp. He was hungry one evening on the day before Halloween in 2018. I went out to the garage to get him some food from the freezer.

While going up this ramp at a good speed, I shifted the food into my left arm and reached for the doorknob with my right. My father opened the door at that very second and I ran through the door like I was an out-of-control cartoon character.

My foot caught on the lip of the door frame, and I fell directly forward onto my forehead. I was in a great deal of pain and could not move. My father pulled me onto my back by using the crook of his cane. I managed to move myself so that I was sitting with the wall to my back. My eyes could not focus correctly, and I immediately got sick, several times.

This was my 6th concussion, and I knew what my injury was and what was happening to me. I just did not know the extent of this injury. A neighbor came to the house to help me, and she wheeled me in my dad’s walker to the couch where I knew not to fall asleep and to not move at a large rate of speed. A new wave of nausea would affect me if I did moved too quickly. I should have gone to the hospital, but I had been misdiagnosed so many times and was in there so much because of my weakness that I did not want to get within 100 yards of that place.

A month and a half later, on Dec 16, my mother passed away from dementia. This main doctor had lowered my Xanax prescription to the lowest level possible and made it impossible to get any more of my medication in a certain timeframe without his consent. Trying to go through this felt like torture to me. What the doctor was making me go through actually seemed cruel. If I had been a horse, they would have shot me.

Because of my head injury and my mother’s passing, I had used the extent of my pills with five days left before I could get a refill. If a person is in a high anxiety situation, nobody on this planet can control when a panic attack will strike when they are off their medication. A person can only try to control it.

Of course, this is the highly legalized way of handling these pills, but I can certainly see how people can go to outside sources to try to find help. This is when people get killed by overdosing on something like Fentanyl. I would be very interested to learn how many fentanyl deaths have been caused by people having to go to an illegal source of getting their medication, all because the doctors will not legally help them. Even families of violent offenders have said that many of their loved ones could not get their medication from their doctors.

Doctors are very worried about being chastised and persecuted by the federal government for giving the medication that is needed to their patients. If doctors are legally persecuted for giving out certain medications, shouldn't the opposite be true as well? Who is fighting for the poor people who need a certain medication and cannot get them. Who is held responsible for this? The pharmaceutical companies for creating them. Why were they a wonder drug and nobody worried about them three decades ago, but now, they are so taboo that the people that were first put on these medications are the one's having to pay?

I am a true believer in doing the right thing! There is no way that I would try to go outside of the doctor’s guidance and go behind the back of the medical field. That is how a person gets killed, but I can see how it happens to some people. I went to see this doctor and explained my situation that I would only need 5 days of medication to get me through this period. He had no compassion and not only refused me on getting the pills that I needed for the next 5 days, he, loudly chastised me.

I asked him what I should do to get me through the next 5 days and his exact words were, “Go get yourself some over the counter Benadryl. It has some of the same effects and should keep you from not having a seizure. I will not give you any!” Nobody knew how deadly mixing Xanax, which was still in bloodstream, and Benadryl could be at the beginning of 2019. This advice from my doctor almost killed me! I was treated so irresponsibly by my doctor and there is nothing that I could do. He never put this advise into my medical records. Plus, even if he did, nobody was once again believing me!!!

I was filling up my old Xanax pill bottles with water and drinking down the contents of the grit that may have fallen off of the pills, as I was in a horrible state of fear and anxiety. It was incredibly crippling. I was taking my replacement pills and trying to make it until I could get my medication. I lasted 3 days.

WARNING: NEVER...NEVER...NEVER mix Xanax, or any other sedative for PTSD or panic disorder with the over the counter drug, Benedril. This may cause you to die!!!! It is a deadly combination. I had a seizure and don't remember 2 full days in a hospital. After that, I had over a week of hallucinations. Never mix these two medications.