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. I woke up in the back of an ambulance and my car had been totaled having run much further down the road than where I had pulled off and had crashed into a pole. Thank God that I had not hurt anyone else.

I received my 5th concussion from this wreck and had sustained a broken back. A friend had seen how badly I was shaking earlier and had told a family member. Of course, their first instinct was to blame this whole thing on drinking and probably still believe it to this day. I was then in a house trying to help 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 them the way that either of them needed, 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.

I could not handle the situation anymore and took a job in the city that was 45 miles away. 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 this anymore after quitting for several months and I found myself getting drunk much faster and much more intensely. After 6 months on the 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 moved in with him once again to be the main cook and bottle washer. My main doctor at the time wanted me off the Xanax, that had worked well for me for almost 30 years. 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. But he 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 the doctor without my consent or knowledge and telling him 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. That pushed me into only becoming a closet drinker. Alcohol would lower the 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 pills 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 and he alarmingly told me for a year and a half that if I quit taking any of these pills, “You will die!!!”

I kept getting lightheaded, dizzy and weak and 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 that were only making me 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 now and I knew 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, because a new wave of nausea would affect me if I did this. I should have gone to the hospital, but I had been 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 doctor had lowered my Xanax prescription to the lowest level possible and made it impossible to get any more pills in a certain timeframe or without his consent. Because of my head injury and my mother’s passing, I had used the extent of my pills with five days before I could get a refill. If a person is in a high anxiety situation, nobody can control when a panic attack will strike. We can only try to control it. Of course, this is the legal way of handling these pills, but I can certainly see how people go to outside sources to try to find help and this is when they get killed by overdosing on something like Fentanyl.

I am a true believer in doing the right thing and 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. I went to see this doctor and explained my situation and that I would only need 5 days of medication. He not only refused me on getting the pills to get me through this terrible time until my next medication schedule, 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.”

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.