Anxiety or Fear?

“Anxiety” is Like This:

It’s really weird.  One minute after eating a bowl of split-peas and ham soup with half a dozen crackers crumbled into it, my stomach rumbles.  It rumbles not as if gas is building up in it.  It rumbles as if I haven’t had a bite to eat in seventy-two hours.

So I haul my lard ass out of the butt-sprung easy chair by pushing down on its arms and stand up.  The room begins to revolve and that large blue painting on the west wall, a super-sized Aloe Vera plant painted by Allison in the style of Georgia O’Keefe, begins to fade.  The chocolate brown quilt covering Buddy’s crate turns tan.  Suddenly color drains from all objects in the room and I know from experience that I am going to fall on my face if I don’t grab something quickly and hold it firmly.

This morning my walker was parked with its wheels locked one pace from the chair I’d been sitting in .  I grabbed its handles just as my knees began to sag.  Instead of plopping back into the chair, I grunted hard, the way I used to grunt when making a six-G pull-up in a Grumman Cougar.  It worked.  I could feel more blood getting to my eyeballs, to my brain.  My knees stiffened and I knew it was over for the time being.  I released the brakes on my walker and stood holding it for a moment while I located the three dogs sprawled on the rug sleeping.  They were blocking the path to the kitchen.  I’m not sure why I wanted to go into the kitchen.  Perhaps I thought a drink of water might help.  So I barked at the dogs, making a noise like the air horn on a diesel tractor and they all jumped up with a start.  “Out of my way!” I shouted.  It was a command they’d didn’t know and yet they instinctively cleared a path I could push the walker through.

In the kitchen I stood surrounded by table, refrigerator and the L-shaped counters tops with range and sinks.  Damned if I could remember what I’d come to the kitchen to get.  The word “Pills” popped into my mind.  I couldn’t recall taking my morning meds.  So with one hand on the walker squeezing the brake, I reached into the cupboard above the eye-level oven for my bin of pill bottles.  As I placed the plastic bin on the drain board I could feel my pulse racing.  I recognized the feeling as ventricle fibrillation, so I turned the walker so I could sit on its seat while I opened the box and found the bottles of pills I needed to slow my pulse, to lower my blood pressure and open the arteries.

Metorpolol Tartrate, according to the cardiologist, works by lowering blood pressure and has a side effect of slowing the pulse and stopping the ventricle fibrillation—I’m not sure I believed him when he stopped the Sotolol, which I knew had been working for nearly a year,  But I can’t remember how he said it worked.  This change in meds was made after my pace-maker was installed in my chest.  No matter.  I popped one of the tiny white pills as I sat on the seat of my walker.  I took a swig of cold coffee from the mug standing on the counter still waiting for me to nuke it since two or three O’clock this morning.

It suddenly occurred to me that this episode could merely be an anxiety attack.  I’ve been more than a little anxious since my wife called from the hospital late last night to tell me that today she may be getting her discharge; she’s been in there for a month and a day.  Maybe, I thought, what I need is a double dose of Diazepam—my Valium comes in ten milligram tabs.  I popped two of them and they dissolved in my mouth before I could pick up the coffee cup.  I seemed to feel the effects of the Valium even as I was refilling and nuking my coffee, but believe me, what I felt wasn’t tranquility.  I felt fear.  Fear puts a knot in the gut and raises the hackles.  This was fear.

I sat in my walker seat waiting for the microwave to ding.  Suddenly my left arm began to sting.  It felt like a wasp or bee had stung me.  But then I could smell my flesh burning and see the cloud of powder smoke from an exploding artillery shell.  I look down at my arm and see the blood boiling around the shards of shrapnel in my left biceps muscle and the stream of blood coursing down to my left hand.  This is what I’ve feared all along.  I had no fear of death in combat, but I had a morbid fear of losing a limb.  Now it was happening.  If I were to move my arm I knew with a certainty hard to explain that my arm would fall off.  At the same time I knew where I was.  I was sitting in my walker listening to the dinging of the microwave oven telling me my coffee is hot.  This situation lasted only a few minutes, maybe only seconds, before my mind cleared and I was able to open the door of the microwave oven and extract my mug of hot coffee, which I left standing on the counter while I tentatively stood up.  The dizziness was gone, my legs felt firm.  I placed the mug on the seat of my walker and wheeled it into my office via the hallway to avoid the dogs.  I put the cup on my desk, lit a smoke and fired up the computer.  I had to write this one down; it had a certain clarity to it that you may not understand, but the fact is that I did.

While waiting for the computer to boot, I drank half a cup of coffee and smoked a whole cigarette—this home-built machine, only two years old, is slower than molasses in January.

I was also mentally asking myself what I was afraid of.  I concluded that I was afraid my wife had merely spoofed her psychiatrist in order to get out of the hospital and carry out some nefarious plan.  I have no way of knowing what she might be planning, or even if she’s spoofing.  But I know as sure as God made little green apples she’ll have something up her sleeve.

I could bug out.  My old truck is running good and I still have enough cash to fill its gas tank.  But bugging out is contrary to my nature, or to my training.  So I’ll welcome her home with open arms and take my chances.  You don’t spend forty years with a woman and then bug out when her mind is out of kilter.  I tell myself that she needs me now as she never needed me before.

THE END