30 Days of Prompts- Day three: Worst day of your life.

I'm a day behind!

So I've wracked my brains for a couple days now, trying to think of my worst day. Sure, I've had lot's of bad days but not one particular day ever popped into my head as the 'worst.' So then I kept thinking and it hit me. It wasn't technically one single day but there was one worst summer of my life. The worst I've ever felt happened during three months in 2007.

You'll need a little background information to understand the story. I started having panic attacks when I was very young, maybe around twelve, and was later diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. I was put on many different medications at an early age. Paxil, Prozac, Effexor, Welbutrin, Rispridol, Celexa, clonazepam, and Zoloft. Nearly all of them worked for a while but ended up not being enough, except for the Zoloft.

I was put on Zoloft when I was fifteen or sixteen and stayed on it until I was eighteen. It was a great medication for supressing anxiety but I felt back then like it was tedious having to take a pill every morning. So in at the end of May of 2007 I stopped taking them thinking I didn't need them. I knew what to expect physically by stopping the medication cold turkey because it'd happened before. I'd get nauseous, shaky and have these very annoying 'head zaps' that made me dizzy.

Sure enough, about a week after stopping my medication, the physical symptoms were starting. I was walking to get a slushie with my brother one day shortly after summer vacation started and I started feeling very lethargic and the head zaps would strike every time I turned my head in a direction. I told him we had to hurry up because I wanted to go home. I thought I would just wait out the withdrawal symptoms and move on when they were over.

They never went away. To top that off, I was starting to have panic attacks again. Not the same old panic attacks I used to get where I could just breathe deep and wait it out. These ones felt like the ones I'd had when I first started having them. Still, I thought it would pass and so I brought my pillow, blankets and a bowl to throw up in if I needed to and camped out on the couch for a week. Being in my bedroom scared me when I was anxious.

About a week later it was clear that I wasn't getting any better. I would wake up panicking and wouldn't touch a single bit of food, fearing that I would vomit from it. I wouldn't move off the couch because I didn't want to feel dizzy. It was going on two weeks that I was planted on the couch, too afraid to move. There came a time where I got fed up of doing nothing so I tried to go to my friend Joey's house with my brother. I had a water bottle with me at all times in case I started gagging which is something that happened a lot when I got panicky. We got to Joey's and had a pretty good time. I wasn't feeling too anxious so I thought I would stay a little later than I intended. But it was like right when I felt like I was doing okay, I wasn't. Walking home, my body began to shake and I started hyperventilating and gagging. My legs shook so bad that I had to sit in the middle of the sidewalk trying to sip water so I could stop gagging. By now I was just panicking in general and didn't know what to do. My brother and I didn't have cell phones at that time so he had to run back to Joey's to use his phone. It was about midnight when my dad came to get us and I cried because I knew he was angry. I said to him, "I'm sorry." He replied, "This has got to stop Jess."

After that night I slowly started feeling my agoraphobia coming back. It had only happened one other time, around when I first started having the panic attacks. Just the thought of leaving my house terrified me and actually leaving sent me into an automatic panic. So I continued laying on the couch. Not eating, not drinking, not sleeping and becoming distant from everyone around me. It was very humiliating to me when I would be on the couch in a panic or crying from feeling sick and seeing my brothers walk downstairs and avoid staring at me, almost as they were taught not to stare at handicap people. I quickly because isolated from the world, completely ignoring my friends and family. I just sat on the couch and watched TV. I didn't eat dinner with the family at the table. I didn't watch TV in the family room with them. I never moved from the spot on the couch upstairs. I was basically just rotting away there.

I began taking my medication again. School would start in a month and if things didn't change I wouldn't stand a chance. After starting them again I thought I would try and go to one of my brothers baseball games with everyone since my mom had begged me to try. I was scared because not only was it outside of my house, but it was extremely hot and the panic attacks made me intolerable to heat. We were sitting right in the sun and the humidity started making me feel like I couldn't breathe. I feared that maybe I would have a heatstroke so I obsessively chewed on ice cubes, trying to manage the panic. A couple minutes later I turned to see a crowd. My mom looked too and we got up to investigate. There was a boy in the middle of the crowd and his mother was bent over rubbing ice on his forehead and tipping water into his mouth. He'd passed out from the heat and this knowledge sent me into a full blown panic attack. I walked away sitting under shade rocking back and fourth quicky.
What if that happened to me?
What if an ambulence had to come?
What if I threw up?
What if I died? What if, what if, what if.

My mom had to leave the game and take me home. I was shaking, bent over a bowl from gagging so much and I remember as I was gagging into the bowl my mom and dad staring at me with a look of hopelessness. And I could have sworn disappointment. I became extremely depressed, thinking the same thing I thought they were thinking. I'm going to be a prisoner of my own mind and it's not going to get better. There were a couple times where I'd sat on the couch and looked out the window until it got darker, until it was dark and then until the sun came back up. I hadn't moved or done anything. I just sat there for hours and hours staring out the window. Staring at the outside world I was being held back from. My family continued trying to ignore this lump on the couch. This girl who refused to eat, refused to change clothes and even refused to shower a couple times. Messy hair and lifeless eyes. I hate that they had to see me that way. I didn't know it back then but I was so much more of a person than that.

One weekend toward the end of the summer I actually fell ill. Of course, no one believed that I was actually sick since it mimicked the physical symptoms of a panic attack. I'd never felt so horrible. My body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds and there were a couple times I'd started seeing stars and I'd had to sit in any random spot thinking I was going to pass out. It wasn't until my mom and brother caught what I had that they knew it hadn't been my anxiety. By the last two weeks of summer vacation my anxiety started subsiding. I still can't believe that the weeks drawing nearer to school was making my anxiety decrease, but I wasn't going to fight it. I think being sick during that time helped me compare being actually sick to just being anxious.

Once the medication was all back inside my system I was able to move off the couch and back into my room. I was able to eat and sleep again and I was thankfully able to go outside again. My panic attacks didn't go away after that summer. I still had them, but they were manageable. My panic attacks weren't in my control until I started therapy at the start of 2008. I hardly have them anymore which is more than I ever expected of myself.

Summer of 2007 will always stick with me. If I think about it hard enough, I can almost put myself back into my seventeen year old self's shoes. It's a scary place to be. Those three months of complete isolation and feeling so completely alone, of not being in control of my own mind, of feeling like everyone had given up on me when I couldn't fight for myself was the reason I chose it to be the worst time in my life. I do, however, believe that the experience made me stronger and a bit more independent.

"There is no strength where there is no struggle."