In Which I Try To Use Worry As A Weapon To Fight Off A Bad Ultrasound Outcome…

Tags

20 week ultrasound, anxiety, baby, defects, fear, miscarriage, pregnancy, worries

My 20 week ultrasound is tomorrow, and I’m doing my Anxiety Girl thing.

Back when I was in my Generalized Anxiety CBT group, they talked about how pathological worriers will often suffer from the superstitious belief that  their worrying is actually productive.

Then I raised my hand and told them my own personal theory of worrying, which stunned them for a moment, and then the leader said,

“That is the most COMPLEX rationalization of anxiety I have EVER heard.”

Wanna hear it?

Of course you do.

Okay, as you may know, one of the many bizarre and perplexing things suggested by Quantum Mechanics is that we could very well exist as one universe in a vast multiverse – that there are alternate universes created on a quantum level for every possible outcome. There could be thousands of YOUs out there, all living similar but slightly different realities.

And yet we only experience it as one lifetime, right? My particular consciousness is separate from the consciousnesses of all the other Carols out there – thousands of things could happen to various Carols throughout the multiverse but I will only experience one of those.

Maybe in another universe, my last pregnancy didn’t end in a miscarriage.

Maybe in another universe, I stayed with my first boyfriend and never married PH.

Maybe in another universe, I didn’t contract that weird disease (I went back to the internist the other day, by the way. The rash keeps coming back, so I spend half my time scratching off my own skin, and lately I’ve been hearing wooshes in my ears…).

Anyway, here is my theory: if I concentrated hard enough, maybe I can CHOOSE which reality my consciousness stays in. Maybe by WORRYING that a certain bad thing will happen, I can consciously AVOID it happening to THIS PARTICULAR iteration of my consciousness. Of course bad things still happen, but aren’t they always different bad things from what we expect? Aren’t we always blindsided by the one thing that DIDN’T worry us?

My GAD group used that as proof that worrying doesn’t help. I suggested that maybe it means that our worrying needs a broader spectrum.

Of course, it’s crazy, and the CBT stuff helped me drop a LOT of that. I don’t worry nearly as much as I used to and look what happened! I had a silent miscarriage and walked around with a dead baby inside me for weeks.

So, this time of course I was terrified of a bad outcome and my 8 week ultrasound was clear. The baby is still alive – I can feel little kicks and twitches at night and sometimes around noon. But all kinds of bad things could happen at tomorrow’s ultrasound. The baby could be hideously malformed. It could have soft markers indicating Down’s Syndrome, or worse, another Trisomy that is seriously deadly. Heart defects, spinal defects…

So far I have googled Trisomy 18, Trisomy 13, Anencephaly, and have read over 20 personal stories from people who had horrible news from their 20 week ultrasound and either ended up deciding to terminate or carrying to term and then taking photographs of their dead/deformed and dying baby. For some reason, ALL OF THESE people are deeply religious and use the word “sweet” and “angel” multiple times.

Not sure if seriously defective babies are some kind of Trojan that Jesus uses to infect people or if only religious people have the strength to document their experiences. Could be both.

I’m also wondering what we’re going to do with Owl if the news is bad. We haven’t out-and-out told him that I’m pregnant. He has noticed that my stomach is getting bigger and has asked several times if I have a baby in there. PH finally  told him that my body is TRYING to grow a baby but we don’t know if it has been successful yet. This prompted him to say loudly “You can’t be making a baby, Mommy! Daddy’s PENIS isn’t in you VAGINA!”

We were in Cost Co at the time. Several people looked around. Kids are great.

Anyway. We told him that tomorrow we will go see a special doctor who can look in my belly and tell us if there is a baby in there. In an ideal world we will be able to bring him in, tell him he is going to have a little brother/sister, and show him the baby on the screen.

But if it’s terrible news, how do we keep his infernal curiosity silent long enough to receive the bad news, discuss the options and digest it all? How do we explain to him that yes, there is a baby in there, but it may not be okay? What do we say to him when we’re told that it’s a boy/girl but it has a hole in the heart/no brain/appears to be an octopus?

 

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

Now if you excuse me, I need to google more weird things that can be found on a 20 week ultrasound so I can ensure that our baby doesn’t have them.

Worrying About The Wrong Thing: Anxiety Girl Strikes Again!

Tags

anxiety, decisions, GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, jobs, problems, stupid, worries, worrying

One of the things they kept telling us in my Generalized Anxiety Disorder group was that we worried about the wrong things.

Our obsession with worrying about everything actually CAUSED problems because we’d be so busy worrying that we would let problems build and build until they became HUGE problems.

Which was exactly what we were worried about.

Something else we learned was that our worries always tended to end up at the same place. Heather Armstrong says that when her daughter makes a mistake in her piano practice, she visualizes a series of catastrophes that end in her living in a cardboard box.

Well, that’s fairly typical, I have learned.

For some people, that ultimate fear is ending up homeless.

For others, it’s ending up dead.

For me, it’s displeasing people and making bad choices.

Doctor sends you for blood tests because your sore throat could be a sign of a serious problem? Pfft. Not worried. Maybe it’s cancer, but it is almost definitely not. Certainly nothing I can control if it is cancer (which it isn’t).

Need to make a serious decision that will end up disappointing someone? BIG PROBLEM.

I hate making decisions. What if I make the wrong one? What if this single decision alters the whole course of my future life? What if this decision turns out to piss someone off? What if this decision makes me a bad person?!

So now I’m here, waiting for a phone call, worrying that I’ll be OFFERED A JOB.

You read that right. Not worrying that I WON’T be offered a job. Worrying that I WILL.

Last Friday, you see, was a big day for me. I landed a big job on Elance, and a national dog charity put up a part time job posting in my area. Suddenly I had a plan – I would train dogs, work part time for a charity doing something I KNEW I could do well, and make extra money on the side as a writer.

It was like ALL MY DREAMS COMING TRUE.

Then I got another call. From a vet clinic.

This clinic is a sort of rival to my previous employer. She was his employee, and when she left to start her own business, three quarters of his staff decided they’d rather go work for her.

So when she asked me to come in for an interview, I could be really honest.

…I told her exactly why I was no longer working there.

…I told her that I have severe anxiety around anesthesia now, thanks to Mean Vet, who she used to work with.

…I warned her that if she was looking for a surgical tech, I might not be a good choice.

She said she liked me a lot. She thought I would be a good fit at her clinic. She appreciated my openness and my candor. She always made decisions like this jointly with her staff, though, so she would talk it over with them and get back to me on Friday. Would I be available to start next week?

So now I’m scared.

If I get this job, I should definitely take it. A bird in the hand, right?

She seems nice. She and her employee vet introduced themselves by their first names, which is a nice change from the old place where I had to call them “Dr So-and-So” all the time.

But I don’t want it.

Why?

Because then what if I also get the job at the charity? 

WHAT IF I HAVE TO CHOOSE?

I SHOULD be worried that I WON’T get this job.

I SHOULD be worried that I won’t get ANY job.

But instead, I’m terrified that I may have to make a choice. I may have to let someone down – someone who took a chance on me.

It doesn’t help that I have so much anxiety about working in a clinic that just the THOUGHT sends my heart racing.

So… to sum up…

I’m waiting for a call, scared that I will be offered a job.

When I should really be scared that I won’t.

Let it all hang out

Tags

anxiety, fear, GAD, worries, worrying

Every now and then you meet someone who had a problem and never really knew it. Like my ex boyfriend, who was born with a malformed knee and was all of five or six before he realized that other people didn’t experience pain when they walked. Or a girl I used to work with, who didn’t realize that she had inflammatory bowel problems until she was in her early teens and said something like “you know how, when you have to poop, it hurts so bad you feel like you’re going to pass out?” and got the response, “no…. maybe you should see a doctor…” Or a man I met who told me that he spent his whole childhood getting scolded for picking fewer strawberries than his siblings, for using such strange crayon colour choices and so on… until he tried to join the air force and was told that he was colour blind.

Now I have people like the psychologist from Fraser Mental Health, and my nurse practitioner, and caring people on the interwebs, asking me questions like “how often do you worry?” and “what sorts of things do you worry about?” and “what have you tried to stop your worry?” and… I don’t know how to answer these questions. Try asking a fish how much water it swims in daily, and how long it has been in the water, and whether it is has been feeling wetter lately, and you’ll probably get a similar empty stare. Mind you, that’s because fish have, like, three neurons total and never blink, but that’s not my point.

I have always considered myself a pretty introspective person. I am highly aware of all of my mental health processes. I know why I say the things I do, and I can analyze the way that I think and make extrapolations about my personality. However, asking me how I worry is a lot like asking a fish how wet it is. I have no word for the medium in which I swim. All of my thought processes, from introspection to planning to reflection to analysis, are worries. To me, to think is to worry. How can one think in a form which is not a worry?

While I never knew that my worrying could be considered bordering on pathological, as the psychologist and my doctor seem to think, I did know that people thought I worried too much. I learned that talking about certain kinds of thought processes tend to get you funny looks, and I learned not to talk about them, much the way that as children we learn not to talk in company about our bowel movements or touching ourselves.

So I’m here to give you the dope. Because I will never be able to catalogue what is normal and what is not normal, if people don’t know about it. I’ll just give you the run down of what I do know about myself and my anxiety.

I can’t tell you or my doctor what makes me worry, because I don’t understand the question. When I ask my husband what I worry about, he says “Well… everything…” so clearly that is a dead end. Let’s just assume that it is like Internet Rule 34. We’ll call it If By Yes Rule 34: If it exists in her mind, Carol is worrying about it.

What I do know is that there are lots of things that I’m not afraid of:

I am not afraid of flying. Although of course when I’m on a plane I worry about crashing, or our bags getting lost, or accidentally flying off into space, or someone suddenly coming down with rabies and none of us can escape because we’re all trapped in a flying metal tube with a rabid person. Luckily I’m vaccinated for rabies so I’m not actually afraid per se. It’s just stuff you think about (yes, I’m exaggerating about the rabies worrying, but yes, I am vaccinated against rabies).

I’m not afraid of driving, either, even in Vancouver where death is imminent the minute you go near a road. Of course, when I’m driving I think about how I’d probably call my husband first, and work second, if I were in a car accident, and I wonder if the EMT people would be able to figure out my contact information and contact my husband if I were not conscious when they arrived. But I’m not afraid. Just planning ahead.

I’m not afraid of public speaking. I mean, it makes me nervous and my heart pounds but I don’t mind doing it, as such. I just try and practice a lot at home first and quadruple check my grammar before I read my speech. In fact, I try to memorize it so I’ll be able to make eye contact with people, and make it sound natural. I don’t want people talking about what an awful public speaker I am.

I’m not afraid of dying. My own death doesn’t scare me, but I do think about what I would do if I were diagnosed with cancer, and sometimes I worry that it would happen before I had a chance to have children, because that is something I really want to do in this life. Then sometimes I worry that I’m being selfish, and if I were going to die young of cancer I should do it before kids, so my kids don’t have to lose a mother.

Really, when it comes down to it, I’m not really afraid of your big, classic scary things. The only three things that scare the bejeebers out of me are:

• Falling (not heights, heights are fine, it’s when I suddenly decrease in my altitude that I freak out)
• Corpses (because corpses are terrifying, obviously, and people say that’s silly because they can’t hurt you, but I’m pretty sure every horror movie ever made begs to differ)
• Doing something wrong

But really as long as I stay off of carnival rides, and the wings stay on the planes I fly on, and I stay away from funerals, funeral homes, morgues, cemetaries, television shows about war or gruesome murders, and other places where I may stumble upon a corpse and have a complete freak-out, and as long as I always, always, always am very careful to do everything right all the time, these fears don’t really disrupt my life all that much.

And until recently, I thought that my worrying saved me from fear. In fact, I still can’t shake that belief, even though Anxiety BC tells me that this belief is commonly held, but incorrect. Still… by thinking about all the possible scenarios that could happen, and systematically devising a plan of action for each of them, I can be prepared. In fact, I might even be able to prevent the thing from happening in the first place.

Look at the Titanic: a classic example of a disaster brought about by people not worrying that the ship might sink.

Then again, if other people are correct, and I am wrong, and worrying about everything doesn’t hold the fabric of the universe in place, then I am wasting a whole helluva lot of emotional energy, not to mention time. But do you really want to take that chance?

Like, if it’s true that I needn’t worry about stepping on my cat while going down the stairs in the dark and accidentally giving him internal injuries, then I probably could have been saved some anxious dreams like that and can speed up my nighttime descent of staircases. Then again, what if I’M right and the moment I stop worrying about it, I’ll accidentally kill my annoying, but Inexplicably Loved kitteh? Or, if worrying about whether or not I’ll be a good mother won’t actually help me be a good mother, then I’m spending a lot of time reading books about having children that I may not need to spend. And, maybe it does take some time to painstakingly unplug all our Christmas lights on the windows before we go out anywhere, but isn’t it worth that so the house won’t catch fire?

It just seems like the risks outweigh the possible emotional benefit of NOT worrying.

I do admit that it would be nice not to arrive home near tears or shaking with anger because of an increasingly catastrophic scenario that I have been building in my head for the last ten minutes as I drove, in which someone says something to me and then I say something else and then they get mad, and then what if they don’t like me any more, maybe I should call them and beg forgiveness, and if only I had phrased that sentence more carefully… and it’ll take me a while to calm myself down and remind myself that none of that actually happened.

…YET.