Knocking Some Sense Into Myself

It was Saturday night, and I was at a friend's house. I'd stopped taking the Kl*n*pin on Friday evening, but was still feeling groggy and dumb and slow, though not quite as groggy and dumb as slow as I'd felt while taking it. The downside was that the anxiety was still there, still weighing me down.

Still, it was a nice evening, as it always is when I get together with my bestest friends and their bestest husbands and bestest children. We laughed and joked and made snotty comments to one another. It was late by the time we got ready to go, and N was tired, so I picked him up and headed out the door. As I stepped off the porch, I half-turned to throw some comment back at my friends, and then in a flash, I felt myself going down, and quickly. I instinctively tried to turn to protect N, but there wasn't enough time; I heard his head hit the flagstone with a horrific thunk. And then I heard this primal sound coming from me..."Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oooooohhhhh." I was crying, I was hunched over myself, and I could only form the ooooohhhhhh sound.

Baroy swooped down and picked up N, who was already crying, loudly. "He's OK. He's OK," he kept telling me. I finally found words. "I tried to stop it. I tried to protect him. I couldn't do it."

My knee was pretty scraped up, and one of my friends helped me to my feet and took me back into the house, into the bathroom, where I automatically grabbed some tissue and antiseptic and started cleaning my knee, then suddenly sat down on the toilet and cried, good and hard, for several minutes. Not as many as I'd have liked, though, because soon Em and her friends were there, and Em was crying, too, scared out of her wits by seeing her mom lose hers. I held her for a few minutes, told her that I was OK, that I'd just been scared, and we collected ourselves and went outside, where N had an ice pack on his head (which had a nice bump), but was completely fine, not crying, chattering away about his "owie," and telling me he could "hold my ice myself."

I went to bed that night with an ice pack myself, on my ankle, which had begun to throb ominously. And I woke up with a foot that could barely hold my weight. (N woke up fine, just fine, nary a scratch or bump to be found.) But that was OK, because there was much less weight for it to hold...emotionally speaking. It took me an hour or two to realize it, but the anxiety was almost completely gone. It was almost as if having something to really worry about had relieved me of the burden of worrying about nothing. Maybe it was just having a good cry that did it. Maybe that fall literally knocked some sense back into me. Whatever it was, it was a good thing.

There is, right now, a little knot in the back of my throat, a little tightness. I can feel it there; it's hard, but it's small, like a tiny anxiety metastasis. That's probably a good thing. Knowing it's still there will make me follow through in getting help, to prevent it from becoming a full blown emotional malignancy again. But getting a respite from the symptoms is also a good thing. Today feels possible, doable. I'm not dreading today. That, too, is a good thing.