High Anxiety

I don't know what it is about me. Maybe it's my childhood. Maybe it's an overactive imagination but I get crazed when my kids don't call me. There is a certain time span when things are OK. I tell myself "Oh, they are busy." or "Oh, they are busy." but very shortly it becomes "Oh, they are dead."

Every headline I've ever read about people running off the road into a ditch and lying there for days before they are found. Or are never found ....run through my head and, late at night, and become ever so believable. Or freeze to death in the snow when their car runs out of gas.
Or flip upside down into an innocuous pond that just happens to be right there...............

Or axe murders....who knows, some berserk landlady with an axe just hacked her way through my entire family.

I used to call it my 2am insanity. For some reason, at 2 am every disaster becomes real. Is there a disease running rampant through the city killing people in hours? Could be. Is there a Moslem riot in Paris and they've begun attacking Americans here in the U.S.A? Well, it's possible. Did I just read about an earthquake in - you name the city? Maybe they were there and buried under the rubble.

I don't remember being this way years ago - well, years ago, they were all safe under my roof where I could protect them from the vicissitudes of life - or so I thought. Once they took off on their own, I became a victim of every headline, every Cold Case File, every rotting body discovered in a suitcase, every crocodile attack in the Deep South, every shark attack on the West coast.

Never mind that these are rare events. Just ask the grieving parents of some victim or other whether it's rare. In my fevered imagination, I'm not exempt from life's disasters - no matter how rare. I empathize with every grieving parent. I weep with every raped child, every kidnap victim and every war widow. I swear if any of my kids had joined the military during an active war, I would have committed suicide rather than live with the stress and anxiety for however many years it took.

I think it's the childhood thing again. For most of my early years disaster loomed on the horizon. Unnamed villains chased me through forests and fields. Nameless dread hid behind the door of my closet - only it wasn't nameless. It was "They" are going to get me. It was "It" knows where I live. In the dark of the night, every flicker or shadow was one of those out to get me. Maybe I listened to "Inner Sanctum" once too often. I remember nightmares for years from some of those shows.

Is it wise to let children watch those things? Is it a good idea to even read books like that? Well not if you are like me. I can name you books that the name of which will give me willies today - forget back then when I was a kid. There are movies I've never seen - just the trailer was enough to keep me awake. Maybe if I had watched things like that I would have developed a thicker skin - or maybe I'd NEVER get any sleep.

Not for me the "Texas Chainsaw Massacres" or what was that movie that scared the bejeebers out of everyone as it purported to be a hand held camera some teenagers had taken out on a camping trip............just reading about it made my stomach hurt.

As I grow older, I seem to be more vulnerable - not less, to these fevered imaginations. On some level I think how lucky can I be that nothing has happened so far. How much longer can I go on counting my blessings?

I used to say that it was a good thing I didn't become a nurse until my kids were grown. And it was true. Every cold would have been pneumonia. Every allergy attack would have been leukemia. Every stomach ache would have been appendicitis....etc. ad nauseum.

We nurses used to joke about it. But it was no joke. I know nurses who went to neurologists FIRST because they were sure their headaches were brain tumors. Every freckle was skin cancer. Every ache or pain was metastases. One of the oncologists I used to work with made jokes. Do you have hip pain? Must be bone mets. Is that a lump on your chin? Must be melanoma. Until, one day it was true. Our Social Worker complained about bone pain and he made the usual joke, but it turned out to be a kidney cancer that ultimately killed her. I don't think he cracked that joke again as long as I worked with him.

So living and working every day with death and the dying didn't make me less sensitive. It made me more so as I saw every day people who had ignored signs and symptoms. Every day I saw families in shock as the unbelievable happened to their loved ones. I saw perfectly sane people do perfectly insane things - like leave a coconut under the hospital bed because someone had told them it might forestall the inevitable - it didn't.

Aha, I've been reading Holocaust materials again. A book recommended to me about the origins of Evil. Where does it come from this insane behaviour from what are apparently normal every day people. I looked at them in Germany and wondered - is that kind and calm face hiding a killer? Is that attractive young woman capable of killing babies? That's what you read about in these books. Ordinary people who killed off 80,000 Jews in one city - Kiev - in a matter of weeks. Very specific information on how they did it too.

No wonder my hyper is hyperventilating. Why read this stuff? Still looking for answers....still hoping I'll find a "reason" in an unreasonable world.

So how sane am I when I leave messages or send emails and get no answer. At first it's like I said. "Oh, they are just busy." "Oh, they are just too busy." and then finally "If that axe murderer didn't get them, I will."