Down The Rabbit Hole

I’ve been having a hard time lately. I’ve basically been driving myself slowly insane and making myself sick and I don’t know what to do about it. This is a window into my mind, and let me tell you, it’s not a pretty picture.

I’ve mentioned before about the nerve twitch in my foot that I’ve had for several months that my doctor told me was stress related. While we were in France, I was totally fine. The muscle in my foot twitched, but not badly, and I was having a good time so I barely noticed. Then the stuff with Maggie and The Pet Staff happened and the twitch got worse. It got really bad when we got back and I wasn’t sleeping well and readjusting from jet lag. The foot twitch turned into twitches all over my body - the backs of my thighs, my calves, my arms, my back. It’s bad enough and annoying enough that I called my doctor again and she referred me to the UCLA Neurology department, but I couldn’t get an appointment until early September. In the meantime, I’ve sort of stepped my exercise, and it really has helped alleviate the twitches. They are still there, but nowhere near as bad.

Here’s the thing, though, and the crux of the problem. Before I called the doctor, I go online. I look up “muscle twitches” and it spits out a list a mile long of horrible degenerative nerve diseases like multiple sclerosis and ALS and stuff like that. I freak out. Even though when I first went to my doctor about the twitch in my foot she told me that it was nothing like that. Even though she told me it is most likely stress related. I read everything I can get my hands on about MS and read the list of other symptoms, like blurred vision and numbness and tingling in the limbs, and at first I think “oh thank goodness I don’t have that”, but the next day, whaddya know, I have a tingly sense in my hands, and suddenly my eyes are all irritated and I’m constantly squinting at things, thinking to myself “I swear that yesterday I could see that more clearly”. I convince myself that I have MS.

The other set of symptoms that I run across in my search for “muscle twitches” are symptoms related to Menopause. Also in that list are things like “hot flashes” and “tingling skin” and “heart palpitations”. I think to myself, panicked, “oh my god I was really hot at work the other day so hot that I had to take off my sweater and I NEVER get hot could that have been a hot flash that was a hot flash oh my god I’M IN EARLY MENOPAUSE”. Or “Did that little patch of skin on my leg just tingle? It totally tingled out of nowhere oh my god I’M IN EARLY MENOPAUSE”. Or “Is my heart beating really fast right now? It kind of is, it’s kind of fast oh my god I’M IN EARLY MENOPAUSE”.

So of course, I become hysterical. I am completely convinced that I am in early menopause. What with my irregular periods, my doctor-diagnosed hormonal imbalance, and the myriad other “symptoms” I convince myself that I have, what other diagnosis is possible? I think, is there possibly a way that I’m NOT in early menopause? And my brain says, “No. There is no way that this is anything other than early menopause. You will never have a baby, you will lose your sex drive and never desire your husband ever again, and it’s going to happen all before the tender age of 31.”

I am on high alert all the time, searching my body for new sensations – a twitch here, a tingle there. I’m afraid to go to bed at night because I’m afraid of having hot flashes and night sweats. I’ve been constantly checking my pulse, to see if my heartbeat is rapid. Which it always is. I’ve had a high resting heartbeat since I was a teenager. I know this. Plus, all the stress I am putting on myself with all this bullshit can’t be helping.

In my heart, I know how this sounds. I know I sound like a raving lunatic. I have moments of clarity, a voice that comes from deep inside me that says “Don’t you see? Don’t you see what you are doing to yourself?” But I can’t make it stop.

The past two years of infertility has made me lose faith in my body. In my mind, how can I possibly be healthy if I can’t get pregnant, or if I can’t sustain a pregnancy? Something must be horribly wrong. And when all the stress from the past two years began to manifest physically as the twitch in my foot, it was all over. It was as if my body was confirming what my inner demon had been whispering in my ear all this time – “You’re broken”.

I look at my body, this body that has been my true home for thirty years, that has grown with me and taken the brunt of so much, from the scraping of knees from falling off my bike as a kid, to being stuck with needles and forced to grow more eggs than should be humanly possible. I treat it like crap, filling it with alcohol, not giving it the nutrition it needs to operate properly, not exercising enough. Allowing myself to become so overwhelmed with stress that I make it sick. And I blame it? My body has done nothing but serve me as well as it could. There are wells of strength within it that I never knew existed, never knew I could put my body through so much. And when it starts to show signs of fatigue, I think that it’s broken. I think that not only have I lost faith in my body, my body is starting to lose faith in me, too.

Hawk has been so kind and patient with me, always the voice of reason, trying to bring me back down, again and again. It breaks my heart that I’m doing this to him. I had a breakdown in the car the other day when we were going out to breakfast, and I cried and told him over and over that I was sorry, that it’s not fair to him to have to deal with me like this, but that I can’t make it stop. He wants me to call my therapist and go get some help and I’m going to.

We’re supposed to do an insemination with my next cycle and I have to get a handle on this before then. I know that I need to be as calm as possible during that time to give us the best chance of success, and with how I’ve been feeling the past three weeks, there’s no way it would work. I have to be good to myself, to take care of myself, to be kind and gentle with myself. Why is it that my first instinct is to beat myself up, to blame myself, to accept so readily that there is something “wrong” with me?

I wish I knew.