More on anxiety

I have been working very hard to fix some things recently.  Things that have been broken for a very long time with me.  Three years ago, I had a horrible bout of vertigo that lasted for six months.  It was a terrifying time for me.  It happend when Dan was away on one of his numerous trips to Europe and I happend to be in Toronto at the time for Gay Pride.  I will never forget it.  I was with friends at dinner and was walking out of a restaurant when my world started to spin.  My friends all thought that I was drunk but the problem was that I had had nothing to drink.  I coudlnt drive home.  My friend Steve had to drive me from Toronto back to Pittsburgh..  I went to my PCP immediatly and was told that i was probably an inner ear infection  I was refered to and ENT and went through tons of tests, none of which provided me with any answers.  I then went on to a neurologist and had a brain scan done.  The MRI showed abnormalites and I was told that it could be MS.  This put me into a total tail spin.  I had visions of life in a wheel chair or worse yet being blind or deaf. No one could give me a clear answer.  Migraines, MS, HIV, Lymes Disease, Shogrins syndrome, Menieres Diesease, all of these were thrown at me as a possibliltiy.  I was a mess.  The dizzyness went into remission and over the next three years it happend off and on and would last a day or two or sometimes even a week but it always went away.  Three months ago, it came back and the feeling of dread came back along with it. 

I have been working on dealing with all of the anxiety that has came along with it.  Work became very difficult as I work in a VERY high stress job that requires me to be on my feet and at the top of my game every day.  There is not room for mistakes in a surgical setting.  My schedule was crazy and we were short staffed to add to the misery.

Most of my anxiety stems form worrying about the dizziness.  It makes me fearful at times to be by myself.  The thought of falling down in the middle of a busy street is a very scary thought.  Some days I am angry because I never used to be this way.  I thought nothing of driving to Baltimore or to Toronto by myself.  Now, I would be a nervous mess and the process of getting there would not even be worth it to me.

I have always been a very anxious person.  I never realized it until recently.  I guess when your baseline is stress, it isn't until you start to work on things that you finally realize it.  I grew up in stress. My mother is a very anxious person and my childhood upbringing was very far from normal.  I never knew who my father was until I was 13 and it turns out that most of my childhood was a very big lie and it continued to be a very big lie until I moved out and went to college. Nothing was ever discussed.  To this day, it is not discussed.  I think that made me not trust people whom I care about.  I was lied to and my world was turned upside down at an early age..  When your foundation is messed up to begin with it affects you throughout your entire life!  Your relationships. How you view yourself.  How you respect yourself or in my case disrespect myself.