Anxiety Nearly Killed me | How to Deal With Anxiety
When I was 27 years old, I had uncontrolled anxiety. This lead me down a path that very literally nearly killed me. I want to share with you my story of how I overcame my anxiety and my long road to physical and mental recovery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a9ADCswvMw
If you are dealing with anxiety, depression or having suicidal thoughts, please contact your health care provider immediately.
Although I haven’t talked about it much on this channel, many people in my personal life know that I have had a 6 year battle with serious heart conditions. What many people don’t know is it was actually my anxiety that started all of it.
In 2012 I was feeling lost, like I had no direction in life. I had hit a ceiling at my current job, I had gone through a difficult breakup, and generally speaking, I had very little long term ambition. Although I never would have admitted it: I was riddled with fear of risk. This fear completely paralyzed me.
Anxiety has the potential to manifest itself in physical ways. Chest pain, fatigue, headaches, body aches, joint pain, blurred vision. At the time I was training as though I was a full time athlete. Looking back it would have been nearly impossible for me to discern what was caused by my training and what came from my anxiety. The over training certainly wasn’t helping anything. When I spent many nights lying awake due to muscle spasms, I did what most anyone does these days.
*Goes to WebMD*
There’s a joke that no matter what symptom you look up on web MD, it always comes back to brain cancer. With my list of symptoms there was a laundry list of potential culprits. Parkinson’s disease, MS, cancer, ALS.
When you have anxiety it’s difficult to think clearly and you often assume the worst. A doctor’s visit was in order.
My doctor was nothing if not thorough. I can only now imagine how frustrating it is to have a seemingly healthy 27 year old in your office with a shotgun scatter of symptoms. So then came the tests. My doctor ordered just about every test you can get at a PCP’s office. That included one test that would forever change my life. An EKG.
My EKG was abnormal, and my doctor explained to me that I had an arrhythmia known as WPW. Although he didn’t think this had anything to do with the symptoms I came into his office with, it was worth seeing a specialist to have it addressed.
Suddenly all of my other symptoms disappeared. The only thing I could focus on was my new found heart condition. I read everything piece of information I could find regarding WPW, and although the condition is usually benign and the risk of serious problems is rare, my anxiety only let me focus on the worst possible outcomes.
When it came time to meet with the specialist, he recommended a procedure called an ablation. A few of the nurses in the office told me that this particular doctor was a genius and joked that he was “like a god” and I took his word as gospel and moved forward with the procedure.
This procedure which turned out to be unnecessary, set off a chain of events that forever changed my life.
Unfortunately my heart was damaged during the procedure, and over the next 3 years, my heart beat slower and slower and slower. Eventually this lead to me needing to have a pacemaker implanted. Although I immediately felt better having the pacemaker implanted. After a short a while I began to feel short of breath, I would get dizzy upon standing, and my fatigue was overwhelming.
Going back to the doctor, it was discovered that although my heart was now beating fast enough, it wasn’t pumping enough blood with each beat. This is known as heart failure. At only 31 one years old, I now had the heart function of someone in their 90s.
The next year was one of the most difficult of my entire life. Running a small business is no easy task, and added on top of that were constant trips to the doctor for tests, or time spent on the phone battling with my insurance company who repeatedly denied claims for these highly specialized doctors and all the testing they were ordering. On top of this my doctors were taking shots in the dark as to what the problem could be. I was tested for rare diseases like Sarcoidosis, retested for Lyme, had experimental genetic testing done for diseases so rare they don’t even have names. I was told that I may eventually need a heart transplant.
Eventually I was referred to doctors in Boston, and that’s when some real progress was starting to be made. Finally it was discovered that I had received the wrong type of pacemaker for my particular condition, and the pacemaker was actually doing further damage to my heart. And although we knew I had to get the correct type of pacemaker to stop any further damage, my doctors were unsure if my heart function would ever fully recover.
After my next surgery to replace the pacemaker, I had to wait a period of 3 months before my heart function would be tested again to see if it was recovering. During that 3 months I felt awful. My dizzy spells were as bad as ever, I was constantly exhausted. I was so sure that my heart function wouldn’t recover. Finally I went for my test. I remember the young woman who administered the test. She was kind and gentle. I was constantly reading her face as she was running the ultra sound over my chest. “What did she see? Does she look concerned? Is she trying to hide something so she doesn’t scare me?”
About a week went by before I got my test results. I was at work when I felt my phone buzz in my pocket and I had a new notification on my online health portal. I pulled up the report. Heart function: normal.
Immediately I felt like a thousand chains had been lifted off of me. I thought I was going to cry. But then a thought occurred to me: If my heart function is normal, why had I felt so terrible recently? And that’s when it dawned on me…although over the past few years I had experienced some very real symptoms from my heart condition, at some point my anxiety had taken over. My mind had been playing tricks on me.
This was a major turning point for me in my life and how I handle my anxiety. Now whenever I feel anxious, I stop and take a moment to reflect: Are things really that bad or am I simply letting my anxiety control me? My mantra became: I don’t believe you, anxiety!
I know it sounds silly, but when I tell my anxiety that it’s a liar and not to be trusted, it really helps me to overcome it, and think about things in a more critical way. As I became better at this practice, my patience began to grow, and I’m able to see my triggers for anxiety ahead of time and avoid them or at least to see it coming, so that when I feel anxious, I can be assured that the world isn’t actually crashing down around me.
Although I’ve been clinically diagnosed with anxiety by two different doctors, using this strategy of patience and my mantra has allowed be to avoid using pharmaceutical interventions to treat it.
I know that this technique won’t be appropriate for everyone, and I know that I’ll likely never fully overcome my anxiety, but I do hope that my story helps to give you some perspective in your own life. And if even one person feels better after listening to this. I’ll have done my job.
