mahiwaga

Here I am pondering the chances of actually breaking out of the Black Iron Prison when I am reminded of a quote by Douglas Adams, author of the cult classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (who by the way was an atheist and is a big influence on my philosophies regarding the universe):

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

And again, we enter the Matrix and ask the question “What is Real?” (I think they really should’ve done the whole Matrix within a Matrix within a Matrix thing. That would’ve made much more sense than the crap they ended up with, but that is neither here nor there.)

How far down the rabbit hole can we go?

I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I realize that my sudden soul-searching and my angst with regards to trying to figure out the ultimate structure and meaning of the universe is a response to the sudden anxiety that has weighed down on me.

Part of it is because of work—after various interactions with a particular supervisor, I have come to seriously doubt my ability to do what I had set out to do, and these doubts, valid or not, are really eating away at my soul.

Part of it is because someone I know has had an unexpected death in the family, and all of the sudden I am plunged back into last summer, when my dad had his heart attack (and which thankfully he is doing very well from.)

I don’t think I ever really delved into my feelings about that episode. Once he recovered and was back to his normal self, I think I prematurely squashed down all those feelings. But I guess I should know better. It’s a mistake to not process those kind of emotions. You’ll note that I did not blog at all in the month of August, and at most I alluded to it cryptically.

I remember the sense of panic that overcame me when I serendipitously called home, and my brother told me that my dad was having chest pain and they had called an ambulance. I was stuck in a traffic jam at the time, and I remember contemplating whether I should just cross the median and turn around to get back home, but I didn’t, and they kept me updated over the phone almost hour by hour. I actually tried to go to work the next day, but my mind was most definitely not into it, and I ended up asking to leave early. Around 2:30 p.m., I hopped onto a train bound for L.A., then trudged up the couple of blocks to the hospital where they took my dad, and I remember being scared shitless but trying not to let it show. My dad never gets sick. I’ve never seen him ill once, but here he was in the ICU with an oxygen mask barely holding his sats above 90%, with at least three different medications dripping into him, none of them lessening any of the pain, and I remember feeling cursed for having medical knowledge, and I remember, remember how much I was concentrating to not let it show how scared I was.

The memory that freaks me out the most is when he could barely open his eyes, and when he did, he really couldn’t focus on any one of us. Even though I don’t have much experience as a clinician, it was one of those looks that give you an “oh shit” vibe inside your bones. I remember going home with that feeling and how futile it was to try to go to sleep.

I think I commuted from L.A. to San Diego for at least three days in a row, hopping on a train around 5:30 p.m. then waking up around 4 a.m. the next day to get to work, making sure I could spend all my free time visiting him. They had to transfer him to another facility to cath him, and it was just one lesion, in the LAD. They call those kind of heart attacks “widowmakers,” but my dad had dodged the bullet there, and I remember the day he was discharged, he was pretty much back to his normal self, with his wry, fatalistic humor, and the sparkle back in his eyes that had been missing that first day I had seen him.

And that was that, I got on with my life, nagging him about staying on his medications (which is harder than you would think, mostly because my dad is a physician himself—the worst patients ever.) I figured the cardiologist must’ve thought it was pretty serious because he put him on carvedilol (Coreg), isosorbide dinitrate, and aldactone, which I recognized from the CCU as a regimen we would put people on if they had heart failure. (And naturally they put him on Plavix because of the stent, and this has intermittently become a point of contention because of the fact that it thins your blood, but that is another story.) But he seems to be doing pretty well, a lot better than most of the heart failure patients I saw in the CCU (but then again, the ones I saw were frequently candidates for heart transplant, with really bad dilated cardiomyopathy from too many heart attacks.)

So I guess that’s part of it that’s been awakened in me. Again, I should’ve known better than to try to suppress these kinds of fears and anxieties because they always, always come back to bite you in the ass.

As to my other fear of whether or not I’m good enough to do my job, well, I have a performance evaluation coming up on Thursday, so we’ll see then. I have always been someone who perpetually thinks I suck, but I realize that it’s important to have a more objective sense of my abilities. There are still things I have to undergo which really make me freak out and keep me up in the middle of the night, but, as Nietschze once said, whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. I guess.

What I probably need at this point in time are some happy pills and maybe an hour a week of some good ol’ psychotherapy, but the ironic thing about having depression and anxiety is that you’re probably less likely to look for help because you’re too depressed and think that it’s not going to help and/or you’re too anxious and are afraid to ask for it.

Damn.