PBW: Ah Ain't Yeller.....

...but ah shure don’t...::ahem::...I sure don’t enjoy sitting in a car for two hours because a few snow flurries are falling and the roads have iced over, especially when it normally takes me a half hour to get home from work. After making my way to the edge of the town where my company is located, I discovered the police diverting traffic back in to town. I guess there was an accident or that particular hill was too steep. In any case, the volume of cars diverted from one of the only two ways off a peninsula now moved at a crawl and it took me twenty minutes to go less than a mile back to the other main road, where it took another half hour before cars were moving.

As it grew darker and the snow increased, I made the mistake of thinking about the “anxiety attacks” I was experiencing when driving a few years ago. One day while on a treadmill at gym, I felt lightheaded and had a tingling in my left arm. I sat down for a bit, cooling off, then tried to drive home. It was scorching hot and my car has no air conditioning, so I still wasn’t feeling right. I thought I was going to pass out. I had to pull in to a parking lot and call my folks to come get me. My heart was pounding.

I don’t like going to doctors. I literally had to be bleeding to death one time just to leave work early and check out a serious birth defect in my intestines that nearly killed me. So I decided to take my dizzy spell seriously and go see my doctor. He wasn’t available, and I had to meet with another doctor in his office. She wanted to give me anxiety medication “just to see” if it helped. She barely examined me, a cursory check with a stethoscope. I wasn’t going to try any drugs “just to see” . Over the course of a month, I had x-rays, blood tests, and even an imaging scan of my head. I began feeling like a hypochondriac as each test came up negative, but knowing you’re imagining you aren’t feeling right and feeling right are two different things.

As a result, I went through a few months where I’d feel dizzy, like I wasn’t getting enough oxygen, any time I was behind the wheel of my car. The more I thought about passing out behind the wheel, the more I felt like I was going to. My dad actually had to come to work with me, and occasionally switch and drive when I felt like I needed to pull over. Looking back, it’s so obvious that it was in my head, but it felt so real. It took a long time, but after I continued to drive without incident, I eventually stopped thinking about it and it went away.

Sitting in traffic in the snow, wipers intermittently cutting through droplets and the glow of lights from other cars, trapped in the center lane in a parking lot of a main road, I thought about that experience from a few years ago. Even writing about it now, I feel that swimming feeling in my head, the sensation that I’m not breathing, that I need to yawn or gasp for more air. It’s a vicious cycle where I get a hint of that feeling, worry about passing out, and that makes it worse. There was definitely an element of claustrophobia involved, feeling like there was nowhere I could go, because I wasn’t going anywhere. If I passed out, I’d be fine, because I wasn’t moving anyway.

Ironically, it wasn’t until I reached a turn where the traffic opened up, where I was moving again that the feeling subsided. I was able to focus on the radio again, sing along, and forget that lightheadedness. I guess it is a stress response, one I associate with being behind the wheel. A few years prior to the incident on that hot day when I overdid it on the treadmill, I actually was in danger of passing out from internal bleeding, fighting my way through pins and needles and ringing in my ears and genuine medical symptoms. I guess that concern will always linger, even if intellectually I know there’s nothing wrong.

So I got a little stressed with the driving conditions on Tuesday night. That doesn’t make me yellow, but here’s a Photo Blog Wednesday that is: