Howdy!

[BrianD]

Hi all! Well I don't know where to start but I guess I'll just take a stab at it. I'm 33 years old, married to my high school sweetheart and we have 2 children, girl 13 and boy 8. I guess that I have always been a little negative and maybe mildly depressed every now and then but it never was bad enough to be a focal point of my life. I'd say for the most part that I had been pretty happy with my life. I used to smoke a little pot every night but it was always just a couple of hits in the evening to relax and that was about it. In Oct. 05 the meltdown happened and I haven't felt good since. I was smoking my normal dose of pot one evening when all of a sudden the anxiety was over bearing and I just began to panic. Of course I was stoned and I did the best I could to deal with. I had heard of this happening to people before and was not under any circumstances going to say anything to my wife or anyone else. I stayed in the garage and I just thought, God let me get through this and I'll never smoke pot again!!! Well, the good news is that I haven't!!!! But I guess a couple of weeks went by and BOOM...another attack just as severe as the first one only I wasn't stoned. That's when I knew something was really wrong. It lasted for about an hour I suppose and I thought I was going to die. The next day, I called my PCP and scheduled an appt. I told him that I had chest pains, rapid heartbeat etc. He put me through several tests including an EKG and Halta monitor, all coming up fine. Then one morning I woke up and was getting ready for work and was trembling, shaking, anxious, and just freaking out. I started to drive to work with these symptoms but there was no way that I could make it and made a u-turn and went to the emergency room. I told the ER doc everything and he gave me an Ativan and told me to relax until the psyche lady came in at 11:00. I was on Ativan and still pacing back and forth in the ER until someone finally came down from Psyche to talk to me. She told me that they could help but because of my insurance, I had to claim to be homicidal or suicidal for them to admit me. At that point I just wanted help and thought FINE, and told her that I wanted to kill myself!! Well being naieve, I really didn't think that I would be locked up in the Psyche ward for 6 days but, Oh well, it wasn't really a terrible experience and it did give me time away from work (which was a good thing considering I think that work has a lot to do with all of this anyway). I also realized that there are some pretty screwed up people out there and that my problems paled in comparison to some of these people that I met. I really did make some good friends while in there though and it wasn't all bad. Well anyway.....I was off work on short term disability for 3 months taking prozac and klonopin. Of course the side effects from the prozac were horrible and I stopped taking it after about a month. I began regular therapy and continued to take the klonopin when I felt on edge and I was coping like that for awhile although feeling more and more depressed. About a month ago I had another whopper of a panic attack. I went back to the doc and he prescribed me Lexapro. That's even worse than prozac. I had awful headaches and not to mention the sexual side effects of these meds are truly horrible. Today I began to surf around the net and stumbled on this site. I think I spent a couple of hours reading posts on here and it really made me realize that I'm not alone. When your going through this stuff it's hard to keep that in mind.

I'll spare all of you any more of my rambling but I was wondering if any of these natural meds are worth trying. I was looking at Anxietol 7 and Clarocet (I think that's right). But I don't want to waste my money if these are false advertisements. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and I also appreciate everyone sharing their experiences. It's helped me get through today and at this point that's all I try to do is get through one day at a time!!:smile: