LS1122

I finally gave in and went to the doctor last week. After convincing me I'm not having the world's longest heart attack, she asked me why I didn't take the Paxil she prescribed in the spring. I told her I didn't want to depend on medication. Which is true - once I found out that what I was suffering from in the spring was anxiety and not something more, I decided to deal with it on my own. When I'd start getting dizzy and numb and all that good stuff, I'd sit in my bedroom and listen to realxing music or put on a comforting TV show. I tried to keep myself busy and not think about it. And this may sound silly but sometimes, I'd just sort of laugh and say oh, it's just anxiety to myself and would will it away.


Well, I started having the symptoms again in December but I was under a very considerable amount of stress. This time the symptoms were worse - my heart would skip a beat and one night my left arm started hurting and that scared me - I posted this here before but long story short, I ended up going to the doctor about two weeks ago. We had a LONG talk about the Paxil and she represcribed it and told me to give it a chance. I started taking it for a few days and I know it doesn't "work" so quickly but I felt jittery and hyper for those few days. Like I'd just get the giggles or I'd wake up in the middle of the night and feel like my whole body had "fallen asleep" (you know how your foot goes to sleep)?

I started getting weary of taking medication again and quit taking it after a week and decided I'd deal with it again on my own like I did this past spring. That worked fine for a while...my symptoms started getting weaker and some of them went away.

Well, in the last few days, I've been under a lot of stress and the symptoms are starting to come back no matter what I tell myself. I got kind of freaked out the other day because I started having some different symptoms - my feet, hands and lips started feeling kind of tingly and my skin felt like it was burning in some spots. I started worrying that these could not be anxiety symptoms?

Anyway, now I'm not sure what to do. All I want, right now, is to feel better (at this point, it seems like every little bit of stress I have causes bad anxiety when I used to not be this way), but I don't want to feel hyper and jittery every night and the idea of taking medication for 6 months - a year at least just doesn't appeal to me.