It's Not the Virus Alone Provoking Anxiety

I keep hearing how the Coronavirus is responsible for the destruction of our economy and concomitantly, how it is responsible for the anxiety which people, many of them anxious on a good day, feel. I beg to differ. It isn't the virus. It is the media, on all sides, which is primarily responsible.

I admit it. I have said it before in these pages. I am by nature anxious. Fear and I are long time companions.  Both my family and educational trainings emphasized the need to be careful, never to take unnecessary risks (and pretty much everything was a risk), and to obey authority as to what was risky and/or foolish and/or improper. Alas, like many people, I internalized the proscriptions and prohibitions such that I became obsessive and/or compulsive about a million different things.  I managed sufficiently and, as I have mentioned, with some help, avoidance of particular triggers, and the flexibility of retirement I actually have had fewer episodes in the last say 10 years.

In this current global crisis, my avoidance technique has included limited exposure to mass media coverage of the "Coronavirus Crisis". As I said in a previous entry I listen to just enough to know what is going on, including talk radio, and up to here I have managed to maintain a reasonable equilibrium, despite the fact that I am considered to be part of one of the groups at high risk--age and health. As you know, if you read this blog, in October I had a stent placed in one of my arteries. I take a blood thinner that has a side effect. Sometimes I feel a little difficulty in taking a breath. Before the crisis, my doctor asked if I could tolerate it, since he liked this particular medication, and I could. I can. Until this "crisis" I was doing well. I felt well. I felt able. I felt healthy. But with the pointed reference to whom is at risk, I now am extremely heart aware and I am always checking if I can hold my breath for 20 or 30 seconds to assure myself that I don't have a symptom of the virus. I doubt that I am alone. But despite this, I have been all right enough.

Until early this morning. Hugh Hewitt, to whose program I listen when I cannot sleep early in the morning, was interviewing some expert. Mr. Hewitt emphasized the lethality of the virus to people like me, again of a certain age with co-morbidity. All right. I can live with that. I am taking the necessary precautions. But then the expert began to talk about separating those who are considered "healthy" from those who are at risk and continuing to "require" that those individuals remain quarantined. Now, note, it wasn't that these people are sick with the virus, only that they have the vulnerability. He wasn't talking about people in hospitals or nursing homes. But people living in the world, usually free to go about, but because of their "vulnerability" required to stay home. I just spent about a half hour trying to locate the recording of the show, to confirm what I thought I heard, but haven't been able to do so to give you a link.

I came pretty close to a panic attack and shut off the radio. I had some plans to take a short trip in June to meet up with friends. Under the best of circumstances I hate the travelling part of travelling. Under the best of circumstances I have gotten sick after flying. I came back from London in 2013 with strep throat, for example. But I usually overcome the variety of fears and make some trips. But having heard this last pronouncement, ostensibly for my good and the good of my fellow citizens, I just wanted to shut down.

I fell asleep for the next several hours. It was a rare really good sleep. It must have been a REM sleep because I had a dream in which I somehow was back at the location of my old job at the State Bar. I wasn't working there. I was walking through the building--not sure which one--looking at various offices, running across one of the few of my old colleagues still there, eating his lunch, but then somehow tripping an alarm and being apprehended by someone in security. I would say that it was an anxiety dream, but oddly, the security guy took me to a bar within the Bar, left me there with a bartender I could not identify, but who made me very comfortable by presenting me with a pleasant concoction to sample. I woke up feeling uncharacteristically refreshed.

I don't know. What's the point of all this? The point, for me, is that I don't buy that all this coverage or the measures being taken unilaterally by our leaders is intended to be of service to the population. Perhaps some people will be saved from the Coronavirus by locking themselves in their apartments for the duration (effectively if you have to avoid listening or reading the constant coverage, they are in solitary confinement), which now, in California is going to be past May 15.  But what about the rest of us? Who will save the anxious from their anxiety? I am pretty sure I will survive, but what about those whose depression and anxiety is overwhelming. Does anybody in the media care about them and their crippled lives? That's separate and apart from all the people who are now on the verge of starving because they and their families have no jobs, and the domino effect that shut down has world wide.

As for me, at least for the moment, and I hope I stick with it, I plan on taking that trip. It's time to live.