Being worried

Anxiety medicines are a modern wonder. Like strong fishing wire, they seem to expand and contract according to the weight on the end of them as the waters of one's mental health ebb and flow. I have one of those plastic flip-top boxes you find littering musty bottom shelves in charity shops, which can hold scores of tablets for each day of the week. Mine, rather usefully, has AM and PM compartments. This means that you can have five pints and a kebab at lunchtime and know that if you fall asleep until the next day, one simple glance at the box will tell you how many pills you need to top up with to make up for the blackout.

Wine boxes should have the same advantage: a teeny tap for first light, a small tap for the morning, a large tap for between lunch and 4pm, a decent-sized tap for tea-time, a fuck-off jet tap for when the children are in bed and maybe a snifter tap for in-between.

A couple of weeks ago my stress levels reached so far beyond known galaxies I felt my heart contracting, pulling my chest cavity inwards, neurons fizzing and popping, a tingling in my arms and wrists. Concerned that I was going to die I rang my cheerful Doctor and asked him for advice.

He was very accommodating. He knows the shitstorm I have suffered over the last few years and has held my hand throughout - as far as a Doctor can. He diagnosed Hunter's leukaemia also, on Thursday May 17th 2012 at about 10am. So I am insanely grateful to him or else Hunter might have died.

He listened quietly as I burbled on barely drawing breath about maxing out on KP peanuts at 2am, the crackling sensations in my arms as though they were going to snap off, the arrhythmia, body sweats the like of which would have made Fatima Whitbread going for gold blush.

I admire clever people who can come up with an intelligent war plan swiftly; a way of tackling an immediate threat while conniving other options to defeat the enemy even more convincingly later on; taking the high road holding Harry Potter omnioculars whilst the ill-prepared adversary takes the low road only to find it blocked by fifteen police cars.

Up with such a plan the good doctor came. He proffered three different weapons from his considerable arsenal: polyporpnolopolypop, fizzeloctenone, and hedgestrimmeronilol,. The first was apparently going to halt the heart attacks, the second would give me the sort of high one gets on a ferris wheel after snorting coke, and the third was to knock me out cold thus saving me the nightly expense of KP Nuts - currently on offer in Asda but usually a brass-neck £3.39 per big bag.

I said thankyouIloveyou, accepted the lot without prevarication and rushed round to the pharmacy to collect them.

A few days later:
So, like I say, anxiety medicines are a modern wonder. I am wearing my pink, tasseled prom dress and fluffy swan-down slippers and my island is crowned with palm trees spilling bananas and lapped by gorgeous cyanic seas and I am eating buttered samphire roasted on an open bamboo beach fire with Justin Timberlake.




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