Oh, Xanax is a good drug. It keeps to its' name, so seventies-era B-movie effective, where the good (or bad) doctor hands the young intern a pill and says, "This will calm you." Then the young intern is practically swaybacked with calm, almost indecently relaxed.
Ok, it's not that good. But it did take an edge off, a really mean edge that had been widening all day; someone I know and see regularly knew it and asked if I wanted one. First I said no. But the tightness I felt in my solar plexus was just not giving any, despite all the deep-breathing I attempted to do (gasp in white healing light, choke out black negative light...) The person that I know- not a doctor- asked me if I wanted it again when I told her about the gasping, and I said yes, and we went to the car, and my person got a bottle of them and handed me one. "This will calm you" she said.
Slowly it did. By the end of the day my jaw was loosened to such a degree that I had very little pain anywhere in my head, which I have decided to take as a Sign: the lounging facial muscles were my little pre-Xmas miracles, proving, in a very underdoggy way, that my head can be much less painful and also that I need to consider all sorts of new angles on my Fibromyalgia. My pain could be attributed to my anxiety.
And here I come back to the B-movie, the part where the doctor says "Yes! It's all becoming so clear! The childhood fear of the Void, as expressed by hiding under tables, was the Sign that was telling me that there's some free-floating anxiety, which is why I dream of things such as ping-pong balls and green tomatos falling on me randomly, which is why I cannot eat them fried, and which is why I can never watch a Mary Stuart Masterson movie without vomiting! IT'S ALL SO SIMPLE!" Because if there's anything a chronic pain sufferer wants- more than xmas, more than fattening foods, more than anything in any Skymall catalogue ever- is a simple explanation for why thier bodies feel the way they do.
So now I'm looking forward to my next dentist appointment, wherein the dentist looks at my mouth and says, "Hey, you didn't grind any of your molars to chalk yet, and four months ago I thought you'd lose at least eight of them!" And I'd get to smile in an easy, just-chatting sort of way, and say "That's because I got me some Xanax, bitch!" and hold up a giant baggie full of a few hundred pills. (Or few thousand- I'm not sure how big the pill is and how many it would take to fill up a giant baggie. Also, I wouldn't call someone a bitch unless they were a female dog. I'm just an old-school feminist, I guess; plus, I think calling everyone bitches is just lazy.)
I'm not the addictive type, just so you know. And I know that certain pharmaceuticals can be abused in their administration and in thier blah blah blah, blather, alarmist crap, Reagan-era stereotyping, blah blah. I've stopped an addictive drug cold-turkey because I didn't like how much I was taking, despite the hesitation of my very knowlegable doctor (hint: don't go see any of the new 007 movies while withdrawing. Maybe on a tv would be managable, but just not the big screen.) I don't expect to get a perscription any time soon, really, but it's just so damn fulfilling to think of a little ball of chemicals as being just the thing. It calms me.
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