When Covid first started to become very real to me, sometime in late February, I began my most…
By: Kareem Omary
Tags: Therapy, Covid 19, Fatherhood, Anxiety

When Covid first started to become very real to me, sometime in late February, I began my most recent of my many life transformations. I would guess that major events in our lives, no matter how major or insignificant they seem to the outside world, are markers in our own personal lifes timeline.

The Covid 19 pandemic started off to me as something far away, both physically because it was in China and emotionally because its distance gave me a false sense of security that it would not effect me and my family.

Only a few weeks into March and I began to start to notice that I was becoming more and more alert and aware of its potential devistation. As soon as the threat became very real, and our daily lives were suddenly turned upside down I felt my world starting to spin out of my “control”.

Like most people who have anxiety, control is something that we are always seeking, not necessarly for controls sake, but to be able to rest easy “knowing everything will be alright”. Of course knowing anything 100% in life is chasing a phantom and the faster my world felt like it was spinning the less control I felt I had. Having both of my boys, ages 4 and 7 at the time, at home everyday every second with no escape was only the beginning of what was soon to change.

My sleep began to deteriorate and my body started to tense up, so much so that I ended up throwing my back and neck out of alignment, and no sitting position or sleeping position for that matter was physically painless. I ended up getting multiple pain medications prescribed to me to loosen up my neck and back but by then a month and a half had passed and I was sleeping less and less.

I went through 4 different types of sleeping pills, none of them could keep me asleep once I awoke, which was usually at 3am to pee. I stopped drinking water past 7pm in an effort to stop from having to wake up in the middle of the night, but of course that didnt help.

I started to see a therapist around this time as I knew that the thoughts that were flying through my mind were that of a tired man who was scared shitless and didnt know what was happening around him. I had done some work on my thoughts and how to seperate them from what was real, but I wasnt thinking clearly enough to prop myself up and having a person, besides my wife who was living in this same world, help me was crucial.

Up until that point, I was relying heavily on my cousin who is a Doctor and my best friend Matt Aprile to help re-assure me. The truth is that the less you seek assurance the more you will be assured, thats the common theme I guess in all of this as you will see. The more I resisted, the more my anxiety persisted. I started to have fleeting thoughts of some crazy things Im embarrassed to write, things from being homicidal, sucidal, secretly gay, having a tumor or incurable disease to fear of eventually becoming a mad man after the meds “change me”

I looked up some of my notecards from my first episode in 2008, and many of those thoughts were the same, my main fear was losing control. But why? Im still trying to figure that out.

By this time it was mid May and the pandemic was showing no signs of slowing down, at least to me and the data I was looking at. My brother and several of my friends thought and still think that the majority of this is either blown out of proportion or a planned pandemic to further the economic divide, take away our rights and reduce the population. Im usually ok with conspiracies, I find many of them facinating and some even plausible, but this was too much for me to phathom with all the uncertainty I was already and still am feeling.

Once my doctor and I figured out a sleeping pill that worked, we began to slowly look at my anxiety medication and if it was the right one for me. You see, for all these years I had been on Lexapro at 10mg since my last major anxiety episode which occured months before my marriage. I was faced with the truth of having never really put the work in to change the thought patterns and behaviours that negatively fed my anxious mind. I took the meds and still had anxious bouts over those ten years, and when the pandemic hit, I spilled over. So no better time to force change than when the change is forced upon you I guess.

Oh, I forgot to mention, that sometime within those early months in March, when I was on all those pain meds and not sleeping, I began to have rigning in in ears, and much like this story I noticed it and it bothered me, but handling my lack of sleep and anxiety was more important than the rigning which I felt was eventually, and hopefully going to go away.

While much of the world I followed on Instagram and other social media outlets, showed people trying to learn new recipes or a new dance, I was feeling myself slipping away, while trying to hide it from my children.

More to come, May through December