Hi,
I new as the title says, I suffer from GAD, panic disorder and depression. I've suffered for years, since I was 15 (I'm 33 now), but it has gotten a lot worse in the last 3 years or so. I live with my parents and I can't even handle them leaving for a weekend or even for one night, it drives me into panic just thinking about it.
I wasn't like that before, they could go places for even a week and I wouldn't care, even when I was 18 or 19 and my siblings and I would rent hotels and such for them to have time away from us, and I never had problems.
My parents are amazing at supporting me. They listen, pray, try to find solutions with me. But I don't wanna burden them anymore.
I also get episodes where for weeks I'm extremely depressed, anxious and having panic attacks, I don't sleep well and I don't eat. I'm in one of this episodes right now. I'm a nurse and I work in recovery (where people come right after surgery to get woken up and such), I do like my job in general, but I do have to be on-call once a week and every 5 weeks I have to be on call 48hrs straight, meaning I have to come in to the hospital for every surgery that occurs. At first I didn't mind it, but last year I had to stay all night at work because there were no rooms in the hospital for the patient we had and my mind started doing its thing or overthinking, and I started thinking a lot of "what ifs" and before I knew it I was in the bathroom throwing up with a major panic attack. Thankfully after calling everyone that works there I found someone to come replace me. But after that I went into a 2 week spree of self loathing, depression and anxiety.
Things at work are getting crazy, as a lot of you might know, I don't care what crap they say, hospitals are in it for the money and don't care about employees or even patients, as long as they can make money. And they're expanding surgery (where they make most of their money) but not expanding the hospital, which makes it hard to find placement for all the surgeries coming out, which in turns means that more patients have to stay overnight in recovery and who stays with them? Whoever is on call that night. Well, for some reason it terrifies me to my core to stay overnight at the hospital, and I've had to work 16-20hrs straight some days because of what's going on. So now I'm terrified to even go to work. I took this week off, my manager knows what's going on with me and she tries to help me, but what sucks is that in 2 weeks she is leaving her position and the person that's taking over is cold, not approachable and very number (aka money) oriented. So that also has me panicking. Now I'm struggling because of everything going on, and I have to go back to work Tuesday and I don't know what to do cause all I can think about is having a panic attack and crying at work and it is so embarrassing and hard to deal with when you're trying to take care of a patient that is in pain and scared after surgery.
Anyways. I'm sorry this was way too long. I just wanted to explain why I'm here, I'm here cause I don't wanna feel like I'm alone in this and I wanna find friends that understand what I'm going through and find counsel to keep going.
Marisa