Drowning in the System - When Help Never Comes

Living with my health issues is a daily battle. There isn’t a single day that goes by without an attack. On a good day, I might only have one—if I’m lucky. But things started spiraling fast, and no matter how hard I tried to keep going, my body and mind were breaking down.

I reached out to my doctor. I was already on medication for my panic disorder, so he increased my dosage to the maximum allowed. It didn’t work. The attacks kept coming, stronger and more frequent. Desperate for relief, I sought help from a therapist and started EMDR therapy, hoping it would ease the edges of my trauma.

But by the third session, everything unraveled.

I could barely leave the house without having a panic attack. My colleagues—who knew about my situation—had to pick me up off the side of the road because I couldn’t drive anymore. Even the simplest tasks, like grocery shopping, became a battle of sheer willpower.

I went back to my doctor, telling him the medication wasn’t enough anymore. Instead of finally getting to the root of the problem—something we should have done years ago—he told me I just had to cope with it.

My therapist suggested I stop taking my medication so I could be reassessed, but every place I called for help had waiting lists that stretched on endlessly. No one could take me in.

So, I turned to the only thing that did help.

At first, it was the black market—buying extra Valium and sleeping meds just to get through the day. But that didn’t last. When those weren’t enough, I turned to drugs and alcohol.

I discovered that when I took XTC, my panic attacks weren’t as frequent. I could actually leave the house, go grocery shopping, and function. My energy levels had hit rock bottom after months of constant attacks, and XTC gave me just enough to keep going. When I couldn’t relax, I drank alcohol with Valium to force my body into some kind of calm. And when even XTC wasn’t enough to push through the weekends, I turned to cocaine.

And it only got worse.

At some point, I couldn’t hide it anymore. I told my therapist the truth, expecting—hoping—that finally, someone would help. But even then, all I got was the same answer: You just have to wait.