Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [37]
“Hello,” she said, shaking my hand. “Come in.”
I looked around her office and was a little disappointed that there wasn’t a couch. I had always seen people on television and in the movies lie on a couch and spill their guts to a shrink, who would scribble notes down on a legal pad. In this doctor’s office, I had to settle for a chair across from her desk. It didn’t matter. I was there and was going to tell her everything.
I spoke for about twenty minutes straight. When I was done, she told me I did indeed have a panic disorder, which was most common for men in my age group who are actors and medical interns. Basically, it affects people who come from structure and are thrown into structureless environments. She asked me if panic ran in my family. I had never given it much thought, but on the spot I remembered that both my father and one of my sisters had had episodes during my childhood.
Before I finished saying the word sister, the doctor had written out a prescription for something called Klonopin. She told me I was lucky to have seen her so soon. Many people, she explained, go for years experiencing panic attacks before seeking help. What struck me during this first meeting with the doctor was that she seemed rather nonplussed about the entire thing. I was going on and on about my claustrophobia—how I couldn’t eat out, couldn’t fly, couldn’t go to ball games or take elevators or subways or even be the passenger in a car. Her attitude was, Yeah, yeah, I get it. Panic. Here’s your prescription. Let’s see how it works on you.
One thing was clear: She certainly wasn’t as alarmed as I was. She acted as if I had told her I had a sore throat and she was giving me lozenges. She told me she was starting me out on a low dosage of one milligram a day of Klonopin, and that we would meet back in her office in a few days to see how everything worked out. She shook my hand good-bye and I walked out of her office into the elevators and then through the emergency room with my future written on a piece of paper with her signature on it.
I walked home and stopped at a pharmacy on 14th Street to fill my prescription. The old man behind the counter told me it would take thirty minutes. He asked me if I wanted to come back later. I laughed out loud and told him I would wait for it.
I sat in the pharmacy for the next half hour at one of those do-it-yourself blood pressure stations. I monitored my blood pressure continuously for thirty minutes. Each time the air inflated around my arm, I was sure it would get stuck and I would have to rip the entire machine out of the ground to escape.
When my pills were ready, the pharmacist called my name, and I took my pill bottle of Klonopin and opened it before he could put it in a bag. I ingested my first Klonopin pill while standing at the counter, thinking that this is probably how drug addicts behave. I walked home to St. Mark’s Place with a half-milligram tablet of Klonopin in my stomach and a pill bottle with fifty-nine more in my pocket.
By the time I reached my apartment, I felt sandbagged and groggy. The feeling of heaviness gave way to a primal exhaustion that barely allowed me to take off my clothes. I lay down to take a nap and slept for three hours without moving.
When I awoke, I lay absolutely still, a practice I had fallen into so I could time how long it took for the storm clouds I would carry around with me for the rest of the day to roll into my chest. I waited for an hour and realized that the storm wasn’t coming. I wasn’t made out of eggshells. I was human. I looked at my hands, my arms, my feet, my skin to see if any of it bothered me. I took my pulse over and over, and it was always around sixty—the same as any other human being who has just woken up. It was as if someone told me that the ice was thick enough