Losing it/Finding it

Tomorrow night I'm supposed to get on an airplane to Florida.  I have airplane phobia.  I haven't been on a plane in years, and hopefully I won't be on this one either...  the Dr. has given me enough pills to tranquilize a large elephant.  So it should be as if I wasn't even there... Unless it's like the time I took a short flight from Argentina to Brazil.  I was so anxiety-ridden that I took Valium.  Once on the plane I took more, and kept on piling it on because it just wasn't working.  That was, of course, until the plane landed, came to a full stop and all anxiety dissappeared... the Valium took over where the anxiety left off and I was on my ass.  To make things worse, we ran into people we knew and I suddenly couldn't pronounce the hard letters, like P and T, or focusing my eyes on a fixed image, or anything that required any kind of muscle power, be it my tongue (which seemed to have grown to twice its size) or my legs... I was Jell-O from head to toe.  Fortunately those people already knew I was strange, so they only asked if I felt okay.  "I'm fffine", I said "I jus tsook tsoo mmmuch Alium".  I slowly shrugged my shoulders and leaning heavily on my husband, wabbled away, my legs fighting for position, one crossing in front of the other as if they were starlets fighting to be in front of a TV camera...

Another time they had to bring the plane back from the runway because I was having a moment.

So today I started to freak out about the flight and I must have really needed the help because God reached down to me on this one:  I found a little paper with three paragraphs, but the only one I read (in the middle) referred to what I was struggling with exactly.  It was a prayer that said "teach me to discern what can be changed and to endure what must be endured" and also "Lift my spirits and calm my anxieties"... and that is only part of it.  So I was content, and kept on my merry day.

I'm more afraid of being afraid than of the flight at this point.  I'm so frightened that I will chicken out and not go, or have a crying fit, or hyper-ventilate or any one of the numerous things I've done before involuntarily, like spit up water at the flight attendant...  Ah, the memories!  To say I once looked like Linda Blair in the exorcist during an especially bumpy flight is putting it lightly. Between the sweat, tears and water I kept spitting up, my hair was soaked and stuck to my face.  My eyes were swollen with tears and my lips red and puffy from crying...  I didn't mean to spit up water, but the flight attendant insisted I drink the water, and with every bump my stomach would tighten and in turn I was a human sprinkler.

Kudos to my husband for putting up with such an unglamorous wife.  Congratulations to him for sticking by my side through very disgusting pregnancies.  Hats off to him for loving me even more when I look like he probably never thought I would, sans curlers and a face-mask...

So I lost it and found it, because He and he love me.  Let's see what I'll lose tomorrow night, on that red-eye flight...