David's Inferno Read Online Free PDF

totally out of hand. Even armed with my precautionary stash of Valium—most of which I’d already taken—I knew I couldn’t go. It wasn’t fear of flying. It was fear of
being
. On the way to the airport, my partner and his wife—two of my oldest friends—stopped by to see how I was doing.
    A few years later, I asked her what she saw that day:
    Â â€¦Â You were in sweats and you looked like you had just pulled three all-nighters in a row, hair a mess, needing a shave, disheveled. That was just the outside. The inside felt even worse. You were having a hard time relating, a furtive look in the eye, like where is the closest rock I can hide under, and not a lot of eye contact. The sense I got was there was an amazing number of strings or cords of energy all around you and they were all tangled up in knots, so much so that I couldn’tclearly see you—both see you psychically and actually see you in the physical, like there was fog all around you
.
    Did you lie down on the floor, near the dining room table? Perhaps. Were we unsure what was really happening? Yes. Did we deep, deep down feel huge concern? Even fear? Yes
.
    I turned to Wendy to get a read and she was circumspect, protective. Perhaps she didn’t really know either, and perhaps she was afraid and freaked. I remember her in the background that morning. I was unsure what was really happening, and remember feeling kind of fuzzy. It took me some time to really see the gravity of this situation. Some of it I dismissed because I didn’t want to or couldn’t process what was happening … we don’t have any structures for when someone comes unhinged … I think it took months before I really understood (from the outside, of course) what was happening to my dear, dear friend
.

Make Up Your Mind
    He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works
.
    â€”D ASHIELL H AMMETT
    O N M ONDAY , O CTOBER 17, 2005, I got up off the floor, called my psychiatrist, told him I’d gone back on Celexa and, in a masterpiece of understatement, reported that things weren’t going very well. He asked if I was taking anything that might be causing an interaction. I told him about the Chinese herbs. He told me about serotonin overload.
    â€œSerotonin overload?” a good friend asked disbelievingly a few days later—this being a guy who had done some serious self-medicating in his day … a day that continues up to the present. “Shouldn’t that be a good thing?”
    Perhaps … if all we were dealing with were the hippocampus and a few of the other animals running around in our brains. But there are a whole lot of other physical processes that involve serotonin, including little things like blood pressure and breathing. Plus 90% of all serotonin receptors are in your stomach where they play a major role in digestion and trigger things like “gut feelings.” Thoughts really
do
affect our digestion, which can affect our moods, which can affect our thoughts again. In fact, scientists now consider your stomach to be like a “second brain.”
    So if you jack your serotonin system up too much too fast, both your first and second brains can start behaving the way that, well, mine were behaving.
    This official diagnosis is “Serotonin Syndrome,” and it can be fatal.
    While my case was nowhere near that severe, it obviously triggered a significant imbalance. In fact, my behavior was remarkably similar to that of someone who “flips out” on LSD.
    No knock on Chinese herbs, my psychiatrist explained, but there was a chance they were working synergistically with the Celexa in the serotonergic system (say it three times fast). He suggested I go off them, at least until I had stabilized on the SSRI. He encouraged me to continue taking the Valium if I needed to calm down and sleep. No encouragement needed.
    So there we were. Me and