Fear of Flying: On Pharmaceuticals
Posted By Hinda Mandell on November 10, 2009
(Photo courtesy of Simone Becque)
By Maidel
With graduate school comes hard-earned knowledge. Knowledge like learning to employ the words discourse, negotiation and hegemony as if they were a part of everyday speak like poop, toaster oven and spoon.
But there’s a different knowledge that oozes from the Ivory Tower. This is the knowledge that graduate school is a virtual medicine cabinet loaded with poppables, a cornucopia of little pills in an array of shapes and sizes. Shake a few grad students by the ankles, the Faigel likes to muse, and enough pills to medicate an assisted-living facility fall to the ground.
A prescribed diet of Ambien, Lunesta, Zoloft, Lexapro, Cymbalta, Wellbutrin, and Ritalin corresponds to the required reading of Foucault, McLuhan, Proust, Geertz, and Halbwachs. FML.
My pill swallowing – ativan, xanax – is limited to dabbling. Dabbling as in I’m 30,000 feet in the air and having a panic attack a la Air France. See, I medicate when I fly. My aerophobia underscores my on-and-off again self-loathing. After all, can you think of a fear more bourgeois, more mundane and more self-indulgent than the fear of flying? Perhaps arachnophobia – from which I also suffer. Well, that’s how I roll.
As Jews, we love our doctors. We are diligent medicine takers and we follow doctors’ orders flawlessly. A prescription is our modern-day Bible. Yet I recently met a health care practitioner who managed to shake my faith in medicine. She blamed my fear of flying on the Holocaust and the guilt I experience for living in an era of ultimate comfort for American Jews. Actually, I don’t really see a connection between Hitler and my hesitation to board a 747, but I appreciate the effort at failed psychoanalysis. (And Tom Cruise just called. He wants his crazy back.)
As we all know, benzoates are highly addictive. Those who regularly pop ‘em require increased doses for the same effect. In my case, I argue, the effect is minimal to being with. So, when I’m 30,000 feet above blessed land I feed myself a steady diet of the anti-anxiety meds even before the flight attendant comes around with the beverage cart. Regardless, four milligrams of Ativan over eight hours has little effect on my body. “Oh, that’s normal,” says the Faigel.
Um, no it’s not, says my best friend the neurologist.
“When you fly you take doses I would give to patients who are withdrawing from alcohol,” said my brain doc BFF on the phone last night.
I counter: “But the Ativan doesn’t have an effect on me. I’m still so nervous in the airplane.”
“It has an effect,” says the neurologist. “Without it you’d be insane.”
How nice.
She then mutters something about Benzodiazepine abuse. And the doc won’t let the subject drop: “For a big guy it would be ok,” she said. “But for somebody like us that’s a shitload of Ativan.
And that’s why I’m booking Greyhound for my next trip. First class. As for the prescription of 10 mgs of Diazepam? Let it burn a hole in my pocket. We’ll blame it on the Holocaust.
[...] invariant amounts of time. I feel like anyone in graduate school can relate to this except the Maidel, who could probably fall asleep if the world outside her bedroom window was blowing [...]
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