JESSIE'S VEGAS

I am not going to spend too much time talking about the feeling that comes creeping on my skin when an anxiety attack comes a-knockin' at my door and ignores the "no soliciting" sign.  The thing is anxiety can't read. If it did, it surely would have absorbed something of the over two hundred books I have read on the subject purely by osmosis. Maybe it would be diffusion...whatever physic process is involved when a living entity is transferring information to a non-living entity. Maybe that is the problem. Anxiety seems to be alive infecting its host like some unwelcome virus or parasite and my unwillingness to account for its existence makes it angrier, itchier and somehow more dangerous.  I was up all night and thoughts and fears assaulted my cerebral cortex like paint gun pellets. They weren't lethal, but they sure packed a punch and left staining on the inside of my skull. I could almost see where they left their mark, but then my attention was diverted to th...

     Scientists were shocked to learn that the Vagus nerve, found in the gut, carries 90 percent of messages to the brain and not the other way around.  While Egyptians posited that the heart was the seat of the human emotional experience due to the abundance of visceral fluids found within its chambers, those of us who have a sinking feeling in the pit of our navels when unpleasantness is encountered know that it is the "bowels that are filled with compassion..." Luke 15:20. Last night, however, it was my esophagus...still part of the gastrointestinal system, that acted up when I heard something I did not want to hear.  What is that lump that forms and tightens and rises up, sometimes bringing vomit, or "baby barf" as my kids are fond of saying? Like an elevator going the wrong way up, someone pushed the wrong button on my esophagus control panel and I found bile rising in my throat when I heard a physician say, "Over the years I have decided that those with s...