Fear In The Time Of Anxiety

I have suffered from depression for most of my life but in the last few years, a new disorder has cropped up in the already dis-ordered place I call my mind. It's anxiety and it coexists quite happily with depression, making it a two-for-one, a veritable doublemint gum of stickiness that clogs up my thinking and life.
I hate it.
It seems to occur when things start getting stressful- perhaps unusually so- and then something triggers a tipping point and I fall over a line into that place where anxiety is waiting to come on in and take its shoes off. The trigger is usually some sort of medical situation. Doesn't even have to be my own and this time, it's not. And although the person whose health this may be affecting says she's "not worried but a bit anxious," I am worried AND anxious and that anxiety is touching everything, putting meanings and omens where there should be nothing but regular day-to-day stress. It's sort of like the feeling I get right before I have a hot flash but it doesn't go away. I feel like I can't breathe well, I feel like EVERYTHING is about to end. I feel like I could give Chicken Little a few lessons in catastrophising.
I know how to handle depression because it's made its home with me for so long but this anxiety thing is relatively new and it's all buzzy and constant and it makes me feel like I'm on bad speed. Coffee makes it worse and serendipitously my coffee maker shut down in the middle of a brewing cycle yesterday- DOA. No real surprise there. The faithful appliance has probably brewed me at least 2000 pots of coffee in its lifetime and that's a lot to ask of a middle-of-the-line coffee maker, even if it was a Krups.
I went out immediately and bought a new one. Same brand, same features, but different button set-up. The instruction manual that came with it was printed in fifteen languages, two of which I can't identify because they're those character languages, not actual letters. However, it didn't give instructions on how to, oh, set the time. My daughter and I both tried, punching what should have been the appropriate buttons at random, trying this one and that one and nothing worked. It just kept flashing 888 at us until she went online and found a PDF of instructions we could actually use.
So now I have coffee again and although I think of coffee as my best friend, I'm not so sure it really is. Not today, anyway, when this constant anxiety is making the pit of my stomach feel like I'm about to go onstage and sing the National Anthem in front of millions or even worse, have to go see a doctor myself. Given those two options, I'd pull up my big girl panties and step onstage.
Isn't that crazy?
Yeah. Because I really can't sing.
And I know it's crazy and I even know why I have this neurosis, I think, and of course it goes back to childhood and since I know and because I'm now an adult, you'd think I could just get over it and eventually I will, but for right now- it's here, running around my brain like a rat on meth.
I'm sure there are medications I could take for anxiety. I even know their names. But hell- I'd have to go to a doctor to get them which makes me feel like there's a display in my head right now, flashing 888 and dammit, I just can't find the right buttons to push in the right sequence to make it quit, make it settle down into something orderly and ordinary like the time of day.
I want that rat to go away, pack his little rat bag, put on his little rat shoes and go find another brain to infect with his ratty methness. I want Chicken Little to go screaming about the damn sky falling on another street.
I want the price of gas to come down and the price of groceries to go down and I want a Democratic president and I want everyone I know and love to be healthy and well forever and ever until they're older than God and die suddenly, in bed, of a heart attack without one thought of fear or dread, here one second, flying to glory the next.
That's what I want.
Instead I'm getting 888.
888.
888.