Definitely stress to the doctor that you've tried Valium and that it helped. I'm glad your doc will have a good feel for your situation and can see you're having bad trouble with anxiety.

You won't have a nervous breakdown when you go off Paxil. You just may experience some physcial sensations. Shivering. Strange electrical flashes. A feeling of not being yourself. Headaches. Trouble sleeping. They go away in time. Just make sure that you go down and off the medicine very slowly and gradually. Those symptoms are much more pronounded in people who suddenly stop taking the medication cold-turkey. A tranquilizer might indeed help take the edge off those symptoms if she'll prescribe one for you.

As far as whether you get Xanax or Valium, they're both highly abused, street-sold drugs. Both are easily addicting and heavily abused. One's not necessarily better than another. Chemically, they're close cousins. They're both very effective in treating anxiety, but Xanax is prescribed more frequently for that problem. Valium is also used as an anti-convulsant (anti-seizure) med and, as you read, for surgical treatment. People who're going into surgery often get pre-operative IV valium to calm them down and sedate them, and it's used for people after surgery, too, for the same reason. It's a very commonly used anesthetic on its own for procedures that simply require heavy sedation without endotracheal intubation--things like wisdom teeth extraction, cardiac catheterizations, etc.

If you're having serious trouble with anxiety right now, you definitely want to watch your intake of cannabis. As much as you dont want to hear this and feel it's your drug of choice, it can indeed make anxiety much worse, especially in someone who's having situational anxiety trouble. If cannabis were legal and you could easily find the perfect Indica-heavy strain, it woudln't be an issue, but the Sativa strains tend to make anxiety worse in a lot of folks. So use caution there, OK?