katie's first panic attack!
Content Warning: This post contains a detailed description of a panic attack.
We were 20 minutes into Angry Birds 2 when the knock came. Buster, whose warm 50 pounds had been pressed against my right side, threw off the white duvet and squealed, “Daddy!”
“No baby, not Daddy,” I said. “Pizza.”
“Piz-za! Piz-za!” He pranced to the door, chanting the word, and pulled it open, no small feat since he was five and hotel room doors are heavy. The Uber Eats driver in the hallway beamed down at him and he said something. It might have been, “You really know how to make a guy feel special.” It might have been, “Yep, it’s pizza!” I wasn’t really listening. I took the pizza boxes from him, trying to keep one arm crossed in front of my breasts. I was shivering, wearing thin pajamas and no bra. I smiled at him, said thanks, and closed the door.
I’d been expecting this pizza which I did not order. I’d never heard of the pizza place. I didn’t know what was in the boxes. When I flipped open the lid of the top box and saw a perfect plain cheese pizza, I wanted to cry.
“Dinner, guys.” The boys sprang on all fours on the hotel room bed and crowed and woo-hooed, and I didn’t tell them to stop. When I’d checked in without a reservation three hours earlier, the woman at the desk had asked me, kindly, if we needed a room on the first floor. I could have handled stairs or an elevator, but I said yes. What I couldn’t handle was choices. Or people.
I slid the open pizza box onto the bed between my sons, restarted the movie, and took a deep breath. Then another. Then another.
I had my first panic attack on Friday afternoon at 4:01 pm, 100 miles from home on southbound I-5, with my two sons in the car. I give the experience zero stars. Do not recommend.
Ryan had a fly fishing trip last weekend and I decided to book a house in Seabrook, the kind of place that’s just the right amount of Stepford. You don’t have to worry about cars driving too fast because nobody drives. There’s an ice cream shop and a pizza parlor. The widest beach you’ve ever seen rolls out in front of you, nearly as big as the sky and the ocean. They were doing their Halloween on Saturday.
My friend Rachel decided to come along, and we exchanged texts to see what we both had in our fridges and could bring for the weekend. “I’ve got string cheese, Cheetos, and spaghetti for buttered noodles,” I wrote. “Great. I’ve got a new loaf of bread and some Nutella,” she replied. We both had wine and sparkling water. The house I rented had double bunk beds, our sons were the same age, 7 and 5, and they’d been friends since birth, all of them.
When Buster and I picked Chicken up from school at 1:36 on Friday, the sky was gray and we had a 4 hour drive ahead of us. Rachel and I exchanged knowing glances. “Coffee?” She asked. “Uh, yeah,” I said. I’d finished 3 hot cups that morning and a cold brew with lunch. Nevertheless. I grabbed a triple shot Americano on my way out of town, from the coffee stand where they know my name. I had enough points for a free one. Score, I thought.
Sometimes I drink a cup of coffee and it tastes good: hot, bitter, a little oily so it coats my mouth. Sometimes coffee tastes like umami. This coffee tasted uh-oh, acidic and unappealing. I didn’t really want it. I drank it anyway. I had a long drive ahead of me. I was scared of getting drowsy and killing us all. Every time my kids are in the car with me I think about how easily we could all die. That’s just how my brain has always worked. On a ferry boat I’m snappish and edgy; I look into the churning, cold, inky water and only feel how little the water cares if it kills us. I imagine their little bodies fighting to survive in it. I imagine how hard the slap of impact will be when I jump in after them. Would it break my legs? Maybe I should try to dive like an actual diver, with my hands pressed together at the end of my arms, as long as a swan’s neck, hydrodynamic. So anyway, that’s baseline for me. That’s a run-of-the-mill Tuesday.
I’d been on the road for two hours when I started to get nervous. Fluttery in the gut. A little tight in the chest. I was nervous about my vision. Little black spots danced on the road. I was nervous that I would get tunnel vision or blind spots; looking at the lanes on the highway, I felt that peculiar, drunk sensation of not trusting the signals that my brain was interpreting. “I don’t think I’m seeing what is really in front of me, not how it actually is.” My depth perception was off; the field of the highway seemed flat, and I wasn’t sure where the other cars really were, or if the lines on the road were straight. My heart started to beat faster.
Maybe I’m getting a migraine, I thought at the exact same time as, I should not have had that last cup of coffee. That was the feeling: the feeling that too much of something was in my brain, caffeine or fluid or panic flooding in, slowly at first and then much, much faster. My hands began to tingle.
Eeeeeasy, girl, I thought. You’re working yourself into a tizzy. I glanced in the rear-view mirror. The boys were both listening to audiobooks. I took a hand off the wheel to press it into my chest. I called my sister. “I’m super anxious,” I said. “I had too much coffee and I’m driving and I feel like something terrible is about to happen.”
“Okay,” she said, her 2-year-old yelling for something in the background. “What if you put on some really upbeat music? If you have that energy, maybe just lean into it.”
“Good idea,” I said. Singing in the car always soothes me because singing needs you to take and hold many deep breaths, and it floods me with memories of chorus and musicals, times I sang with people under lights and the sound of our voices swallowed me up so I was invisible and ecstatic, like electricity.
I hung up and turned on Rihanna. As I car-danced, I felt a little better. This is what I needed, I thought. Then I realized how hard I was working to feel better and it felt like a warning, like a stone dropped into my gut. It shouldn’t be this hard to feel better. Something’s wrong, Katie. Something’s really, really wrong. Suddenly, the beat felt manic, like a car alarm, and I felt worse. A lot worse. My hands flashed into numbness. My next inhale was a stuttering thing with an asthmatic wheeze, the kind of inhale your body forces you to make mid-sob. Oh fuck, oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.
I put on my hazard lights and moved into the right lane. I called my sister again. God bless the people who always pick up. I wish I were one of them, knowing how it felt to touch my sister’s name on the hot glass of my phone and know I was seconds, seconds from connecting.
“Hi, I’m having a panic attack.”
“Okay,” she said, her 2-year-old yelling something in the background. “It will last five minutes. No more than ten. You can do anything for five minutes. Where are you?”
“I’m getting off the highway now.”
“Good. Find a place to stop and put your car in park. Do not unclip the kids.”
“Okay…” I exited the highwat. “Oh great, it’s a roundabout.”
Buster piped up from the back seat. “Oh great, it’s a roundabout.”
Two more roundabouts before I found a parking lot. “My hands are numb,” I said.
“That’s normal,” she said.
“My fingers feel like they’re curling in toward each other,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
I put the car in park. I got out of the car. Buster said, “I want to get out too,” but I said “No,” and closed the door.
I paced in the parking lot, a huge lot next to what looked like a ranger station or maybe the first guard gate leading onto a military base, a beige cube with a flag sticking out of it.
“Where are you?” My sister asked.
“A… there’s a dog park over there… I think I might be in Yelm?”
“Dog park. Yelm. Great,” she said, as if I’d given her useful information. I half-laughed.
“Oh my God, my heart is racing,” I said.
“That’s normal,” she said. “It’s also normal to feel like--”
“I’m definitely going to die,” I said. “I’m dying. I’m having a heart attack. Or a stroke. Jesus, my hands.”
I looked at my shaking hands. I tilted my sunglasses off of my nose and saw my palms were white and all my veins were bright blue. Mottled patches like tiny bruises speckled the white skin. The tiny veins in my fingers popped out.
I paced back and forth next to the car. Chicken was listening to his audiobook. Buster was watching me pace, banging on the window and yelling “Let me out!” I kept flashing him thumbs-ups that he knew were straight bullshit. “Let me out!” His voice came through the door muffled, suffocated. He sounded hot. The car must have been warm. I opened the door for some air.
My teeth were chattering. I was dying. I was dying.
I was about to die at the Yelm dog park. From an overdose of espresso. What the fuck.
“How are you feeling,” Sarah said, after 6 or 7 minutes of listening to me mutter “Fuck,” and “Holy shit,” and “Oh God.”
“Better. My heart isn’t pounding anymore,” I realized as I said it. “Fuck, that was awful.”
“I know,” Sarah said. “You’re gonna feel better soon, but you’re gonna be tired.”
“Okay,” I said. “I sure wish I didn’t have 94 more miles to drive tonight.”
“You can always pull off, stay in a hotel tonight and finish the drive in the morning.”
“Good idea,” I said. As soon as she said it, I knew that was what I was going to do, even if I wasn’t ready to admit it yet, or even if my brain wasn’t quite wired for decisiveness again yet -- those fuses needed changing and that shit was on order. The choice part of my brain felt blackened and charred. Out of service.
I got back in the car. I wasn’t sure I could drive yet but what, was I gonna bed down at the dog park of Yelm? With my kids in the car? I turned the car on and got back on the highway.
Can I do this? The thought was huge in my head. Can I see the road accurately? Is my vision better? Am I calm enough to drive? Will I murder my children with hubris? Will I die tonight? Little shooting stars of numbness blazed down my arms and into my hands. I don’t know if I can do this. Rachel called.
“Hey! Where are you?”
“Um, just getting to Olympia. I just had my first panic attack so I had to pull over for a few minutes to calm down.”
I said this as if I had, in fact, calmed down, which was a lie, even though I was calmer than I’d been when I’d stared at the palms of my hands, like a battered corpse’s, and said, “What the fuck is going on with my hands.” But I wasn’t calm.
“I’m going to take another swing at this,” I said. “But if I don’t feel like it’s safe I’ll pull over and grab a hotel room, finish the drive in the morning,”
“Oh my God! Do you need me to turn around?” She asked.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’ll see you there.” Her two boys were as excited as mine to get to Seabrook, where every tidy group of cottages had its own grassy knoll and fire pit. She’d remembered s’mores fixins. I had the pancake mix for tomorrow’s breakfast.
The traffic on the highway was heavy, which I said was a good thing even though my brain said it was not a good thing, not at all. I wasn’t going fast, but there were so many moving vehicles in all directions, so many brake lights, and then I passed a sign saying, “Lodging Next Exit.”
“Guys,” I called into the back seat. “I”m sorry, but I don’t feel good, and we need to stop for the night at a hotel and finish the drive to Seabrook in the morning.”
Chicken burst into tears with no lead-up whatsoever. “NO, Mom,” he screamed. “You keep going! You try again! You feel okay!” The thing was, in that second, I did feel okay. Ironically, I think I felt okay because I’d made the decision to stop driving, but the fact that I felt okay made me think maybe I could continue driving. As soon as I thought about continuing the drive, my gut twisted. My mouth went dry.
“Okay. I’ll try,” I said, “But honey, you need to start getting your head around the idea that we may be in a hotel tonight.”
I went past another exit. Four more hotels, gone. I could have been checked in by now. The highway traffic began to break up and as my speedometer crept up to 50, 55, 60, I felt short of breath. Am I allergic to something? I thought. Did I ingest an allergen? My throat started to close.
“Sorry guys, I have to stop,” I said.
Chicken burst into tears again. “Mom! Mom, no! Please!”
“Stop crying,” I said. It’s not something I usually say to my kids and I backtracked immediately. “I understand you’re disappointed and it’s okay to cry, but we have to stop. For safety,” I added. As if that would console him. We’re not going to the beach with your best friends like I promised you, but only because Mommy’s crazy and we’re in mortal peril.
I took the next exit and felt better as soon as I saw the sign for the Hilton Garden Inn, straight ahead. Chicken continued to cry until he asked, “Can we play on the iPads in the hotel room.”
Oh God yes, I thought. Because I’m going to be vomiting in the bathroom. Fruit Ninja, my son. Fruit Ninja like it was the last time.
“Yep,” I said. His tears disappeared.
“Buster! Buster, did you hear that! We can play iPad in the hotel room!”
I pulled into the parking lot and grabbed my handbag. “Stay here,” I said to the boys, who were already unbuckling their seat belts with the hurried hands of junkies, ready to start looting their backpacks for their iPad fix.
I walked into the hotel. The desk clerk was on the phone. She mouthed “Hi,” at me. I pulled my credit card and ID out of my wallet, and I whispered, “I don’t have a reservation.” My hands shook. My knees shook. I looked around for the closest trash bin.
I thought panic attacks only lasted 5 or 10 minutes. I thought I was supposed to feel better. Well, that seals it, I thought. I’m not having a panic attack. I am actually dying. The thought that I was dying, a textbook symptom of panic attacks, returned me to the reality that I was physically safe and only mentally in crisis.
But if panic attacks lasted 5 or 10 minutes and it had been close to an hour, I must be dying.
But thinking you’re dying is a symptom of panic attacks. So it must be a panic attack. The longest panic attack ever. Aka, dying. Which is something only people with panic attacks think…
She typed and I circled the drain, trembling.
I looked at the receptionist and wondered what she would say if I told her “Call an ambulance and then grab my kids from the car, would you? The Subaru’s parked out front. They have fully-charged iPads but you’ll need to order them a pizza. And here’s my husband’s phone number. Call him after they pronounce me dead on arrival.”
I didn’t wonder all of that, not all the way. My imagination fuse wasn’t charred to shit like my choice fuse, but it was sparking erratically. I imagined her calling an ambulance for me. I imagined my children’s faces. I imagined writing down Ryan’s number. I didn’t connect those imaginings into a narrative.
“How are you tonight?” She asked me after she hung up the phone.
“Awful,” I said. “I’m on the way to Seabrook and I just started to feel so sick. My kids are in the car and they’re so disappointed…”
“I’m really sorry,” she said. She stopped typing to look at me.
“Thanks,” I said. I wiped a tingling hand over my face.
“Do you want a room on the first floor?” She asked me like it was a special favor.
“Um, sure, yes. Thanks.”
When we got to room 105 I thought I’d feel better immediately, like I’d cross the threshold onto sacred ground, a church of hospitality where this demon could not come. I thought my stomach would stop pushing sour, hot liquid into the back of my mouth and I’d be able to feel my hands and I would stop knowing, absolutely, for sure, that this moment would be the beginning of the tragedy that defined my children’s lives forever. Sad to say, the god of Hilton forsook me on Friday night, and the demon came into the hotel room shaking under my skin and whispering “Get ready because it’s coming, and it’s bad.”
Seriously, thank fucking God for iPads. The kids tumbled into the big queen bed and booted up Fruit Ninja.
I texted Ryan. “Call me ASAP. Panic attack on the road. Pulled into a hotel in Olympia.” He was flying back to Seattle from San Francisco, then planned to exit the airport, drop his business suitcase in the car, grab his fly fishing bag, re-enter the airport, and get on a plane to Montana to go fly-fishing with Jon for the next three days. They’d planned the trip for months. He’d ordered special flys online. $200 worth of flys.
Fuck my fucking broken brain.
I got in the shower; I couldn’t stop shivering. In the shower, waves of nausea rolled over me. I was afraid I would fall. I sat down in the tub under the shower’s spray and pressed my hands against the white tub floor. I spat into the drain, surprised my spit was clear; it was so hot and acrid it should have been yellow at least, maybe green. I picked up one hand and inspected the palm: pink. Okay.
I got out of the shower. I toweled off, shivering. I called Sarah back; my scorched brain could only think of calling Sarah back. She asked if I’d called Dad yet. Dad’s a doctor, but his father had died a month earlier and Dad had a back spasm yesterday. I called him anyway. If I was dying, I wanted to know.
“I just don’t know what to do,” I whisper-screamed, pacing in the bathroom while my kids played Fruit Ninja on the big queen bed with its fluffy duvet. “I can’t take my kids to the emergency room and I don’t know anyone who’s less than two hours away.”
“I think it’s worth getting checked out to make sure it’s not a virus or some other issue,” Dad said.
“Like a heart attack,” I said.
“Well, or something else,” he said.
Ryan called while I was on the phone with my parents. My words bubbled out of me like ants from a hill, like the wasps who built their nest under the water meter cover in our front yard. I’m freaking out. I feel like I’m going to die. I don’t know what the fuck to do.
Ryan was on an airplane that was taxiing to its gate. “Okay, okay. Let me send you the information for a teladoc appointment so you can talk to someone without having to leave the hotel, okay?”
I said, “I’m so scared.”
He said, “I can barely hear you.” I hung up on him.
I called my parents back. I pulled my hair into a high, messy bun to get it off my neck. I closed my eyes and rolled my forehead against the wall. “Oh God, I feel so sick,” I said. My phone battery was at 10%, perched on the edge of the counter, charging while my parents were on speakerphone.
“I’m scared I’m going to hyperventilate and pass out and scare the kids,” I said.
“If you do, your breathing will normalize while you’re unconscious. You’ll be back up really fast,” Mom said.
Buster came into the bathroom. “Mom, I’m hungry.”
“I know, baby,” I said. “I’m on it.” The only “it” I was on was the bathroom floor. Shame hopped into the jacuzzi in my belly: Your children are hungry. Your children are hungry. You can’t even feed your children. Something must be really, really wrong.
He walked back to the bed and turned on the TV.
I called the crisis line. “I am having a panic attack,” I said to the nice woman who picked up the phone. “It’s my first one and I have no idea what the fuck to expect from this. I pulled off the road and checked into a hotel and got my kids on their iPads and I feel like I’m going to vomit. They say they’re supposed to last 5 or 10 minutes but I’m going on 2 hours here.”
She said some calming things, including “Wow, you’ve done a lot of things for having a panic attack,” and I felt both proud and like screaming, because I have these children, what the fuck else was I going to do? Bed down at the dog park in Yelm?
She said more calming things and I interrupted her calming things with unanswerable questions which I barked at her in a harsh, shaky half-whisper, “What do I do? Do I need to go to an emergency room? What do I do with my kids? What do I feed them for dinner? They’re hungry, what do I do?” Her answers were calming things which I interrupted again. This is a very big deal, for me. Normally, I am almost comically polite and empathetic on the phone with strangers. I had no sensation of being rude at the time; only looking back do I wince at how barky and snappish I was. I know she didn’t take it personally. I wasn’t normal.
My call waiting beeped and it was Ryan. I switched over.
“I’m on the phone with the crisis line,” I said.
“You’re on the phone with the crisis line?” He repeated. “I”m canceling my trip.”
I didn’t know why the words “crisis line” made him take me more seriously than the words “I feel like I’m going to die” or “Please help me, I feel so scared.” But I didn’t care. Was he coming? Was he coming here?
“I’m ordering dinner for the kids,” he said. “Send me your hotel.” I hadn’t asked him to order dinner. He just knew.
Ryan had planned this trip for months. The flys. I was so sorry for this stupid panic, which was so fucking real and so fucking not. I was so sorry that as soon as he said he was coming, I felt better, so much better that I thought about telling him not to come. But the idea of him not coming was enough to send me careening off my peace again.
I was two and a half hours into this thing and was just now getting calm enough to say to myself, Katie, you could have called the nice front desk lady who checked you in and ask her to order a pizza for your children. It took me more than two hours to figure out how to get help ordering a pizza. This is a very big deal, for me. I can always figure out how to order a pizza.
I lay in bed and methodically clenched my toes, my calves, my thighs, my belly, my shoulders, my hands, my jaw, my whole face. At some point it occurred to me to take off the security chain from the door - in case I hyperventilated and passed out, my children would need to get out to run screaming for help, or the people who came to address the screams from behind our door would need to be able to get in with only a master key.
I was glad I’d thought of such a reasonable, smart, forward-thinking move. I despaired that my logic reinforced what I was coming to accept as gospel truth: I was definitely going to hyperventilate. My children would absolutely scream. The fact that I’d planned their unhindered escape felt prescient, not paranoid. It felt like a confirmation of the fuckedupness that lay in store. I was proud of myself for thinking of it; I was terrified because all I had to do was think it in order to make it real, and possible, and even the most likely thing.
I bought a $20 pay per view movie: Angry Birds 2. While I watched it, sandwiched between my giggling sons, the anxiety came in waves like labor in reverse. At the height of the attack, in the dog park in Yelm, the waves crashed over me continuously. As time passed, the waves grew less frequent and less intense. I experienced moments of calm, eyes in the storm when I was sure everything would be okay. Ryan ordered dinner. Ryan would be here soon, within an hour and a half. I imagined him driving to me, the size of his chest when he’d arrive and give it to me to lean on.
Then another wave would crash over me. 90 minutes until Ryan. 90 whole minutes. It was so long. $200 on flys. For nothing. Stupid brain. I imagined him driving to me, disappointed, his jaw clenched. Hot liquid pooled in my mouth. My heart thundered in my chest and my stomach knotted and I knew I would never, ever be okay again. I clenched my toes. My calves. My thighs. Then that wave receded and another moment of peace flowed in, this one just a little longer before the next wave knocked me down, this one just a little shorter, a little less intense. Labor in reverse, a process that ended with pulling myself together again rather than tearing myself apart.
The pizza came. My children ate it all and laughed at the movie. In the moments I wasn’t awash in terror, I laughed with them. And five minutes after the movie ended, Ryan tapped on the door to room 105. I opened it and he was smiling at me.
“The thing that made the difference was knowing you were coming,” I said. I imagined him in the sturdy, hammocky airplane chairs, his thumbs tapping on his phone as he searched for a pizza place that would deliver to his family, 2 hours away.
My children slept in soft, white hotel beds. Chicken stretched and muttered something, his head on the foot end of the bed. Buster, before he fell asleep, told Ryan, “I thought Mom was going to die.” I looked at his sleeping face and knew his brain was still alight, working on the problem of what the fuck happened on the way to Seabrook. He still talks about the time the omelet station caught fire at the restaurant we went to for Papa’s birthday.
I crawled into bed next to Ryan and felt little buzzing jolts travel down my limbs. They kept me awake long after I wanted to be sleeping.
On Saturday, Ryan us drove to Seabrook. I stepped onto the wide beach and the cold air kissed my cheeks. I took off my shoes and the wet, hard sand was like ice. I felt nauseous, still buzzing, but better.
I vacillated between wanting to talk about it and not wanting to talk about it; sometimes if I talked about it I could feel tremors in my bones, little electric shocks, warning me not to go there. Sometimes if I didn’t talk about it, I felt the same tremors and tiny jolts, warning me that if I kept this fear locked up inside, I would not like how it forced itself out of me.
The boys played Monster Hunter and we took them for ice cream. I ate a scoop of chocolate and didn’t gag. We took them trick-or-treating. Rachel and I rushed into Mom costumes: headbands with a shirt that kind of goes. It was cat ears, hastily drawn-on whiskers, and a black tunic with leggings for me, and a unicorn horn plus a sweater with hearts and a clip-on rainbow tail for her. Ryan cooked salty spaghetti and it tasted good. I fell asleep first, before any of the kids, wearing my down coat.
I drove out of Seabrook on Sunday morning with Ryan in the passenger seat. I needed to get behind the wheel again as soon as I safely could, in the sweet spot after I’d stabilized past the risk of acute freak-out, but before the neural pathways in my brain built a solid bridge between “Driving, anywhere” and “Panic attack, every time.” I drove for an hour that felt like six. My stomach churned. My arms tingled.
My brain started to gasp, like too much fluid, or not enough, had put my thoughts into a seized panic state. It felt like the veins in my brain were gasping for air and I couldn’t tell if that was because they were drowning or suffocating, from a flood or a vacuum. Both felt real. Both felt possible. No, more than possible. Probable. Definite.
Easy, girl. I looked at the clock. It was 11:20 am. I gripped the wheel and breathed into my belly to the count of five, then loosened my grip and exhaled. At 11:22 you will feel better.
“Mom, how do your hands feel?” Buster called from the back seat.
“Fine, baby,” I said. “Are you worried?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t want you to have another panic attack.”
“Me neither,” I said. “That was scary, huh?”
“Yeah, really scary.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, I’m going to do everything I can to never have one of those again. And I can promise you, just like on Friday when I got scared and I pulled over and we went to a hotel, that no matter how my brain is feeling, I will always keep you safe. Always.”
“Okay.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“Mommy, will you sing some songs?” Ryan asked. I smiled.
“Any requests?”
We stopped at a rest stop and I walked a lap in the cold air. By the time I got back in the car, I felt better. Calmer. Like my calm wasn’t a thing I needed to construct for myself anymore. Like I didn’t need Ryan to feed me piano bar standards like Sweet Caroline and Africa anymore.
This 10-cups-a-day girl drank no coffee that weekend. Saturday was no problem but by Sunday night, my temples throbbed and the base of my skull seemed like one giant, pulsing nerve.
I had to get back behind the wheel because fuck you, brain, I will not let fear tell me where I can or cannot go. I will not let the threat of a panic attack make my life small enough that I can’t get on a highway with my kids in the car. Coffee, though. I can give that up. I’m perfectly happy to sacrifice coffee if it means never having another panic attack again.
It’s Tuesday, four days after my first panic attack. I booked a physical for tomorrow, more to hear a physician say “You do not have a heart condition” than because I have a credible fear of having a heart condition. Therapy isn’t until Thursday.
I’m weaning myself off coffee, which is not a little thing for me. I’m having half a cup in the morning and half a cup with lunch, which is less a “weaning” than it is a “slashing” of my previous intake.
On a good, centered, normal day, my anxiety clocks in between a 1 and a 3. On a stressful day, my anxiety might top out at a 6. The panic attack was a 10. Maybe a 9.5 since I never actually hyperventilated.
Today, my calmest moments are 4s and 5s, which means at my best, I’m still as anxious as I am, usually, at my worst. BONUS, I still experience waves of 7s and 8s, brain contractions that make me feel like barfing or bolting. They come out of nowhere, moments when I have to stop packing lunches, lie down, and breathe into my belly. During one of those waves, I took my pulse on my pulse-taking app. That shit was 88. My resting pulse is usually in the low 50’s. It felt good to see a number validating the intense stress I felt, even as it pissed me off in the flavor of fed-up cop 2 months from retirement: Knock it off, body. Don’t be a weisenheimer. Or are you the brains behind this operation, BRAIN?
When a wave crashes over me, panic spit pools in my mouth, my stomach knots up, and my scalp starts to tingle, as if my brain is gasping. I feel shooting sparks down my arms and legs, and my gut lurches, threatening to boot. My breathing gets fast and shallow, and I have to stop, lie down, and breathe.
“Jesus, that sounds awful,” Ryan said when we spoke earlier this morning.
“Oh, it’s fucking awful,” I said. “And it’s fucking unacceptable. If this is my new normal then I plan to move directly to pharmaceuticals, without passing Go or collecting my $200.”
Once, Ryan and I were staying in the Mission District in San Diego and there was a pedicab whose handlebar radio played “Don’t Stop Believin” and only “Don’t Stop Believin.” The rider did laps around the liveliest cluster of blocks, in a small enough perimeter that even if we couldn’t see him, we could always stop, listen, and pick out the strains of Journey, getting louder, getting fainter, but never disappearing entirely. Right now, it feels like my panic is that pedicab. It’s doing laps around me, narrowly missing me so I have to leap out of its way at its loudest pitch, and never fully gone. I spend all my time listening, waiting, wondering “Is it coming? Is it close?”
I don’t know if it’s normal to experience such a long tail at the end of an attack, or if I’m experiencing post-traumatic anxiety because that shit was TRAU.MAT.IC. I don’t know if these last few days have been extra shitty because of the panic attack fallout, or because my body used to be roughly 18% black coffee and rebalancing that shit is a wild ride.
I don’t know, but fear, that this first attack may have carved some deep groove in my brain like an iceberg, a structural wound and a shortcut that will make future attacks biologically easier. I don’t know. I’m exhausted. I mean that almost literally: I am fresh out. My stores are exhausted.
I don’t know how to stop yelling at myself for this fucked up experience. Someone told me I’m not broken and I don’t fully believe him. Someone else told me I’m valuable in any state, including this one, and I don’t fully believe her.
What I do know is that I had a panic attack on the highway, a hundred miles from home, alone in the car with my sons, and that was the fucking worst.
I also had a sister who picked up the phone, a husband who canceled his trip, friends who rolled with us through an unexpected weekend, and parents who listened. I had kids who hung tough with the change of plans, and a hotel I could afford and get to without hyperventilating, and a very, very patient crisis line lady. I also had a network of loved ones who have, unfortunately, their own experiences with panic and anxiety, who kept telling me they were breathing with me and who checked on me for days after. And that’s really the best anyone could hope for.
And if you can relate to any piece of this, please let me do a little of what was done for me:
I’m breathing with you. You are valuable in any, every state, including in whatever state this finds you. You are not broken. You are, like all of us, in progress. In progress, you feed yourself. In progress, you reach out for help, you find something that makes you laugh, something soft to wrap around you, like this, I hope.
I called Crisis Connections at 1-866-427-4747. It doesn’t hurt to have the number saved in your phone, and maybe even in your favorites so you don’t have to search for it.
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