Early July of 2009
I'd been walking through my mom's empty house, when a foreign sensation punched me in my chest. Stopping dead in my tracks, I tried to take a deep breath but found my chest too tight for that.
Immediately, I rushed to the couch to sit down. My heart felt like it was skipping every couple of beats and every time it skipped, it felt like I was being punched in the chest.
Over the years, I had experienced these strange senstations in my chest but they were so infrequent and never happened more than once or twice in a row. I remembered vaguely a doctor telling me they were harmless. But this time, they sure didn't feel harmless.
After laying down on the couch, my heart returned to the rhythm of predictable beats. But after a few minutes, it returned to the skipping and the punching sensation in my chest.
I was scared and starting to shake. My heart started to beat faster which made the skipping and punching come faster too.
It wouldn't stop. My heart had completely lost its mind.
And so I lost control, and spiraled into the worst panic attack I'd ever had. And the first one where I actually felt like I was seeing my life flash before my eyes.
Hyperventilating, losing the feeling in my hands and arms, I somehow drove myself to the ER, on the phone with my mom, because I was sure I would be dead in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.
Of course, the ER doctor ran all the standard cardiac tests on me, and when everything came back completely normal, he asked if I was experiencing any new stress.
At the mention of my grandfather dying, he just nodded his head.
"Just a panic attack," He'd said. "You just need to find a way of coping with them."
Which is the great secret, isn't it? How to cope with panic attacks.
Feeling like an idiot for thinking I was dying, I walked back out the automatic glass doors of the ER back into a world that didn't look like the one I'd woken up in yesterday. My world after this panic attack would never be the same again. I didn't know it, but that's why the world looked so different, I felt it in my soul.
The panic attacks started coming all the time, from the moment I woke in the mornings, until I paced myself exhausted into bed at night. They were unrelenting.
I was afraid to get in my car, afraid to go to work, afraid to swallow food.
I was afraid to live.
I'd been walking through my mom's empty house, when a foreign sensation punched me in my chest. Stopping dead in my tracks, I tried to take a deep breath but found my chest too tight for that.
Immediately, I rushed to the couch to sit down. My heart felt like it was skipping every couple of beats and every time it skipped, it felt like I was being punched in the chest.
Over the years, I had experienced these strange senstations in my chest but they were so infrequent and never happened more than once or twice in a row. I remembered vaguely a doctor telling me they were harmless. But this time, they sure didn't feel harmless.
After laying down on the couch, my heart returned to the rhythm of predictable beats. But after a few minutes, it returned to the skipping and the punching sensation in my chest.
I was scared and starting to shake. My heart started to beat faster which made the skipping and punching come faster too.
It wouldn't stop. My heart had completely lost its mind.
And so I lost control, and spiraled into the worst panic attack I'd ever had. And the first one where I actually felt like I was seeing my life flash before my eyes.
Hyperventilating, losing the feeling in my hands and arms, I somehow drove myself to the ER, on the phone with my mom, because I was sure I would be dead in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.
Of course, the ER doctor ran all the standard cardiac tests on me, and when everything came back completely normal, he asked if I was experiencing any new stress.
At the mention of my grandfather dying, he just nodded his head.
"Just a panic attack," He'd said. "You just need to find a way of coping with them."
Which is the great secret, isn't it? How to cope with panic attacks.
Feeling like an idiot for thinking I was dying, I walked back out the automatic glass doors of the ER back into a world that didn't look like the one I'd woken up in yesterday. My world after this panic attack would never be the same again. I didn't know it, but that's why the world looked so different, I felt it in my soul.
The panic attacks started coming all the time, from the moment I woke in the mornings, until I paced myself exhausted into bed at night. They were unrelenting.
I was afraid to get in my car, afraid to go to work, afraid to swallow food.
I was afraid to live.
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