Panic first struck me hard, unexpectedly, and out of nowhere. I was an eighth grader playing right field in a baseball game one night when suddenly everything seemed unreal. My body felt like someone else’s and I felt light enough to float away into the sky. I started breathing fast, as if sucking in lots of air would make me heavy enough to stay on the ground but I was afraid that I might keep getting lighter and lighter until I floated away like a helium balloon.
The stronger this fear became, the more my breathing sped out of control. Pretty soon I felt like I was choking, or maybe even drowning, as if I couldn’t get any air.
That’s when panic kicked in. I had that same dreadful feeling that you get when you have been underwater too long, your lungs are about to burst, and you look up and realize that the surface is high above.
That inning was the longest inning of baseball I can remember playing in my life. I could never slow down my breathing and looking in from where I stood in right field, the batters seemed fuzzier and fuzzier to me. Eventually my arms and legs got tingly and I felt weak all over. My feet went numb in my shoes and my hand felt dead inside the leather interior of my glove.
I didn’t understand what was happening to me and was completely terrified. It was all I could do to stay out in right field and sweat out each pitch, just waiting for the inning to come to a merciful end. By the time it ended, I was so dizzy and weak I could hardly jog off the field.
Back in the dugout, I finally caught my breath. That’s when the feeling returned to my arms and legs, and my vision cleared up. The panic went away, too, but I still felt uneasy. I was afraid that if I went back onto the field it would happen again. I also felt like I couldn’t tell anyone about my experience because they might think I was going crazy.
Because these unpleasant sensations came over me that night in the absence of warning or logical explanation, I felt extremely vulnerable in the following days. I was afraid the experience might revisit me at any time.
Both spring and summer passed that year with thoughts of this waking nightmare lurking in the back of my mind like a foreboding specter. I didn’t feel safe. No matter what I did or where I went, the experience hung over me. I prayed to God it would never happen again.
My prayer wasn’t answered. At least not in the way I wanted it to be. Those same sickening feelings I had felt on the baseball field came back. They broke in on my education and rudely disrupted my life on the Monday morning of my third week of high school. It was my fifteenth birthday.
During my first period algebra class, I lost all sense of security and well-being. My heart’s heavy pounding grabbed my attention first. My chest tightened, and I had trouble catching my breath. It was like I was suffocating from a lack of air in the room.
Almost gasping, my vision blurred as I lost my sense of balance. Desks, chairs, and even the other students seemed to swirl all around me. My disorientation and dimming sense of sight triggered intense waves of panic.
For several minutes of this, I suppressed my terror, in hopes that the symptoms would just go way. Instead, they only got worse and a terrible nausea came over me. I could feel drops of sweat falling onto the cloth of my shirt. I didn’t know what was wrong and hoped I wasn’t having a heart attack. Finally, when I couldn’t sit at my desk another minute, I raised my hand and asked for a pass to see the nurse.
I ran all the way across the campus to the nurse’s office and dialed home with shaky fingers. Waiting for my mom to pick me up seemed like forever even though it was probably only ten minutes. Since I thought I was sick, I went to bed as soon as I got home. For some reason, once I was under the covers, all the bad feelings went away and I felt fine. I was totally exhausted from and confused by the experience, but felt pleasantly relaxed.
The experiences I just described, which I can now identify as panic attacks, started happening closer and closer together after that day in algebra class. Since at first they mostly happened in classrooms I got in the habit of staying home from school to avoid them and continued going everywhere else. However, I eventually had panic attacks in other places and the fear slowly generalized. I had panic attacks at church, in the mall, at friends’ houses, and so on. I stopped going to every place I had experienced panic for fear that I might have another attack.
My world slowly shrank until I hardly left home anymore.Though I didn’t have many full-blown panic attacks at home, fear did not leave me alone to rest there. The physical sensations I felt during panic attacks left me with questions about my health. Since I didn’t even know what panic attacks were, I thought something was physically wrong with me. When I stayed home from school, often I lay in bed most of the day scanning my body. I put my hand over my heart to make sure it was still beating. I blew air into the palm of my hand to make sure my lungs were still expelling air. I worried that I had some hidden tumor, an enlarged liver or spleen, or some rare unexplainable disease.
Fear of the unknown hung over me every day and I had way too much time to think. I found myself turning into a hypochondriac. That’s when I started going to the doctor.
Actually, I didn’t just go to one doctor. I went to many. When I told my general practitioner I was having difficulty breathing and thought I had an irregular heartbeat, he took x-rays of my heart and lungs. Everything checked out fine and he told me it was all in my head. Neither I nor my parents could accept this diagnosis.
You have to understand that my dad was a school psychologist at the time. His job was diagnosing the problems of other people’s kids. In his mind, there was no way his own son could have a psychological problem like agoraphobia or panic disorder.
Most of all, it was I who could not accept that I had a psychological problem.I come from an intelligent, educated family. People like me, I thought, don’t have psychological problems. I saw myself as too smart, too healthy, too young, and overall way too normal to have a mental disorder.
I thought psychological problems were only for “screwed-up” people from dysfunctional families, and I knew there had to be something wrong with me that was real. When I say real, I mean something physical and tangible. I couldn’t see myself as someone who would be staying home from school just because I couldn’t get a mental grip on school or life.
Needless to say, I felt totally insulted by what the doctors told me and vowed that no doctor would make me doubt my sanity. I got a second opinion, and a third and a fourth. Every doctor’s opinion was the same. They all told me there was nothing physically wrong. Though I eventually gave up on learning anything from the doctors, denial kept me from seeking psychological help.
As spring of the next year approached outside, my indoor world had gotten pitifully small. When I tried to go back to school, my knees would get so shaky that I would freeze for fear of falling down. When I attended church with my family, I would feel all the air being sucked out of the sanctuary and run outside just to breathe.
When I went walking through the shopping mall, the ceiling would appear to be so high it would leave me feeling weightless and airy, like I was slightly out of my body and just barely being held down by gravity. When I tried to find a doorway out, everything looked bright and blurry and I found myself walking hurriedly and wildly through an endless and dizzying maze of colorfully-dressed, slow moving people. I started running panicked out of grocery stores, restaurants, and even the baseball card shop where I used to hang out on Saturdays. I felt especially trapped and helpless in moving automobiles. Almost every situation threatened me, stimulating a strong impulse to flee. I didn’t know what to do or where to turn for help, so I got into the habit of retreating home where it felt safer.
I had learned to fear the panic itself. The dreadful anticipation of the next panic attack left me forever uneasy. Though I spent long days at home, sometimes I couldn’t even get comfortable there. The television flashed pictures of public places and scenes before my widened pupils. The stories of shootings in the newspaper left me fearful and ill. Video games became too violent and the rock music I once loved became an intolerable assault on my senses. Even small amounts of sensory stimulation overwhelmed me, throwing me into violent panic attacks.
I woke up tense and nauseous every morning, and I went to sleep each night only after endless pacing around the house, worrying. I kept worrying that my heart would stop. I kept worrying that my lungs would collapse. I even worried that my skeletal system would fall apart, or that my muscles would all freeze. In short, I had no faith that my body would keep itself alive and constantly checked my heartbeat, pulse, and respiration.
My world at home kept narrowing. Every day I surrendered ground. Each panic attack and each terrifying sensation would leave me afraid of one more chair, one more corner, one more lamp stand, or one more room. The fear eventually backed me into my bedroom where I learned to spend long hours alone in quiet darkness, lying prone, and wrapped safely in bed sheets.
At the point of utter defeat, I admitted that the doctors might be right and I finally went to see a psychologist. As you might suspect, I was diagnosed with Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia.
