More than two decades ago, I experienced a severe and prolonged series of panic attacks. When I say prolonged, I mean they went on, night and day, for six months. It was a terrifying experience and one during which I felt entirely helpless, as well as utterly confused.
Why was this happening to me?
The first panic attack I did not recognise as such. It came some three years before the six-month invasion of my life. I was in England, visiting my then partner. He had gone to work, and I was in the bath, in the empty house. Suddenly, a massive crashing sound came from the hall downstairs. Someone was breaking down the front door. I leapt out of the bath and started screaming. The person ran away. Shaking, I stood at the top of the stairs in a towel, and looked down at the shattered door; its bottom two panels kicked out, and the busy street right outside.
I recognised the symptoms the second time around. The hyperventilating. The feeling of being about to pass out. The racing heart. The sensation of almost being paralysed
I phoned my partner and he came home at once. It was at that point I felt the strangest sensation come over me. I had to lie down immediately. I started hyperventilating. I thought I would choke, or faint. Then my heart started racing. I was unable to speak: speech required an effort that was temporarily beyond me.
I lay on the floor, wondering if I was dying.
My entire body was in some kind of trauma. After maybe half an hour, the ghastly sensations ended. It was a panic attack, although I didn’t recognise it as such until it happened again, and again, and again, three years later.
I recognised the symptoms the second time around. The hyperventilating. The feeling of being about to pass out. The racing heart. The sensation of almost being paralysed. I had invited friends around for dinner, and two hours before they were due to arrive, I ended up lying on the hall floor gasping for air, to the alarm of my housemates. The dinner was cancelled, and I went to bed instead.
And then it just continued. Every single day for weeks and months.
The attacks began to merge into each other. I felt as if I was in a permanent state of vertigo. I held tightly on to banisters on stairways, as if I was on a storm-tossed ship. I had to cancel many social outings at short notice. No matter how many times I told myself they would pass, and I was not going to die of a heart attack, my brain refused to process that message.
In fact, I got worse. I convinced myself I was seriously ill. I requested, and got, a brain scan that I did not need. My partner came with me for the result. Before we went into the consultation room he asked me what I would do if the result showed I was perfectly fine. I told him the relief would cure me. It did not. My eternally panicked self continued to be in a perpetual state of high alert, anxiety, and fear.
On a train one day, I overheard someone saying that an initial sign of a particular dreadful terminal and debilitating disease was pins and needles in your hands and feet. That night, I woke up, my hands and feet tingling. I had pins and needles full time in my hands and feet for months.
It was only later, much later, I realised that my unbearable state of anxiety was due to a particular personal reason about the relationship I was then in. I was literally making myself ill with anxiety and worry. The panic attacks would take over my body, wave after wave after wave, for hours and hours and endless hours. I read up on them, and marvelled at how people recovered after 10 or 20 minutes. I could not find anything about someone being in a full-time state of panic. That just made me feel worse, and even more fearful about what was happening to me, and the whole miserable cycle continued.
I do not know how I managed to continue to work during that time. I would be interviewing someone, while simultaneously feeling as if I was going to fall off the chair with the sensation of vertigo. I temporarily became absolutely terrified of flying. It was the cruellest of ironies: the one thing I love most to do is travel, and suddenly airplanes were no longer magic carpets. They were prisons where I felt so trapped and terrified, that I spent an entire flight back to Dublin from the US where I had been on a reporting trip to the Special Olympics, sobbing non-stop in my seat, convinced I was about to die. The stranger beside me asked to be moved.
I stopped flying after that. I turned down a fabulous press trip to Canada because it involved not just two long flights across the Atlantic, but a helicopter ride over Niagara Falls. I turned down another, far more fabulous, press trip to go on safari in Africa, because it involved six flights, some of them in small planes. I had become afraid of everything I loved to do in my life. How had this happened to me? I had never been a person who had been ill before. My sole hospital stay had been to get tonsils removed as a child.
Finally, at 3am one night, when the pins and needles in my feet and hands were so bad they woke me from sleep, I got up and went downstairs to the kitchen to make tea. I was there crying when one of my housemates, a close friend, saw the light on downstairs and came down to join me. At this stage, the panic attacks had been going on for six months.
She sat there quietly with me for a while. She had seen what I had been going through, and the huge change in my behaviour and personality.
“You’re afraid of your own body,” she said after a while. “But you travelled all over the world by yourself, and nothing ever happened to you: you were never ill. You have to trust your body. Stop being scared of it.”
It sounds so strange, but her words were a turning point. Among everything else I had lost over those months, I had also lost my confidence. I went back to bed and thought about what my friend had said. She was right: I had become frightened of my own body: in some way, I was making myself literally sick with anxiety about what unknown catastrophe might befall me.
When I woke up the next morning, the pins and needles in my hands and feet had vanished. They never returned. Slowly, my innate confidence returned. When I felt the familiar waves of panic attacks starting, I sat still, did breathing exercises, and told myself I was not going to die. Not right then, anyway. In a matter of maybe a fortnight, the near-constant panic attacks of the previous six months had gone. I felt I had been given my life back.
That attack lasted the entire morning. I ended up calling my doctor in Dublin to reassure me that I was not going to die. Not that day. I have no idea what brought it on
Someone who understands a lot more about how our brains work will be able to figure out what was going on with mine at that time.
In the two decades since, I have thankfully had just two separate panic attacks. The first was about three years ago. I had received some very bad news about the health of someone close to me. Later that day, I was driving on the motorway with a relative in the passenger seat when, to my horror, I felt a horrible sensation begin in the small of my back. It was like a stain of coldness creeping up to my neck. I started breathing fast. I suddenly felt as if I would either pass out, or throw up. I worried I would crash the car.
I managed to pull off the motorway and park the car. Then, to the alarm of my passenger, I got into the back seat, lay down and asked her to keep talking to me: to tell me I was not going to die. I stayed there for four hours, unable to move. I thought I’d have to check into a nearby hotel for the night. My passenger told me my face was bone white. Finally, I made myself get up and walk around. I made myself breathe properly. I made a phone call to a friend and explained I was having a panic attack. She reassured me I was not going to die. Not that day.
It was only later I made the association between the terrible news I had heard, and the anxiety it must have created within me.
The second and last panic attack I have had was about six months later. I woke up with it, while visiting a friend in New York. I was on holidays and had had the happiest of visits. Yet, there I lay, comatose and silent, rigid with panic. It was like my body had been hijacked while I slept.
My friend got up, and chattered away, asking if I wanted coffee. I was unable to speak. Eventually, she asked if I was okay. I tried to explain what a panic attack was, but I couldn’t. It was too much effort to speak. I went to the bathroom and dry heaved, then lay on the floor there, literally unable to move.
That attack lasted the entire morning. I ended up calling my doctor in Dublin to reassure me that I was not going to die. Not that day. I have no idea what brought it on.
I sincerely and fervently hope it was the last panic attack I will ever have.
Read: How to deal with persistent panic attacks