Paralysis (My Experience of Anxiety and Panic Attacks)

Member Name: Xamis

Product:	My Experience of Anxiety and Panic Attacks
Date:	23/04/02 (697 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Really, Really, NONE

Disadvantages: Fear, Confusion, Disorientation

This is a kind of tough opinion to know how to start. The first point I would make is that it is very hard to know, from the standpoint of a 'normal' person, when someone else is having a panic attack or when you yourself are having them. For 3 weeks I thought I was having some kind of weird withdrawal symptom from drugs I will talk about elsewhere. It was only when I mentioned it to my doctor as an aside that he instantly told me I was showing "all the classic symptoms of panic attacks". So I got another set of pills, some new and improved anti-depressants which I notice have their own section here - Cipramil.

I had come home from University a fortnight after returning there from my Christmas break. In that fortnight I had got rather wasted but also learned that the girl I had been chasing for 3 months, someone who was both stunning and into Farscape, was playing games with me. More specifically, she kept leading me on and then going cold. I thought it was an issue of hers, that with perseverance we could get closer, but it was all a game. See, a friend of this girl, Christina, felt that I had been unfair to her early on in the year. This much detail isn't needed, but I'll explain to anyone who wants it. The upshot was that Christina and Sarah had been playing with me all this time, and they were still at it thinking I didn't know. Over Christmas I had one moment of paranoia, thinking that it was all a game, but then I told myself how silly I was, how I shouldn't let my trust issues interfere with a potential relationship. When I found out, I was stunned. Physically, I felt like I was out of my body for the next hour. Over the next few days it turned out more and more people knew about this, had let her get away with it, and hadn't bothered to tell me. By my 12th night back, I was so scared sitting in a friend's room, of her being part of the conspiracy as much as anything else, that I knew I had to leave.


Getting back meant a rather large change in lifestyle for me, I didn't take any hash back home (and I had been relying on it rather a lot), I didn't drink, and I was alone at night. The last one proved to be the toughest. Christina's friend had been trying to justify what they had done to me through text messages until around 4am, when I gave up to go to bed. For the last hour or so I had been feeling these odd pulses. The best way I can describe it is as a warm, tingling sensation. They started in my stomach, making it feel rather numb, and then moved, in a wave, up my body. I could fight them back, but it took concentration. After a while I thought they could be fun, so I stopped fighting and lay back. They travelled all the way up my body then, and seemed to sizzle in my head. They came more and more frequently, until three in very rapid succession overcame me and I wasn't in bed anymore.

I was sitting out in the allotments that border our garden. I was sitting in the mud talking to Jo, the friend from Uni whose room was host to my fear. We spoke for a while, and then I got up to start walking. After all, it was after 4am and kind of cold on the floor. I walked to the end of the plot, onto the main path that leads directly away from my house. As I walked I felt a strange sense of foreboding. I got around 20 paces from the main gate and saw my best Uni friend Paul standing on the other side of it. For some reason I was terrified. I tried to reel back, but found I was walking forwards anyway. I looked down at my legs and realised that I was not moving them; I was more gliding forward. It was only then that I remembered my bed and the pulses. I realised that I was not really in the allotments, but the fact that I was getting closer to Paul and he was scaring me was not a dream at all. I was there, perfectly aware of what was going on - it WAS reality. Logic took hold, and I realised (less than 10 paces from the gate) that my legs we
ren't moving, so this could not be real. My legs were actually back home, in bed, where the rest of me was. I could see my home looking over my shoulder, but obviously there was no way to simply rematerialise there. If my leg was in my bed, I figured, then moving my leg would prove that this reality wasn't real, and that I was actually in bed. But I was close now, only half a dozen paces away, and I was panicking quite a lot. I tried with all my might to move my leg, but my legs were immobile beneath me as I was pulled closer and closer to this figure of fear. I remember the mental exertion as I tried, desperately, one last time to move it before I was within Paul's grasp. It twitched, and I saw it twitch underneath my covers as I was back in bed.

Over the next three nights I had similar experiences each night, when I was trying to sleep. The second night I was so scared whilst awake that I texted my ex-girlfriend, hoping vainly that there would be someone just to talk to. I cowered in bed, sobbing, with all the lights on, as if I was 14 again. The visions changed, grew more insidious. In the second attack, I woke up but was in bed still, so I could not draw a distinction between hallucination and reality. There was a shadow on the right of my room, and it moved up the wall and slowly across the ceiling, with that familiar sense of dread building up inside me. I can't remember how I stopped that one, but the next one was even more dangerous. I was snatched, from my bed, to a beach, where I had my head ploughed into wet sand. Waves were coming over my head and I couldn't breathe at all. I tried to break free, get my head above water, but nothing would work. With what little bit of rational strength I had left, I decided this was another vision and I had to do something with my real body. Seeing as how I wasn't breathing right now, that seemed to be a sensible thing to try. But I couldn't. At all. It was so much more intense than
any of the others before it because I literally wasn't breathing. When I finally managed a breath it took me 5 minutes to recover, to breathe normally, and that was when I was really afraid.

When the doctor told me they were panic attacks I felt an odd mix of relief and shock. He knew what they were, they weren?t withdrawal, and they were relatively normal. But at the same time they were anything but, my head had taken another step towards insanity. I had pills, but I knew things were going to get worse. The week leading up to my Friday appointment had been evil; I drank or smoked anything I could to get me to sleep without an attack, and spent every waking hour trapped in a hellish prison of depression. Staying at home wasn't working, but I couldn't go back to University. I couldn't stop and get a job, but I wasn't likely to be studying much longer. There was nothing, no joy, no ray of light, nothing but the pain. I hope I'm not sounding overly dramatic, but as my Dad found out on his birthday, no words can get across the extent of complete disconnection from the world I felt. I even scared my dog Thursday afternoon, hugging him and crying about the shit life he was having. It must have been odd for Josh - it really was for me.

Since then things have become kind of different. I found a narcotic that worked to completely remove the panic attacks and the fear of them, and spent every night from the 28th January through to when I left Uni, on the 22nd March, wasted. It kept the pain, the fear, and the uncertainty away and made me feel kind of better. It didn't work the way it did for my friends though, and I realised then that things were not going well. What is happening now? I left University, they singed me off on medical reasons, but there is no doctor up on what is going on. This is partly due to the fact that I was having prescriptions written in Blackburn and in Aberdeen, but also because all the doctors I have
try and fob me off rather quickly, without (seemingly) daring to probe too deeply into what is going on.

The Cipramil I take seem to largely control a lot of the feelings, but missing them for a few days really does turn the world, and this is the best way I could think of putting it, ragged. I can feel my mind fraying as I mistake a pair of boots for my cat, Jasper, the shadows for my other cat, Imp, and see people walking towards me who are never there at all. I spent 15 hours at a "Free Party" in a forest in Aberdeenshire just a week and a half ago. I'm going to paste in how I told this story elsewhere -

"I wandered off to relieve myself at around 4am, and found myself completely disoriented. I was looking for my mate's car but decided it was to the left because of a fence in front of me.

I had badly sprained my knee earlier that night and so was walking with a salvaged stick. I decided to swing the stick forward to see how far away the fence was. But it seemed to go right through. I walked closer, but could still just see it in the dark. Undeterred as I still hadn't hit it with the stick, I moved much closer. I thought I could just be imagining it, but it wasn't going away as I got closer. I forced myself to keep walking and stepped right through it.

I looked back but it was still there. It felt kind of odd and made me tingle inside & giggle rather a lot. I stepped back into it and could see it going through me. I tried to feel the fence, to figure out how it was going right through my torso, but my hand passed through every time.

I likened it to Al in Quantum Leap, but combined with constantly mistaking a pair of boots for my cat (whilst completely sober, only under the effect of drugs to stop my panic attacks) as well as many different other mis-interpretations, I am beginning to worry."

I could have sworn it was there; it was only by constantly telling myself in
my head that it was not there that I managed to walk through it. What was more unnerving was that I thought it would go away once I proved it was not real. It didn't.

Other things happened that night. I got talking to a girl I was kind of friends with. Her boyfriend had fallen victim to a rather intense bad trip, and had at one point seemed ready to rape her. She pointed out to me that after a moment of fear for herself, the fear she felt, intensely, was for him. Someone she loved was this messed up and confused at that point. This led me to talk about "Chal" (See my Depression op., it seems to tie in with quite a lot of this), the man who effectively stalked me. What I had not realised until then was the enormity of one thing - our friendship. I was afraid, terribly afraid, for him. Seeing him turn like this, twisted by things in his own head and attacks from others, into what he became was the worst thing to ever happen to me. I ended up telling the full story (only the fifth time in my life I have) to this girl, and as I was telling it I felt many things. I thought I could hear or see people in the dark coming to get us, until she reassured me by holding my hand or hugging me. I felt random fear, just paralysed in the tent afraid of nothing I could quantify at all. I mistook another friend of mine, who was sleeping, for a random stranger who had come into our tent and curled up. That was terrifying until she found out who he was for me. I mistook some oddly marked rocks for 20 joggers all tying their shoes, and whilst exploring a small cave we had found was sure that the rock walls were rows of rock people glaring disapprovingly at me. Things have not been that intense since, but it is still always there, niggling at me, and I have no idea how to hang on.

I'm just adding this paragraph an hour or so after uploading the op. I just nipped downstairs to get a glass of water and out of the wide kitchen window I could see the mo
on, framed by clouds. I have always loved the site of the moon, and used to spend ages standing outside looking at the sky. Tonight, I knew I could only look from inside. The fear I felt at 15 is back, I don't dare go outside on my own after around midnight, unless I'm in a really good mood or someone else is awake. When I'm awake alone, like tonight, I find myself checking the back door 4 times in as many hours - just in case. I would never consider unlocking it even to put milk bottles out, let alone go out. What upsets me more than any of the niggling things I have got used to is that I can't go out on my own and revel in the darkness that used to be my panacea (cure-all).

What help, if any, can I offer? First of all, the movement of a body part when having an attack. It came instinctively to me, and I have not spoken to another sufferer to ask if this is a technique they use, but bear it in mind if you don't know how to cope. It helped me feel slightly less insane to know that it was simply a matter of control. Talk to your GP, unlike depression medication, stuff designed especially for panic attacks seems to do the job of killing the physical symptom, even if it is not a long-term aid. I found that any help was better, and that I could deal with my problems better if I was not living in fear of another attack. I still can't go to bed at night though, unless I am so exhausted or wasted that I can't not go. To get out? I cannot tell you, I am not yet out myself. But even if all you do is a carbon copy of this op, which I'm sure is going to be a carbon copy of another out there - telling people is essential. I was scared I was going to go insane before. That is still a minor fear, but I was more scared that nobody would know what had happened to me. Getting it all down on paper has helped me gain a clearer picture in my head of what is going on, has given me advice from others (and I'm sure more will come in the comme
nts, which I thank you all for in advance), and more than anything has reminded me that there is a whole world out there and I am part of it.

Good luck to anyone unfortunate enough to be where I have been/am at.

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