Don't Panic...Attack (reminiscence)

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From my youth onwards, I've been known as a cool head.  After something unexpected happened, after emergency measures had been taken, those around me have typically said something like, "Look at this guy Byron.  Didn't bat an eye!  Boy, you can't rattle him!."  So, in times of pressure, I've just about always been looked on as someone who doesn't show alarm, doesn't panic, maintains a calm demeanour and a steady approach to the situation.

After more than fifty years of having been described this way, from time to time, then, it seemed particularly ironic recently when I - me - Mr. Cool - the unflappable - I experienced a series of what had to have been "panic attacks."

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I was involved in a long-range project: de-cluttering our family house after 25 years and then packing the remaining books, clothes, chotchkies, and other things that we would move with us to a smaller home in another city.

Preparing to leave those familiar environs for new digs involved a certain amount of stress, I suppose, but it was clearly (to me) the good sort of stress, the excitement of looking forward to new adventures.  And, by the way, making such a move was the result of planning and anticipation for over ten years; that added to its "feel-good" quality.  Packing up our treasures to take with us also felt good; after all, they just are nice things.

Selling, giving away, and ditching the other stuff was laced with nostalgia and some reluctance; but it was never a serious problem.  Such a sorting really should have been done years earlier, etc...  AND the work itself, I have to say, was a real pleasure.  Once we located sources of good boxes and packing supplies, wrapping things up and storing them safely away was simply fun.  Hauling the full boxes here and there provided just the right amount of physical work, not too much, and I was enjoying employing all my skills at the packing arts.

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On the other hand, I did have to acknowledge that all that dust which had collected over the decades in the back corners and on the bottom shelves... and all that other dust which came in with the used boxes we were rounding up, all the dust stirred up my dormant asthma.  My little inhaler twice a day had been quite enough to deal with the irritants in the air during "normal" activity, but it wasn't up to the challenge of all this extra dust.

I monitored the situation prudently, or so I thought, and was not at all concerned that when this little job - oh well okay, this big job - was finished, my lungs and I would bounce right back to normal.  So even if my lungs were congested, I wasn't feeling stressed about it.

*

So for two or three months, I was basically enjoying myself, beavering away on the de-cluttering and packing.  The first puzzle I came across with myself was that my appetite began to wane.  I was doing more consistent physical labor than I had for years.  I may not have been over-doing it, but I was doing it all right.  And at first, as might have been predicted, I needed more calories to replace those I was working off each day.

But after a month or six weeks, I began to notice that after cleaning my plate, I wasn't looking around for a little more.  Then I was finding that even to clean my plate in the first place was a chore rather than a necessity or a pleasure.  I didn't feel hungry later either.  If in times of stress I was Mr. Cool, at meal times I was Mr. Appetite... Only, not so much several weeks into the pre-moving project.  

That was odd... Something that was me, and had been for decades and decades, suddenly didn't seem to apply anymore.  (I didn't particularly want to mention it either: maybe first because I didn't want to acknowledge it, and also because my wife A----- was generally unwell but she did still pride herself - justly - on the innovation, variety, overall tastiness, and healthfulness of her cooking.  She was disgusted at her own tendency to lose her appetite during her own illness.  I didn't want to be adding to her unhappiness...)

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And then the other thing:

My wife has always been the lighter sleeper.  She always said that as soon as my head hit the pillow, it was off to unconsciousness for me.  This was a blessing too: it was as though "When the going gets tough, the tough - i.e. me - gets to sleep."

Also, because of a long-time heart condition, I was "pushing fluids" all day every day, so for the last ten years or so, I was getting up to go to the bathroom 3-4 times a night, routinely.  A----- became even less attuned to what happened to me during the night than she had been; she didn't want to make it even harder than it could have been for her to stay asleep or get back to sleep herself.

As it turned out, though, that meant that another fundamental change in the person whom I had come to know as myself found himself changing. ...Because as the de-cluttering and packing went on, I became more and more afflicted with the dreaded insomnia.

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Ever since college, I have especially liked falling asleep while lying on my back, maybe even propped up on my sit-up pillow reading or watching t. v.  That just seems delicious to me, to slip quietly away "sitting" up there comfortably.  As a married man, I gradually learned that if I was going to snore, it was more likely to happen when I was sleeping on my back, so that way to slip into sleep was pretty well out of reach most of the time.  And I didn't have to, since Mr. Fall Asleep could nod off just when the pillow came within sight.

Since I've been waking up several times each night, I developed the habit of waking up on one side and lying back down on the other side when I returned to bed.  I had an FM radio on my bedside table, and it was my inveterate custom to put an ear plug in one ear when lying on the other side as I listened every night to Classical Music Through the Night.  When the morning news came on at 6 a.m. and the news came on the radio, I'd switch on the CD player to extend my music-accompanied snooze until the last minute.

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The first stage of the new problem during de-clutering and packing did not involve getting to sleep the first time.  That went "normally" enough.  When I returned from my trip to the bathroom, however, I couldn't just put in the music-bearing ear plug, lie down, and sail back off to dreamland.  I didn't feel comfortable somehow.  I'd try lying on the other side.  Still uncomfortable.  I learned that my best chance at getting back to sleep was to replace my sit-up pillow on the bed and lie on my back.

Soon, I'd have to leave a night-light on in the bathroom across our bedroom.  The final stage required me not only to go to the bathroom as usual but to spend a few minutes prowling around a little, looking out the kitchen window into the backyard or checking out the streetlight in the neighbor's front yard.  Sometimes I'd do that several times and lie quietly in the semi-darkness for a while before I would doze off again for another hour or so.

What seemed to be keeping me awake was this awful feeling I was having.  It seemed like it was in my stomach or chest, and it was weighing me down.  I finally had to wake A----- up just to whine about how jumpy and creeped-out I was feeling.  Talking through it was a little therapeutic, and of course so was her sympathy.  And I did ultimately get another hour or two of sleep that night.

I took to describing my icky feeling that kept me awake as a deep kind of fear or, more accurately, dread.  I just couldn't make myself vulnerable by going to sleep because something was scaring me; I was dreading what was going to happen.  I knew it was loony; I knew I wasn't in danger of anything but a sleepless night.  But that description was the best way I could find to capture what I was feeling.

Try as I might to control my groundless fears, I was panicking;  Mr. Cool was being attacked by irrational panic.

*

When I had the chance to try to describe this experience to the various nurses looking after me in the hospital after an apparently unrelated health crisis, they all focused on my diminished lung capacity - which was very apparent to them in my lab reports, in the fact that I had a tube for which the nurses were responsible pumping oxygen into my nose at 4 liters per hour (which must be quite a lot), as well as the fact that I had two or three regular visits from pulmonary therapists every day.

"Well of course you were panicked," they would say.  "When you lay flat down, it seemed like you might not be able to keep getting your breath.  That would scare anybody."

*

I don't know about "anybody", I guess, but it sure scared me.  And once in a great while I can still feel little hints now and then of that kind of deep dread weighing down on my chest.  Just a tiny bit of that again now recalls the whole rotten experience.

I've always felt sorry for those poor folks who commit suicide, but it was always impossible for me to imagine what they must be feeling when they conclude they'd rather be dead.   It gives the word "depression" a whole new meaning for me today when think back about my own "panic attacks."


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