Panic, or Knowing Fear

I'll be the first person to admit that, as babyish and occasionally hypochondriac as I may be, I tend to try and tough things out rather than make a big deal out of them. Most of the time, it's because past history has proven such issues to be of little import or consequence; after a few false alarms, you tend to think twice about crying wolf.

I should have cried wolf so many times in the past few days that I must look like the world's biggest idiot. Of course, at each point along the line -- each time I felt a little intake of breath that was a bit too sharp, every walk that ended with a touch of what I perceived to be lightheadedness, each time I swore I felt a tiny little flutter in my chest -- it never turned into anything and simply went away. I figured it wasn't worth making such a big deal about.

Let me be the first to admit it, then. I was fucking dumb. Because until you sense something really drastic about to happen to your well-being, you really can't know the true meaning of fear.

So imagine, if you will...

You, with a very short history of events akin to those detailed above, are sitting alone in your office, finishing your lunch and waiting for 1:30pm and your scheduled office hours to start. Imagine that the office is perhaps a bit warmer than comfortable room temperature, but nothing out of the ordinary. You've just finished a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich and a granola bar, and you're reading a random Wikipedia article. Then, all of a sudden, you have that brief little flutter again.

It surprises you, but you decide you're probably alright and that the episode, like all the others, will pass. So you stand up, take a deep breath, and sit down, taking a sip from your almost-full bottle of water. You continue reading your article, but notice that the episode is not subsiding. Even with more water, it doesn't quite feel right, and you can't put your finger on what's going wrong.

Before long, you stand up, believing that perhaps a walk around will settle yourself. But the moment you stand up, you don't feel better. You feel incredibly lightheaded, your balance feels frighteningly compromised, and before you can even register what might be wrong, you become conscious of the beating of your heart. Alarmingly conscious. You grip the wall of your cubicle and put your fingers to your neck. You feel your pulse almost jumping out of your skin. Without even looking at your watch, you can tell that it's beating at almost two beats per second, and your breathing becomes instinctively heavy as you panic.

You walk in and out of your office, trying to shake the feeling, trying to decide whether you should tell someone just how close you are to passing out on the floor. After the longest minute of your life, you begin to feel strong enough to head downstairs to the graduate office, where you tell the secretary that this doesn't feel anywhere close to right, and you have to figure out exactly how to tell your girlfriend to get to campus as soon as possible to take you to the health center, but that she shouldn't freak out.

You get to the health center and, though your pulse has dropped again, it's still probably over 90 bpm, and you can feel it. You sit nervously as you wait to plead your case to the receptionist; then as you wait to sit in with the triage nurse, peering nervously onto the computer screen as she enters your vital signs; then as you wait again to see the doctor, forced to listen uncomfortably to a conversation between two Asian girls in their native tongues when all you want to hear is silence.

Then, when the doctor does take you in, you sit and answer questions about your condition, spilling out the whole truth in a way that feels both cathartic and deceptive, since you've keep seemingly little things to yourself for so long and you can't help but regret that now, wondering why you ever thought that was a good idea in the first place. You give details about your family history that alarm you further, subject yourself to a perfunctory cardiac exam and, afterwards, to an EKG that will turn up depressingly normal. You accept a prescription for lab work and the promise that they will set up an appointment with the hospital to have you fitted for a 24-hour Holter monitor, in the hopes that one or more of these episodes might be caught. So that someone may be able to tell you just what the fuck happened to you in the past three hours.

And then you have to go home and figure out how to tell your parents without scaring the shit out of them.

You imagine all that?

I wish I could just imagine it, just like I wish I'd just been imagining all the "stupid little things" that were happening to me over the past couple days. I wish I was imagining it all right now, but I'm not. It's real. It's all part of a painful, upsetting reality that has so many potential consequences that I wish I wouldn't have had to think about. My goddamn birthday is coming up in four days, and all I can think about is that I hope to hell that what happened today doesn't happen again between now and then.

This all just got way too real. And way too fucking scary. And I can't ignore it anymore. And I can't make it go away.

That wasn't imagination. That was my day.

So, how was your day?