Panic

Anyone who has ever done any in-depth studies in the medical field already knows a few disturbing things about their brains: Your brains are essential components of the way you function. But they’re also finicky, prank-calling bastards that don’t know all the things we tend to think they know, or should know, or remember. In other words, your brain is a frat megadouchebro that literally lives inside your head. Even those of us who are highly intelligent and have excellent memories will end up having brain plops more frequently than we care to admit. And for those of us with significant mental issues, those brain plops tend to stick with us and build on top of each other. The common protocol when they do that is to simply forget about them and ignore them, but that method doesn’t actually make problems and incidents go away. It merely lets them accumulate more and more weight. And what happens when the brain accumulates too many of them is explainable through basic physics: The whole apparatus crashes and crushes what’s below.

The brain can crash. And if it does, there’s a chance it may treat the heart to a series of uncontrollable sensations and feelings which no one will see coming. It can treat you to little simulations of heart attacks and strokes. The attack that smacked me back in the beginning of September couldn’t have come at a worse time. I was starting to get treatment for the high blood pressure that was a longtime issue of mine. The workouts and healthy eating habits I had adopted over the previous few years had been getting results; my pressure had fallen back to minor highs rather than the disasters they had been back when my pressure had just become a real issue. But they still necessitated medications, and the doctor had advised me to start using one of those home monitors. For a couple of weeks, everything went just fine, and when my meds arrived, they seemed to be doing their good right on the spot. My pressure took a sharp drop almost on the nose. Then one Sunday evening, I made a terrible mistake and took my pressure basically right after dinner. And it was a heavy dinner: Chicken pot pie, root beer, full dessert. Naturally, my pressure was going to be through the roof no matter what. Which it was.

Part of the reason I obsess over living a lifestyle based in health and routine is because I have an enormous backlog of psychological issues which dates back nearly 20 years. I find it easier to generally exist and make sense of the rest of the world if I have a rock-solid routine to center my days around and a goal to be working toward. But while doing those things can help mitigate tough psychological problems, those problems are still going to exist on a backburner, simmering and festering until they jump out and shock you. And combined with my usual problems, as well as a new relationship, a broken car, and a six-week-old move which I was already starting to question (in part because of an asshole housemate who busted my car in an attempt to fix a problem with it), something in my brain snapped. It was like a flood of nervous heat, blurred vision, and jitters washed right over me, and for the entirety of the night, it never went away. I didn’t get a wink of sleep, so I had to work in full zombie mode the following day.

Sleep came in fits over the next few days, and my body never seemed to let go. My mind ran through every worst-case scenario it could conjure up, and my heart palpitated with every last one of them. And my mind can be a creative beast. Every time I thought everything was over, something new popped into my head. There were numerous times when I thought everything was over, only to have another panic attack, and my vision stayed blurred for days. It wasn’t until Thursday that I felt a sudden and odd jolt, and a part of me felt liberated. My vision was clear and my palpitations were less pronounced, like my body finally felt the urge to return control to me properly. But then the opposite problem developed: I wasn’t getting enough circulation, and my entire left side started to tingle. I made it home as fast as I could and blasted through a workout, and that set things right, saving me a trip to an emergency room. Or, in my case, at least delaying it.

It was now that I was feeling normal again, at least to a degree. The invasive thoughts and palpitations, though, never entirely went away. They assailed me regularly over the weekend, and another problem soon started to set in: Insomnia. Weed tinctures and melatonin were becoming major parts of my nightly ritual. And they didn’t seem to be helping very much. I struggled to find a couple of hours of sleep per night, and in fact started to FEAR sleeping at some point. In the meantime, I continued to think of worst-case scenarios, which was bad enough. Even worse was the fact that I kept looking them up online. Everything I looked up seemed to reveal some new horror that I managed to talk myself into believing. And after ten horrible, uncomfortable days, I decided I was finished. I woke up on a Wednesday a week and a half after this panic attack began intending to go to work like usual and tough it out like usual. Just when I was about to make my final turn into the transit center, though, I decided I’d finally had enough and drove straight to the Swedish Medical emergency room. I called in sick and was there pretty much all morning, and while the staff ran several tests on me, they couldn’t find anything seriously wrong. My vitals, in fact, were all stellar. I had been more or less expecting that exact response, but going to the hospital did leave me with an important effect: The all-encompassing panic attacks finally stopped.

My body and mind were starting to feel like mine again, but the insomnia returned with a vengeance. It’s a well-known fact that Navy SEALS get four hours of sleep per night when they go through the infamous Hell Week during their training. I got maybe four hours of sleep, total, in the span of a single week at this point. Where’s my trident? The lack of sleep didn’t go unnoticed by my coworkers. I finally abandoned the cannabis completely and lowered my melatonin dosage, and I also stopped drinking for the time. What I think happened was that the melatonin, a natural chemical emanating from the pineal gland which causes drowsiness, had managed to reset my internal clock. In layman’s terms, I was dealing with jet lag without having traveled anywhere. THIS was something I had no choice but to tough out.

The connection between mental health and physical health occurred to me after a few nights of palpitations and no sleep, and I started giving thought to it. My doctor thought I had a mental problem and wanted me to undergo a neuropsychological analysis in order to learn more. I turned down the idea on the thought that I didn’t consider it necessary at that time, but my panic attack made me think it over. No matter how controlled I believed my mental problems to be, a bad pressure reading shouldn’t be able to cause a wholesale psychotic meltdown that puts someone in the hospital. It was time to take the nuclear option on my brain.

Here’s a thing they don’t teach you in school about finding a good therapist: It’s HARD. Therapists exist for an important purpose. The mind has normal modes of operation, same as the rest of your body. And like the rest of your body, when things aren’t running the way they’re supposed to up there, you need a specialist who can fix it. There are specialists who exist for the various aspects of your mind which can go wrong, same as there are doctors who specialize in different parts of your body. Unfortunately, no one bothers to teach anyone the little details of the brain, so the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist looks superfluous. Fortunately, my insurance was able to offer me references and referrals. That made the process a lot easier, and when given the option, I chose a psychiatrist just in case I would end up needing more meds. Another problem arose in my work schedule: Save emergencies – which, in the field, occur in the forms of suicide threats or threats to hurt others – mental health is a five-day-a-week job, and you can probably guess which five days they are. That narrowed my options down quite a bit because I was already working through a set of physical treatments and was at the point where I couldn’t just ask for more time to deal with my head. Ah, the American health care system!

November shaped to be an active month in my book. I had a proper physical, my neuropsychological analysis, and my vacation. I DID feel relief, though, when an outside referrer managed to set me an appointment with a mental health expert who did Saturdays. In the meantime, my chest hasn’t entirely let everything go – it still tingles in times of intense emotion. Sadly, that’s basically all of the story I have for now. Since nursing myself back to full strength is going to be a long process, this is likely going to be an ongoing series, so stay tuned.