It Started

I was sitting there feeling fear run through me as I lightly bounced about in the seat and what I remember most was how loud the noise of metal grinding against metal was as one carriage rose and the other would fall. It was fear I had not felt before. Not on a train any way. Even although I had been in a train crash 13 years before never in the many times I had been on a train after had I felt fear. Not just fear but irrational fear. In fact I never felt or thought much about the journey other than noticing people and what might be blurring past the window. I always found travelling by train relaxing. Its how we got to Amsterdam earlier that year and how I travelled alone from Paris to Bordeaux 4 years earlier. How I travelled to Suffolk a few times a year each year for holiday with my uncle and aunt. How we went up to Inverness for new year. The list goes on.

So this was irrational. Very irrational. I wasn't sure where it had eminated from. But the noise of the train was so loud on that short 20 minute journey from my town to Glasgow. I felt vulnerable. It did not feel safe. It felt like it might come off the rails at any minute and thoughts on this and other disasters fired through my head as the noise grew too loud to stand as I sat agitated praying for it to be over soon. No doubt somewhere in my subconsciousness that train crash had been pulled out the archives and I was somehow reliving it.

It was some time in 2002. I remember feeling strangely weak and breathless on the walk to the train station and somewhat lightheaded. I remember when I got off that train I felt overwhelmed by people and noise in the city as I struggled about slowly trying not only to find my way to where I had to go but trying also not to move too quickly as to get out of puff. I found the place I had to go for the exam and after going through the door I was greeted by a big stair case. I could feel fear peaking. Thoughts returned to weeks before in Edinburgh on the week long study course for this Database Administrator exam. And that moment when I ran up the stairs and found when I got to the classroom I could not breathe. More than that actually I actually felt I was suffocating and there was some invisible cling film over my nose and mouth. Something that I think has stayed with me ever since and certainly played into that moment. So I took things really slowly taking one step at a time at the pace of a 100 year old man. Little did I know that although I would not have my first panic attack until 2 years later and the agoraphbic inducing full blow panic attack for another 4 years the road to this current situation has started. It started there.

The year I went to Prague by bus with the woman who the following year would be my wife. All good. No anxiety but also maybe a reluctance to go out too far. It was something that was becoming more common. I was finding myself less inclined to venture. On a holiday with a friend in Tenerife much to his frustrations I never left the complex at night except for once and on that occassion I felt so uncomfortable I cut it short. But in this year 2002 I had gone to Prague by bus as I said. And also the course I was doing meant I'd had to fly to London, stay there for 2 weeks and fly back again. I had, and still have, a fear of flying so the travelling was a nightmare. Coming back the apprehension over the flight was so bad that rather than spend an hour in the pub at the airport dulling my fear with alcohol I paid £50 to get an earlier flight, only an hour earlier, just so I could get it over and done with. Fear while travelling, train crash and episode of not breathing ( or at least feeling that was the case). Every little thing holds hands and creates a chain of events to a destination.

Fears maybe came easier. I remember years before doing my back in going out the door to work and could not move for a week. Around this time despite it not being a problem for all those years it started to creep into my thoughts creating fears. Such a simple thing causing immobility and pain. I had gone down the stairs and as I remembered I had a bin bag to take out I turned and grabbed it as I descended, got a few steps, felt a stabbing pain. came out in a cold sweat and had to sit down straight away. In the end I had to crawl up the stairs and through the flat to get to bed. But now I was starting to think: what if? What if something as easy as that happened at work? How would I get home (it was 30 miles drive)? What would I do? How stupid would I look laying in a room full of people on my back unable to move? Then other things. I started noticing being ill at work and getting annoyed. Started feeling ill when they showed signs of being ill. Wondered if I'd get so ill I would struggle driving home or get stuck on the road somewhere. Then I started to notice I felt weird going out at lunchtime. I found it difficult to walk too far without getting out of breath. I found just walking a short distance I would feel off balance. I was starting to feel heavily fatigued all of the time. At my desk in the afternoon I would feel on the point of sleep and so would have to go for a walk in the fresh air but this again brought the problem of getting out of breath.

Getting out of breath or getting no air started to become a real problem. Even just sitting at my desk I would sometimes feel I was getting no air and I spend many times in the cubicals trying to unblock my nose convinced it was block. It drove me up the wall so much one day that I drove out to the chemist at lunch time and got a nasal spray to use when it happened. But it all accumulated: breathlessness, fatigue and worry. Worry over finding a new job. Worry over getting the sack as they had no work for me. Worry over how to fill my day. Aside from worry there was the tediousness of it all. Sometimes 2 hours to get to work sitting mostly in traffic to spend 8 hours at a desk with nothing to do and then that same journey back home. I started to feel more and more fatigued.

I did not see the link but this was about the time I started going to the GP sure there was something physically wrong with me and getting nowhere. I even went to a chemist for a free diabetes test as all the symptoms seemed to match. I was going to the shops and getting more and more out of breath just trying to get there even though its only quarter of a mile away. And then I started to find myself getting more and more agitated in the queues until I was eventually bordering on panic. So nothing felt right and that was why I was back and fourth to the GPs but they could find nothing wrong.

And then one day I remember in 2003 going to the shops with my wife and holding my daughter in my arms, who was a few months old. Something scarey happened. It was really hard to describe. Everything that should have been familiar just felt alien. I felt totally detatched from it all and like I was seeing it from another dimension or something. I remember it clearly as we were just walking through the doors. People were walking not in slow motion but slower and the lights seemed too bright and the sounds were all mixed into one great murmur. I had to leave. I had to get home. I left my wife seething rightly at being left with no explanation to shop with a baby in her arm while I just left as quickly as I could. I was convinced something bad had happened. Something to do with my brain. This was not normal, it was as abnormal as it got. I was scared out my whits. When I got home I just crashed face first into the bed and intent in ripping my head apart for want of a better plan but instead fell into a deep sleep.

I should say as scary as this was the reason I am posting about all these things is the CBT. I have been doing that the past few weeks and its sinking in now. I am understanding how panic works, develops into a disorder and is maintained. With this all these things have been resurfacing as if showing me my own route to where I am now. But not only that showing me exactly how and why they happened. Take that episode there as an example. As I said it scared the life out of me. It would scare the life out of anyone, believe me. When your mental health, your sanity and maybe your ultimate mortality all are put into question out of the blue I think even the bravest and most fearless of people would flinch. Now though I see it for what it is. Its a symptom of anxiety/panic named unreality. Although I could not see it at the time there would have been a lot of anxiety building up. I already said getting to the shops had become a problem and queuing was getting me very uncomfortable so there would have been a lot of anticipatory anxiety. Also I did have a lot of worry. I thought I was seriously ill at the time and the doctors were just not finding it. I knew something was wrong. I had very little sleep because the little one was up crying 2 or 3 times a night. All this and more brought it to a head in a panic attack. Lots of things can happen in a panic attack. Its fight or flight and as I just said effectively when it happened with nothing to fight I took the flight option. I could go through every function of fight or flight but will only say what was relevant here. One symptom is that the pupils dilate to let in more light and it creates a kind of tunnel vision in order to focus more attentively on danger and this in turn makes the outside would seem unreal because its familiar yet strangely different. The mind goes into high alert looking for danger so that brings a sort of sensory overload and this is well noted in some people who have come through real dangers where they have felt things sort of slowed down in the moment but related it to the danger. Simple fight or flight. So that is all that was happening but because I did not now this it scared the shit out of me. 

Anyway these things started to snowball. All these little memories that I had forgotten about are now popping back into my head as if mapping a path. In 2004 I remember again carrying my daughter and getting panic. We were at a bridge and had gone down the side to get near the water. I had to carry my daughter, who was about 1 at the time, up the steep slope and as I got to the top I had to put her down with a bout of breathlessness sure I was going to go blue in the face and need an ambulance. We started to walk to the next town just a little bit away but I felt so bad we had to turn back and go home.

I remember at the funeral of my wife's friend's son panicking as the doors were closed and locked in the crematorium. I remember standing in the soundproof box at the church for my wife's gran's funeral glad to be away from the congregation and the relief later when my father in law told me he was going to ask me to carry the coffin but could not see me. I remember the panic standing up in front of the congregation at my daughter's christening and the fight not to leave. I remember being at Blairdrummond Safari Park in 2005 and trying a swing with my daughter and my whole balance turning on its head scaring the life out of me- again. In fact everything was scaring me. Panic in a traffic jam in Manchester and sitting at the back of the church on my own near the door during the christening using my other daughter as an excuse once again at church. I also remember the first panic when my parents visited and after leaving the room to calm down on bed falling asleep- twice that happened.

Oh I could go on and bore any readers to panic so I won't. The point is for anyone going through this in time you will see all the little things that built towards it. What I was begining to wonder what is the point of it all? Why do I need to know? But I guess its to show it for exactly what it is. And maybe even also to show that these things were done very easily so in theory can be done as easy. Its also though worth noting that this is therefore not one big thing but hundreds of little things all congealed together in a sticky mess. And it can be undone. Bit by bit like it started it can be undone and I think it is why I am seeing these things because at the same time now I am starting to see those things I could not do a year ago which I can now do and maybe its like a sort of regression back to the old self. Or at least a new better self.