panic attack number 000001

The first panic attack I ever had was in a campground in California. It was the summer before sixth grade and my parents buckled my brother and me into the back of our white volvo station wagon for a six week trip across the country.

My brother and I slept head to toe in tiny brown tent which leaked at the seams and smelled like it. The night of my first panic attach I crawled into my sleeping bag and pulled out my flashlight and had this thought: if I don't think about my breathing, it will stop. The thought came from nowhere and was suddenly, everything.

I started to cry, gasping and shaking, suddenly terribly sure that I if I fell asleep I would die. My brother tried to comfort me. My parents yelled at us from across the campsite to be quiet and go to sleep. And so I cried myself to sleep, to death.

You already know how this ends. Or rather, what this begins. I woke up the next morning, my brain having miraculously taken over for my labored efforts and steered me safely through the night. If only that one night was enough to help me let go of the obsessional fear (which, now that I think about it, was likely more OCD-related than anxiety/panic). If only I didn't have spend the next four years obsessing about my breathing each night before bed.

* * *

How do we come to terms with brains and bodies and nervous systems that are, at truly significant moments, entirely out of touch with reality? I used to obsess about the possibility that if something really happened -- when that long-obsessed-over heart attack/stroke/asthma attack finally came for me -- that I would have trained myself to well to ignore these feelings of impending doom that I would ignore the real thing.

Of course, the reality is that I haven't yet trained myself to ignore those feelings. Nor has the heart attack come for me. Yet.