Okay. What I had was probably not a true panic attack and not quite as intense as what they describe.
I did have a situation with a terrible boss where I would start to have my heart race as I approached work every day, and I would cough a lot, and vomit almost all the time.
Not me, but my wife has had them (none for years, thankfully). It was extremely disorienting for both of us the first time she had one. Ended up at the emergency room although the decision process on the need to do that was not crisp.
When I was diagnosed with panic attacks back in the nineties, the narrative was very different from the HuffPo one, and I'm a bit suspicious of "a panic attack is ipso facto the Worst Thing Ever and you feel like you're going to die and it hurts, etc etc". I just had breathing difficulties and felt like I had to concentrate on my breathing or ,my body would stop breathing - as if the automatic breathing response thing wasn't working for me. They told me to breathe into a paper bag and that would help me calm down, which it generally did.
I've had a couple of epic ones where I felt....um....reallly panicky, like something very bad was about to happen or I was about to drop over dead, and I couldn't think. During these, it seemed perfectly reasonable that I might just randomly keel over for no reason at all, despite being relatively young and in good health.
I get mild ones sometimes where I feel a general sensation of doom and paralysis and can't focus.
I'm sure the big epic ones exist and are terrible, but I feel like the popular narrative about panic attacks has gotten ridiculously dramatic in the past ten years. Possibly because people don't listen when you say "sometimes I get intensely scared and anxious and I feel like I can't do anything or focus and it's really awful".
I can only call them mild, compared to some of those descriptions, but I started having panic attacks a year before I went on the job market. They'd happen when I was alone, and didn't recognize what was going on in time to distract myself. The fear of failure and the feelings of helplessness would build quickly, and then physical symptoms would start: racing heartbeat, sweaty palms, heavy breathing--I could talk myself down, but it took a while. I've got tenure coming up in a couple years--Ive had a couple small ones again. It's frustrating, because though I've learned some coping strategies, there doesn't seem to be an off switch.
5.2: I've had those. They stopped by 25 or so. I never called them anything.
My sister gets panic attacks. Horrible ones that last for days. During an attack she's basically unable to function other than to tell people to leave her alone curled up in bed. She's on meds that take the edge off, but she still has to watch out carefully for triggering events. Essentially anything that would normally make a person a little jumpy is enough to trigger an attack. Not every time, but often enough that it's a problem.
As a personal update, a single small pharmaceutical intervention earlier this week made me suddenly able to fully relax my muscles and fully expand my lungs and sleep again, and all of that was enough that I haven't needed more since.
Before I knew what mine were, the physical symptoms weren't the worst part because I was so focused on the (irrational, made-up thing) that I was afraid of in the moment. (I started getting them at the end of my first year of college, and they were associated with not-reality-based fears about physical safety--I was worrying constantly about break-ins at my house or job, being carjacked, being abducted on the street, etc. Instead of a fleeting thought of "double check the door locks!" I became unable to move onto thinking about something else and would become fixated on all the ways I could be hurt. And developed a little, minor, OCD-ish thing about door locks that still hasn't totally gone away, 15 years later.)
Once I started seeing a counselor (who used cognitive behavioral therapy methods), and I could rationally evaluate the threats outside the context that would lead to panic spirals, I was able to separate the details of what my brain was fabricating for me to be scared of from the physical symptoms of the panic attack. Once I understood that physical panic symptoms --> psychological worries, and not the other way around, I could take a moment to decide if I was worrying about something real, and if not, just focus on getting through the physical symptoms through a variety of behavioral tricks. Still not especially pleasant, because this approach involves some dissociation from your body--a realization that your heart is pounding, vision is blurry, fingers are tingling, mouth tastes sweet FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON is a disconcerting thing. I had to stop trusting my body's fight-or-flight instinct. It was broken.
For me, the thing that made the most long term difference was reducing my overall level of anxiety on a day to day, and minute to minute basis. If I'm already anxious, it's much easier to tip into a panic attack. If I have a lower background level of anxiety, things that could induce a panic attack just make me generally anxious. My beloved caffeine is the number one culprit, and to this day, it's the first thing I have to cut when I start to feel a little too worked up.
Panic attacks apparently respond well to cognitive behavior therapy. You basically tell yourself that the physical symptoms don't mean anything and that you are perfectly safe and that can stop the spiraling out of control.
or what 11 said. It apparently works much better than using CBT to deal with depression or addiction.
Yeah, I have to agree that my physical symptoms were never as bad as described in the article. The hardest thing for me was accepting the total disconnection between the real world and what my body was up to. Especially as a woman, learning to tell myself to calm the fuck down because I wasn't in danger from strangers in the bushes was not an easy thing to learn.
I also did well with CBT. The big girls have done trauma-focused CBT with really great results, so I recommend that if any of the other unfogged-adjacent kids with serious anxiety or histories of abuse etc. There'd probably be a version that would be useful for most kids. They learn where in their bodies they feel their feelings and how to name those and then work on writing their life story and identifying feelings through that, and it was simple but very powerful for them both.
A lot of people love CBT. And it is "evidence-based". I'm personally dubious of some of the research with certain populations, and the lack of tons of research on other types of interventions is not evidence that it doesn't work. (Let's just say that I worked on a demonstration project, and it was clear that I and the people at the other agencies involved in the project were not doing a lot of the CBT-type interventions the way that we were supposed to, because we really upset some of our clients when we did. I have heard of other stories from actual therapists who participated in CBT research; they said that they did a lot of psychodynamic stuff)
For some people it's great; other people like other modalities.
Still not especially pleasant, because this approach involves some dissociation from your body--a realization that your heart is pounding, vision is blurry, fingers are tingling, mouth tastes sweet FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON is a disconcerting thing. I had to stop trusting my body's fight-or-flight instinct. It was broken.
This isn't my goal. My goal is to learn to recalibrate so that I can trust my body's fight or flight signals. I have mild dissociative tendencies anyway, and I think that I need to work on counter-acting them.
I used to have mild panic attacks on the subway after 9/11. Good times.
17: You're not the first person I've known who has said that.
Had my first around the time I was 25 and then they got pretty bad when I was in a PhD program. I associate the onset of a panic disorder per se with the day in what I swear was October of 2000 that it snowed something like three feet in Chicago though of course it wasn't a discrete event that way. At their worst, they made me some mild version of agoraphobic. They're really infrequent now, keinahora, partly because I learned ways to make them less bad (the most effective of which was just a sort of relax and accept tactic that went like "I am having a panic attack and it will suck because they do but it will be over at some point") and partly because things change.
A friend of mine fell on an escalator while wearing a long scarf which got caught somewhere. She lost parts of her teeth and got a bunch of stitches. She's grateful she didn't die. A couple of people have in similar circumstances. She needed some help dealing with the agoraophobia.
a single small pharmaceutical intervention
Oh I should credit that, too. A benzo stops panic attacks very effectively for me, so just having Klonopin around I think helps me not get them. But lots of things contributed to me not having the background anxiety that peaked in panic attacks, including dropping out of my PhD program and getting a very fluffy cat.
Now that we're distinguishing between minor and major panic attacks, I feel like I should clarify what I meant by "proper" in the OP - I'm with Apo in 1, on any scale. (Oh god what if this didn't require clarification)
16.last: Yeah, the body/mind dissociativeness of the CBT approach (at least in the way it was taught to me) is definitely a downside. One of the most helpful tools on that front for me was Gavin DeBecker's "Gift of Fear", which advocates for listening to your gut when it's fearful. For me, it gave me some ways of thinking about how to determine when my gut was reacting to something real, and when it was being crazy. But I still have to do that double check, which is not ideal. But better than perpetual panic attacks!
I've only ever had panic attacks as a result of pharmaceutical interventions.
Aw, years and years ago I responded to someone's question about therapy on here by mentioning that CBT also stood for something else though I wasn't sure if this was the kind of blog where one would mention such a thing. It was my first comment.
Also I don't think my panic attacks were as bad as the ones described in the link. I mean they were awful. But I didn't cry or throw up or anything.
These days I go in more for plain old gnawing-away-the-soul anxiety that hangs out but rarely punches me in the face.
And then we fought about the mayor of Houston!
I don't know what the line is between PANIC ATTACKS and mere attacks of panic, but I have gone through periods of getting quite unpleasant versions of the latter, at least, waking me up in the middle of the night. Ugh. Not lately, though, and I hope they stay far away.
28: Aw, that was hardly a fight!
After my mom died in August my usual mid-level anxiety became more of a double-over-with-stabbing-stomach-pain-pacing-around-hyperventilating-trying-not-to-pass-out kind of thing. I am much better now. There have been pharmaceuticals.
27: weirdly it doesn't come up until the very bottom* of the first page of google results (for me).
* aptly?
Another vote for CBT. I've never gotten the full-on, think-I'm-having-a-heart-attack panic attacks, but it's incredibly helpful for their milder siblings. That and heavy exercise.
OTOH ever since I quit my job my anxiety has basically subsided. I'm not sure I want to think about what that means for when I go back to work.
Had 'em while I was pregnant. They were especially focused on sensory overload issues, being touched, claustrophia, and paranoia. The idea of going into the subway at that point--mm.
In general I'm pretty calm.
34 My first month here before "I'm never getting a job again" anxiety took over, I was also pleasantly non-anxious. It would be neat if there were a way for work not to ruin one's life.
Since Josh mentioned heavy exercise, I'll throw in that strenuous exercise while dehydrated can cause panic attacks. The boyfriend and I went to a baseball game on a hot day a few summers ago. He went for his normal workout (3 miles on an elliptical) the nexy day and had a panic attack shortly after. The hyperventilating heart-attack kind. Apparently, high lactic acid/sodium lactate is well known to induce panic attacks (used in animal models), and if you're dehydrated enough to throw off sodium-potassium ratios, you get a slightly irregular heartbeat as a bonus. (Funny moment while he was getting 3 bags of IV rehydration was when the doc caught me in the hall and asked, "He's a bit tightly wound, yes?")
The highest levels of anxiety I've ever had happened when I tried to get off the benzo (Ativan) Rx given me for much milder anxiety right after the stroke in 2007. It took me about two weeks of tapering the stuff before I felt normal, which for me tends towards 'hypervigilant".
But no, I've never been incapacitated or had the full-on TV show variety.
38: You also hated beta blockers, but for me propranolol has been a godsend.
Anyway, I've had a few of the feels-like-dying attacks in my teens, but mostly lower-level anxiety where my calibration is just off and everything feels awful, like the last 10 days. Not being able to breathe properly always makes me anxious, so there's usually a week or two in the winter when I'm not sure whether I'm having anxiety attacks or am on my way to pneumonia. I guess it's lucky that it's usually pneumonia, but depends on your perspective.
Mine had their onset when I was 22 and had just moved to Iowa for my MFA. Winter was coming on, all my friends were in California, and suddenly my vision was going weird, I had the directionless fear and sense of suffocation/choking and my legs couldn't hold me up. I had no idea what panic attacks were (since the name makes it sound like an emotion rather than a disorder), and my best guess was that the Ecstasy I'd taken in college was somehow coming back and turning me into a drug casualty. I foresaw all my friends coming to visit me in the ward and me not remembering their names.
The acute attacks lasted, yes, about ten minutes, but they were so scary that I basically ate nothing and slept very little for seventy-two hours. I spent time on the phone with the university psychiatric hospital, who said that they could make an appointment for me in a month. I still don't understand how that was supposed to work. Finally I talked to my mom, and it turned out she'd had the same onset at the same age and could assure me I wasn't going to die or lose the power of speech. After that I was able to eat some oatmeal.
For about four to five years after that I had to plan things around the attacks (sit near the exit in auditoriums, don't drive where you can't pull over, choose easy-to-swallow food because of the choking sensation). As with Smearcase in 19, it was easy to see how chronic attacks can make one agoraphobic.
Xanax stopped them in the moment, and eventually I found the SSRI that would prevent onset and/or just got older and mellower. I've had almost none in the last few years.
Never had any, but I'm pretty much the poster child for Cartesian mind-body duality.
That's probably an interesting poster.
My daughter began getting panic attacks a couple of years ago. Fortunately, Mme. Foch had experience with them herself, because I would not have recognized them for what they were. The daughter has had attacks at school that were so extreme she was sent to the ER in a catatonic state. Benzos and SSRIs seem to help.
There was a period where I am convinced she unconsciously but deliberately allowed herself to progress from initial symptoms to full-blown panic attacks. She hated her school at the time, and subconsciously understood that having a panic attack was a ticket home. So where she might have been able to head it off by doing her breathing exercises and the other relaxation techniques she had learned from the therapist, she would let it continue. If true, that says a lot about how much she hated school, because the panic attacks were horrific and traumatizing for her. (We have since taken her out of that school, and the frequency of attacks is way down.)
Hrm. I just missed Halloween, but there's probably something useful to be done with a Ghost in a Machine, costume-wise.
Hawaii has a transparent habit of getting "injured" (owwww I bumped my arm) whenever we are focusing on her misbehavior. This is not a problem, and not related to the escalation business from the other day, just the vaguely super-diluted version of 45.
That's probably an interesting poster.
40: Definitely. I still have an old unopened bottle of Metoprolol sitting on the dining room table.
Somehow, way back as a kid, I learned to ignore the physical signs of anxiety. My heart rate can go way up and all that but no one who doesn't know me well can spot it. E.g. I'm told I seemed cool, calm and collected at the Ph.D. defense but I know, because I checked it, my heart rate was close to 200 bpm and sweat was soaking my socks just before going into the room.
My stepdaughter is always making a fuss about hurting herself. "I hurt my finger!" and then if we don't respond right away, "Didn't you hear me? Don't you care?" Since I'm contractually obliged to figure out a way to be the most annoying person in the room I developed a stock response, "Oh, my god! Are you ok? Do I have to perform an emergency fingerectomy?"
Rowan just posted on facebook a goodbye to his friends because he's going to jail and won't see them in a while. Stomach dropped, shaking, heart racing, prickly eyes here. Maybe leaving the medicine at home while I work wasn't the best choice, but at least maybe things are sort of done.
51: Sounds like the best outcome from what's gone down already. Still so sorry and much sympathy, Thorn!
(Maybe "them" should be "us?" Watching his comments and activity has been a weird dynamic and not a pleasant one for Lee or me.)
Hawaii has a transparent habit of getting "injured" (owwww I bumped my arm) whenever we are focusing on her misbehavior.
Young Mademoiselle Foch used to do this around that age.
50: "Let's amputate!" was our stock response for minor but overblown injuries. The kids survived all this psych trauma.
51: so sorry. You'll get through it without the meds, though Inwould totally want them if I were in your shoes right now.
47: I'm sorry I always seem to be Hawaiisplaining, but it sort of seems like she has some anxiety/OCD/sensory stuff (which I see as being a spectrum of sorts at that age) and it's possible that it's not deliberate but just that when emotions are high she experiences her body differently or something like that. Nia is also always "hurt" in that context and I think it's because her fight-or-flight stuff gets triggered and her body feels out of control and so "pain" etc. is amplified.
51: Oh, I guess this was expected but so sorry in the moment.
Watching his comments and activity has been a weird dynamic and not a pleasant one for Lee or me.
Would it make sense to hide him from your FB feed for a while? You don't have to unfriend him to do that.
59: Police asked me not to. I'm assuming that they're looking since I gave them the links to his page and his brother's, but I've also been taking and sending them screenshots just in case.
I mean, this is the good outcome. He seems all right with it and part of the plan (inasmuch as he had one) may have been to go to jail. Heck if I know. The physical panic stuff has subsided though the totally-fucking-sad response hasn't, and I'll be fine. I hope he'll be as all right as he can be.
I am so sorry for you and him that his life is working out that way.
Police asked me not to.
Ah. That's hard.
Are there links in the archive to background on what happened with Rowan? Last I remember we were looking at helping him get a car.
64: That was Colton, who's actually doing well and still on track to start nursing school in a few months. The story starts here and mostly stays there because I didn't want to clog all the comment threads with updates, especially when there weren't many updates.
Tell me things about beta blockers. I have asked doctors about using them for flying (no real plans, pre-pre-pre-contemplation) and they're dismissive. In fact the last one just moved right on to how he should prescribe one of the benzos where you forget everything afterward, which I thought sounded great actually, only then I got down to the pharmacy and he had given me good ol Klon, of which I have 40 in the medicine cabinet. But my idea is that beta blockers are, as I understand it, for the feedback loop of anxiety, and I really only have "I'm going to die now" fear on a plane, as I recall, when there's turbulence, but then it does the feedback loop thing. Surge of adrenaline, bodily sensation of fear, oh god look how terrified I am, must be something to be terrified about, more terror, GOTO 10.
66: Have you/your doctor considered Tenex? It's a blood pressure and anxiety drug but not a beta blocker, good for inhibiting fight-or-flight overreactions in PTSD.
No but that sounds very worth looking into.
66: IMX they definitely work at blocking betas. My kid takes a propranolol before doing any public speaking and the one I had lowered my anxiety-reactive BP considerably. It was the side-effects from chronic usage I couldn't stand. The intolerance for any exertion and for heat were driving me nuts. I've read about performers using propranolol for stage fright.
Absent any solid reason why you shouldn't try it for occasional use, I'd say go for it. IMX benzos are wonderful but really clingy frenemies, much harder to ditch than Luckies even.
51, 65: So sorry, Thorn - I had missed your comments from last week. Hugs for you. Big hugs.
69: I used to take my klonopin more regularly. Life is better in some ways, but I've also gotten better at thinking through things in the moment.
Slowing down my heart rate with the propranolol helped enormously. I'm on a pretty low dose. 10mg BID. Yup, performers take it for anxiety before performances--especially musicians.
66: Propranalol is also prescribed a lot to prevent migraine headaches, so I'm surprised your doctors are so dismissive.
I took Inderol/propanalol for migraine, but I don't think it did anything much for the anxiety I also had. But that was high school.
Also thanks, everyone, for all the support in the last few weeks. It's helped a lot to know I have a place where I can rely on people to listen and actually care what I'm feeling.
And I just got a phone call that I've been recommended for the paid position facilitating the post-adoption support group in our area, which we'd refused to attend because the people running it were so offensive and thoughtless. It's not a lot of money and Lee is going to want to nix it because she doesn't want me to take on any more commitments, but I'm definitely tempted to think this might be a place I could have an impact as we stop fostering and also flattered that the caseworkers and supervisors thought I was a good choice!
Might it replace one of your other commitments? I mean after a graceful ramping down.
73: No, and it would preclude my appointment to the school board, which isn't a certainty at all and would probably be a bad idea anyway. It would just be an extra ten hours of work every month, but significant bits of it I'm doing already for free.
And unlike any of my other commitments, one of the perks is that there's free childcare, though I might have to be the one to arrange it.
I really wish I could quit running the parent-teacher org, but everyone else on the executive board has quit and so it seems unsporting. I kind of hate it but planned a good meeting for next week anyway. Probably no one will attend yet again.
Sounds toss-up/lean-towards to me. Any chance it might develop into something more?
I don't know. The job itself doesn't get more intense, but presumably if I were good at it and made enough connections I could work on training the people who do the job or on creating new training materials. And apparently I've been a helpful resource for struggling foster/adoptive parents in the past, which is why they thought I'd be good, and all that support has been done for free, as has speaking on the panels of experienced parents talking to prospective foster parents and at the transracial parenting training.
66: and I really only have "I'm going to die now" fear on a plane, as I recall, when there's turbulence, but then it does the feedback loop thing.
This is probably the least helpful comment in the history of the blog, but my wife's initial panic attack came a couple of days after our flight had experienced a static discharge* as we climbed through rain clouds out of Newark. However, in the event itself, the fear that gripped her was that a small bump on her skull (that was not new) was evidence of a brain tumor. Entailments Fear is bad, Mr. Cunningham.
Good news is that she flies semi-OK now.
*I was trying to see if there was a more specific name for the phenomenon, big flash of light and boom outside thje plane. A short time later (presumably after assuring himslef that all was well), the pilot came on in his "all is well:/Chuck Yeager voice and said, "Well, that was interesting, what we just experienced was ... and everything is fine."
... and you should see her shoulder muscles!
The pro tip I know about beta blockers is that you have to be careful not to stand up suddenly, because your heart rate won't increase fast enough and you might pass out.
IMX they definitely work at blocking betas.
I really hope this means "beta" in a Brave New World sense.
I definitely am prone to panic attacks, but fortunately have gotten decent at stopping them fairly quickly (essentially through CBT techniques). They are seriously scary, even when you know what's going on. (I've never had the intense pain ones, though. Thankfully.)
Update: Rowan was arrested this afternoon, two felonies for the robbery and using my mom's credit cards. So I guess that's it, for now at least.
85: hugs. As big a hug as you can send over the internet.
I'm sorry I always seem to be Hawaiisplaining, but it sort of seems like she has some anxiety/OCD/sensory stuff (which I see as being a spectrum of sorts at that age) and it's possible that it's not deliberate but just that when emotions are high she experiences her body differently or something like that.
She may have sensory stuff to the degree that I do, which is to say I'm a fussy PITA about certain sounds and being touched and fidgeting constantly. (Actually, Hokey Pokey's teacher has harnessed his desire to fidget as part of teaching him to control his outbursts. She is magic.) And she's definitely more like Jammies in anxiety than she is like me.
But despite all that, the bumped-my-arm howling is particularly unconvincing and theatrical in these particular circumstances.
I'm really sorry to hear about Rowan.
Thorn, I haven't been around here long enough to know anything about Rowan other than this episode, but am really sorry for what you're going through.
Sorry to hear about Rowan. Weak words, but may it go as well as possible.
The physical panic stuff has subsided though the totally-fucking-sad response hasn't
Aw, geez, best of luck working through that. It seems like a sad story just reading your comments here, without knowing him at all.
It also sounds like this was the expected ending, but still, that's rough.
Thorn, there aren't any words that will make it better, but I'm sorry. I do hope he does the growing up (and getting clean) he needs and that he ends up on a more sustainable trajectory.
Thorn, I am also sorry to hear this. And what ydnew said.
On panic attacks I can attest after sufficient research that they can be much more frightening and in some ways unpleasant than a real heart attack.
Pro-tip: if you yank a muscle in your shoulder, it can hurt like fuck and if it's the first time, you may worry about it. if you ran up 100 steps out of the tube immediately afterwards, you probably shouldn't spend the next month obsessively re-reading Nworb's heart attack.
93: God, it would be wonderful to think I once wrote something that frightened people as much as a medium-grade PA! That should go into the cheering things thread.
I don't, touch wood, have them much any more. Straight anxiety, morally paralysing fear, crushing remorse, grief and all that still play their parts in my inner life (Nice things have a role there, too). But the peculiar quality of a PA is its physical expression and the sense you have of it as a physical wrongness, rather than an expression of emotion. And I find that exercise really helped with that side of the horror. That, and constant journaling. The amount of time I have spent on trains and tubes frantically typing up my symptoms so that people would understand how I had died ...
Smearcase, I used to work with a woman whose normal state of being was panic attack, e.g. if she hadn't taken her beta blockers for whatever reason and you had to walk across the office, you had to plan your route so that you didn't go behind her chair or she'd have a PA. However, a beta blocker regime enabled her to live a normal life* doing stuff like holding down a job and raising kids. So if they can have that much effect, I guess they could probably sort you for flying.
*Normal except for things like believing in the spirit world and having a powerful disgust reaction to the word "portion".
It seems sort of like a waking dream sequence, somehow.
This is exactly what night terrors are like, except the dream is a nightmare, occurring during an apparently wakeful state (akin to sleepwalking). Young Mademoiselle Foch also used to get night terrors. Like most children who get them, she grew out of it by age seven or so. I wonder if there is any correlation between panic disorder and night terrors. I understand that the etiology of the latter is a bit of a mystery.
Dealing with the night terrors was the most emotionally wrenching thing I experienced as a parent, not excluding watching over a child in the pediatric intensive care unit. Your child is screaming in abject terror, and you are utterly powerless to comfort them.
Oh, night terrors is the same as the apnea apparitions that sit on one's chest and so forth?
I've woken up petrified from bad stuff happening and continuing to happen in dreams, but that's about it.
I don't think they're the same. I have once or twice had hypnogagic paralysis, without hallucinations but still terrifying. I was conscious, but completely paralyzed and very unhappy about it. But that's not a night terror, where you're in some sense asleep, but able to loudly express your terror.
97: Night terrors seem to be common as part of the prodrome of schizophrenia.
Not, let me hasten to add, that most people who get night terrors are going to develop schizophrenia.
Are you trying to cause panic attacks?
Lie back and think of Thomas Bayes.
||
Getting off the bus, saw what looked like a homeless guy conked out in the bus shelter (legs and cart). Soon after, saw a guy apparently pointing him out to a cop driving by. Now there are three police cars hanging around the shelter and, as I type, a fire engine just pulled up, so I guess there's some reason for concern about his condition rather than trying to move him on. Still don't see why so many cars were needed.
|>
Oh, and now an ambulance has joined the party.
Still don't see why so many cars were needed.
Because his condition might be "cold to the touch".
Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.
107, 108: Aaaaaaaaand this is why everyone is drawn to gender essentialism with regards to women being taken seriously on the internet ...
Actually, I'm extraordinarily jealous of 108. Well-played.
I have panic attacks, sometimes, but have been taking benzos for like 6 years now, so no. which is sort of bad, though, because they're fucking impossible to quit. but they make it so easy to sleep! so not your heart it going to burst out of your ribcage and make a dramatic leap for freedom while your ears ring and the coppery taste of blood fills your mouth! plus you don't have to drink bourbon. wait, or, on the downside you don't get to drink bourbon, but that's ideal for me. ugh panic attacks are so awful. I always had the worry I would kill myself to make it stop, so, just go on and step into the path of the oncoming 1 train. I am prone to both night terrors and straight-up awake hallucinations, as you know. My older daughter outgrew the night terrors at 8. They are horribly disturbing because you are holding your child in your arms but you can't make her understand you're there or comfort her, and she really would scream in terror. she didn't usually remember them, though.
thorn: I'm so sorry about all this, it must be so saddening and scary at once. it sounds as if this should be reassuring in a way. I don't think I said anything at the time, but your mom is a total badass.
I had night terrors as a kid and didn't develop schizophrenia. God told me this in person.
Ace has started having the cutest nightmares, where she's crying and screaming "MIIIINE! MINE! MINE" and then she'll cycle through a bunch of objects that various people - the usual suspects - are trying to take away from her. "MY APPLE. MIIIINE. MY WAWA. MY BABY." Etc. What an adorable horror!
