Panic.

[From April 6, 2016: If you want to guarantee the ire of a caregiver, lecture them about the importance of “self-care.” That said, most caregivers could probably use the occasional lecture about self-care. I wrote the following at the beginning of my own dalliance with the very notion of self-care. It’s worth noting that several months after this, I also got a new doctor.]

The first time it happened, I thought I was having a weird blood pressure spike, but it quickly passed and so I ignored it. When it happened again, I assumed it was the cold medicine I’d been taking, so I blew it off. It kept happening, though. Not often, but often enough. Eventually, I started to wonder if maybe my heart was acting up again. I’ve been down that road before, with surgeries and medications and big scares, but that was all in the past. To be safe, the next time it happened, I hooked myself up to a blood pressure cuff to make sure I wasn’t dying. I wasn’t, so I pretty much dismissed that, too. For a while, I’d have episodes where I’d feel completely out of breath, agitated, and oddly overheated. Maybe I hadn’t eaten today and that was the problem? No, clearly, it was because I’ve eaten far too much, enough to have gained a demoralizing twenty-five pounds over this last year. So, I resolved to just sit in my own shame for a while, chastising myself over how much I’ve let myself go. You bet you’re out of breath, fat ass.

I started to notice that these random symptoms often accompanied my obsessive worrying, like a fixated loop that my mind would run when I hadn’t heard back from a text message I’d sent to my wife a whole three and a half minutes earlier. I’d imagine, in alarmingly vivid detail, all of the horror that was probably befalling her, each image worse than the one before, until she’d finally text me back to let me know everything was fine. It would still take me ten or twenty, sometimes thirty, minutes to catch my breath again. Eventually, this became a marital issue, as these things do, so Chelli told me that she thought it was “the stress” and that I should probably see a doctor. Of course, I took that as the sort of insult she should have kept to herself, but I agreed to talk to the doctor anyway.

When I did finally talk to the doctor, I told him that I thought maybe I was having trouble managing stress. I used that phrase several times in a row – “having trouble managing stress” – until I felt like he finally would hear me. He said, “really?” as though there was some miscommunication or maybe I was joking. “You seem fine,” he said. “Are you stressed now?” I wasn’t, of course. Now I was irritated. But I said it again anyway. “I’m having trouble managing stress, I think.” He told me that he’d write me a script for “something small, not much of anything, really,” so I could see if I felt better. Maybe I should try breathing exercises, he suggested, because apparently he was under the impression that it never occurred to me to breathe. He said something else, too, but all I heard was “and maybe you could try to get a fucking grip.” I’m probably projecting.

The not-much-of-anything pills didn’t make me feel any better, so after the second month, I quit taking them. And then things got worse. The other day, it happened again. I was standing in my kitchen, rushed to get from one appointment to the next, when everything closed in. All of the prior markers were there, too, but now I was suffocating from the inside like I’ve never experienced. I was gasping, shaking, convinced that it was a million degrees in our house. Chelli was trying to talk to me, somehow talk me down, but I felt like I had earplugs in or like she was the teacher on Charlie Brown. I needed to lie down, but I couldn’t stop moving, spinning, panicking.

After months of dancing around it, it was now clear. I’m having panic attacks. I talk a lot about the shit storm’s shrapnel, whether it’s physical complications or the emotional wounds that never have a chance to fully scab over, but I’m always amazed when we encounter a new one. A couple weeks ago, one of my Facebook friends asked how I stay so positive and “happy” – her word – in the midst of it all. Clearly, that person has never watched me unravel in the middle of my kitchen.

I don’t say all of this for pity or, my god, advice. I say it for this reason alone: The shit storm isn’t pretty. I often try to write things here to make it sound hopeful, whether it’s hope for me or the people who care about us, I’m not sure. We all need hope these days, you see, when the very notion of it is such a rare commodity. But those moments of hope have to coexist with the moments of sheer internal terror. That’s the challenge, really. It’s not just learning how to navigate the storm, but learning how to balance it with navigating a life.

So, I’m going back to the doctor in a couple days and this time, when he asks me if I’m stressed now? I’m going to punch that cocky bastard in the face.