medication panic attacks – what to watch for.
Have you ever found yourself in the ER room with what you thought was a heart attack only to be given diazepam to calm you down? Do you ever feel like you are going to suffocate because your chest seizes up and your breathing is unsettled? I most certainly used to and I’ll tell you that it feels like you’re going to die every minute of every day. Diagnosing yourself with panic attacks and anxiety disorders is an incredibly difficult thing to do. You don’t even realize that you have a problem with your mind, you think that it is everything else that has the problems.
I remember waking up in the middle of the night, convincing myself I was deathly ill and then making my wife drive me to the emergency room. I had a normal cold but I had blown it completely out of proportion in my mind and was convinced there was something terribly wrong with myself. The doctor was kind but wouldn’t listen to me. She kept insisting that I only had a common cold and coughing up mucus was a symptom of the cold, nothing more. She gave me some drugs, I thought they were for the cold at the time, but it turns out, they were diazepam to calm me down.
Another consuming thought I constantly had was that there was going to be some sort of disaster and I would ultimately be trapped. Sometimes in tall buildings I would let the thoughts of a fire consume me. I dreamt while awake, while in conversation with colleagues, that the fire would trap me on the top floors of the building and I would die. Same with traffic. I thought often on my way home from work that if something were to happen, I couldn’t get anywhere because of the traffic jam. I felt like a prisoner, and no amount of reason or logic could convince my mind that none of this stuff would actually happen.
The thing is, I didn’t always used to be this way, it just… started happening. I don’t really know how to explain it, but something in my brain must have switched off one day. I like to think of it as my brains ability to hear reason. At first, I would feel uncomfortable sitting watching a movie. My mind would race with thoughts of suffocation, gassing, fires, you name it, I dreamt it. After the first few months of my condition, it completely took over my life. It encompassed everything I did. Evey time I would go to the grocery store, I would have a panic attack. Every time I got in the car, I would have a panic attack. Every time I did anything, I was so afraid that it would end terribly that my life had become not much of a life at all.
After countless hours of therapy, a number of online courses, and a few trips to the pharmacist for prescriptions, I found Panic Away. All I ever needed to do was find a tool that would break the terrible cycle of my panic attacks and bring me back into the real world. Panic Away did all that in three days and quite literally saved my life for me.