First one happened on the 46 bus, if the exact number matters to anyone but me. Ordinary Tuesday. I wasn’t stressed about anything I could name. Then my heart just took off, like it had somewhere else to be, and I couldn’t get a full breath in no matter how I tried.
I was completely sure something catastrophic was happening to my body. Got off two stops early, stood on the pavement gripping a lamppost, trying very hard to look like a normal person having a normal day while quietly convinced I might be dying in front of a bakery window.
Went to A&E. Waited three hours next to a guy with a fishhook stuck in his thumb, which under different circumstances I would have found hilarious. They ran the tests, found nothing wrong, and told me it was almost certainly a panic attack. I remember thinking: okay, so now I know what it is, which means it’s basically solved.
It was not basically solved.
The weeks after were worse than the attack itself, if I’m honest. I turned into my own full-time cardiologist. Constant status checks — heart rate, breathing, was that dizziness real or imagined, could I feel my hands normally. I stopped taking that bus route. Then buses generally. My world got smaller in these tiny increments I barely noticed happening, like a photo slowly cropping itself.
Nobody sits you down and tells you that the fear of it happening again is a separate problem from the thing itself. I had to work that out the slow way, mostly through a few genuinely miserable months and one very patient GP who didn’t roll her eyes when I came back a fourth time convinced it was my heart.
I still don’t love the sensation when it starts creeping in. I don’t think that ever fully goes away, and I’ve stopped expecting it to. But there’s a second thought now, running just behind the panic: oh, this again. I know this one. It doesn’t make it pleasant. It does make it shorter.
Discussion prompt: Did you find the waiting-for-the-next-one part harder than the attacks themselves?
— shaky04