Panic

Night Thoughts

William Blake Los 1794

My father died from an intestinal aneurysm that burst without warning one evening when he was in his mid-70s – exactly my age now. He’d just that morning been in for a routine physical, and received a clean bill of health – except for the emphysema and other ravages that came with 60 years of heavy smoking  and hard drinking. But basically, as healthy as he’d been for years. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” the doctor had said. “Except for the drinking and smoking,” went unspoken, as understood.

Then suddenly, only hours later, dead. Bled to death, so the doctor said, from a burst artery, likely grazed by a bullet while he fought in North Africa during the War – THE WAR, World War II. So basically he bled to death from a war wound that had been lurking inside him for forty years, biding time until it made the decision, at last, to kill him. He died within minutes of the rupture, as they put him on a stretcher in his living room, icy cold to the touch, so my mother told me later. Nothing could have been done to stop it. His death had been sealed in the North African desert decades earlier.

So bleeding in that region, as sometimes happens for old men, has always terrified me.

I remember one midnight, a few years ago now, on the anniversary of his death, waking suddenly out of a deep sleep with a piercing pain in my gut. Even I, ever the skeptic, knew that it was too coincidental to be coincidence. It was a night of panic for me – of anticipation, expectation of imminent death. I lay there sucking shallow breaths, listening to my heart pound, pound, pound, my chest like an empty oil barrel, that heart pounding to get out, the sound pumping in my inner ear. Longing for the escape of sleep (though knowing sleep is no escape), but struggling to stay awake, for fear the sleep would be final. It was, of course, the death of sleep for that night. But lost sleep seemed the least of it. It was, once again, a panic attack.

And, once again, as all the times before, I didn’t die. My heart grew quieter eventually, my breathing deeper, and sleep came – the temporary sleep from which I awakened in the morning – not refreshed, but reassured that death might still be a future milestone, to be faced more bravely when it did come, instead of with the panic of the night just past.

I had panic attacks all through my young adult years – almost reaching to middle age. The first one came on without warning in my middle 20s. I suppose I’d been what might be called a “nervous” child: thanks mother for the heredity and father for the midnight terrors of a rampant alcoholic who might rage at any moment. But before that first attack there’d been nothing to hint at the complete conflagration of panic that engulfed me in a second, leaving me trembling and whimpering and certain of my imminent end.

Despite my Calvinist background, I’ve never much held with predestination. But one thing certain: From the instant of conception, we’re all predestined to die sometime within a hundred years or so, no way to avoid it. The only uncertainty is when. It’s always there lurking, like my Father’s war wound, biding time.

That first attack struck shortly after my first, and only, LSD trip – a very bad trip – one that I’ve never had any wish to repeat. I never had been a voracious druggy. Joints, of course, once I’d learned to smoke enough to tolerate them, but everyone smoked joints then; a few other experiments that came with the company I kept; and drinks aplenty - so many drinks. The typical fare of a went-to-college-in-the-60s, came-out-gay-in-the-70s guy finding his way into adulthood – an exploration that has, perhaps, not ended yet, though no longer drug enhanced.

But one night my lover of the time had LSD on offer, and so, Why not?

As I said, bad trip, not forgotten in any fraction, even now.

Shortly after, the lover left, taking his LSD with him. The panic, when it arrived – I’m not saying there was any connection – hung around for years.

The first one came on suddenly, as they all did, with little warning and hardly any reason: a missed heartbeat, perhaps, or a tingle in fingers or toes, which may only have been static electricity – things that happen all the time, and usually get ignored. But at panic time, once the idea was planted, there was no ignoring it, no matter how much biofeedback I employed. Because panic time meant death, certain, unavoidable, instantaneous death. Biofeedback has a hard time facing that down.

The attacks sunk in their talons regardless of time or place, sparked by their own secret triggers – though some externals seemed to factor in. Air travel became terrifying – death with strangers trapped in a plunging metal tube. Going over bridges? Almost impossible. The capsule taking me to the top of the St. Louis Arch (I lived in St. Louis at the time) - a coffin. Caves transformed to catacombs in which my shelf beckoned. But even more day-to-day, the inevitability of food, or other, poisoning, or just breaking into pieces loomed ever-present. Life became a desperate attempt to stave off, not death itself, but those crushing attacks of the fear of it – attacks that would not be staved off when they decided their time had arrived, much like my father’s war wound lying in wait.

More than once I got myself to emergency rooms  (or friends or family got me there), begging to be saved – the body, that is: a Church of Christ childhood told me the soul was already most likely lost.

When ER nurses would say, “There’s no need to panic,” I knew there almost certainly WAS. Otherwise why would the phrase even come to their minds. Once, at least, my exasperated doctor, when they’d reached him at last, instructed them to, “Give him a Valium and send him home.” Did I actually hear the doctor say it; did the ER staff report it to me; or did I hear it only in my panic addled head? Valium – the wonder drug of choice then, for so many of us – even my mother took it.

After a while, the fear of panic’s return became almost as terrifying as the panic itself. Not quite, but almost.

Then, after 15 years, as suddenly as the panic attacks had arrived, they left. It took some time, but I began to grow confident that I no longer had to live in perpetual fear of their return. The remaining tablets in my Valium prescription bottle grew dusty with age, their expiry date years, then decades, in the past. Though I never summoned the confidence and courage to flush them away – always caried them in my dopp kit, I almost knew I’d never swallow them. Almost.

That one attack, on the anniversary of my Father’s death, though real, had seemed to be a one-off that proved the truth of what the doctor told me: they were most often a Female Trouble (it was the era of the film), though in that case, why me? And that most aged out of them. “Keep taking the Valium as needed.”

But that was medical wisdom of 50 years ago, and, it would appear, wrong. Terror of terrors: they have returned. I seem to have aged back in. “Pride cometh before a fall,” the saying goes. And also, it would appear, “Confidence before a panic attack.”

This is destined to be an essay with an end, but no resolution. I’d consult the doctor again for his updated medical wisdom – I always had such confidence in him – but I’ve just learned from Google searching that he died only last year at age 91. A long, and I hope panic-free life.

So here we are once again, after all these years – just me, ineffectual biofeedback and the doctor’s last advice: Keep taking the Valium as needed. I wonder if I should dust them off before taking?