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Panic Attacks

-Tom Fratta

If you’re anything like me, the mere fact that what you’re reading is printed in a font probably never chosen for anything with a spine will be pinching your brow with scepticism, carving knife at the ready to take this pretentious piece of shit writing to pieces.

Something written by another student, like you, by someone who wanks off to downloads of dyed-blonde, surgically-scarred, anally-bleached sex, like you; someone who cues in the same supermarket, pissed off and bored, buying discounted frozen chicken, like you. If you’re anything like me, right about now, my cheap attempt at getting into your head should have you thinking: wanker.

If you’re not like me, maybe you’re into redheads instead of blondes, or men, or the whole ebony-and-ivory thing. You might be a vegetarian, or vegan, or just find the general idea of battery-farmed, anally-bleached chickens offensive. But one way or another, male, female or other, we all wank, we all eat.

Like or unlike me is beside the point; like or dislike what you’re reading so far, likewise.

The point is similarities: the things that we, being the same species, inescapably share. Like wanking, eating and dying. Especially dying.

But first, for everyone sucked into this because you wanted to learn something educational about “panic attacks”, stuff you can highlight and underline in pencil you won’t erase anyway, stationery at the ready:

A panic attack is physically characterised by, most significantly, tachycardia and hyperventilation. The first means a very rapid heart-rate; during panic attacks your heart beats at maximum rate, which is normally around 200 beats a minute. If you’re into thrash metal, grindcore or hard-tek, you’ll have a good idea of just how fast that is. For the uninitiated, to frame it in relative terms, your resting heart-rate is between 60 and 80. Your typical late-April frantic gotta-get-that-hot-beach-bod-to-score-with-hot-beach-birds cycling will push your heart rate to between 120 and, if you’re extra unfit, horny and desperate-determined, 160. Your heart does this to flood your muscles and brain with oxygen and glucose, to increase speed, strength and alertness, for prompt defensive action.

Hyperventilation is ultra-mega-breathing. Your lungs expand to their maximum capacity in an effort to get as much oxygen as possible into your blood stream; your diaphragm stretches, and typically, people who are hyperventilating will have the paradoxical feeling of suffocating, because the diaphragm is so contracted that you find it hard to exhale fully. If you try inhaling as much as possible with minimum exhalation, you’ll have an idea of the “suffocating” experienced.

Both of these physical effects are caused and accompanied by the endocrines above your kidneys releasing generous amounts of epinephrine, or adrenaline. This has other effects, familiar the user of stimulants such as cocaine, speed and MDMA: your pupils dilate, you have cold sweats starting at your palms and spreading to your entire body, you get what cocaine users call “coke shits” (a nervous urge to have a pee and a poo) and you get what is called “mini-dick” in nightclub jargon, if you have one (a penis, not a club, wink wink).

Doctors will tell you that all this unpleasantness is caused by day-to-day anxiety, which can become severe enough to eventually trigger the conditions described above, or what they call a “fight-or-flight response”. Somewhere, the line is to be drawn between your run-of-the-mill severely debilitating anxiety, and a panic attack. Unfortunately it is not yet known just how the doodle works on the colourful paper table-cloth that is neurochemistry. Fascinating thing, the human body.

The one thing left unclear so far is what the “panic” in a “panic attack” actually feels like. It’s really quite hard to describe.

Hark back to your more tender, imaginative years, when you would lie in bed at night, in complete, dark silence, being as still as possible lest a powerful, enormous, hairy hand came out suddenly from under your bed, to grab you by your torso or legs, pulling you underneath to strangle and rape you in pitch darkness punctuated by screams and animal grunts and brute, tearing force.

Well, it’s not at all that sort of fear. It’s not the skin-crawling fear you feel after you’ve watched a horror movie by yourself and think something horrible is behind the next corner. It’s not the disgusted kind of fear you have when you see an animal of which you’re phobic. It’s not the anxious fear you have just before you check your bank account or your end-of-year exam results.

If you’re scared of flying and have ever been on an airplane with turbulence so bad that people around you actually start mumbling prayers or holding hands, and you suddenly start thinking “This could actually be it, right here, right now”, and time starts to slow... everything around you seems unreal and detached, like in a strong déjà-vu, well it’s more that kind of feeling. It’s that blind, powerless sort of fear, which is more of a sensation than an emotion.

Think of the numbness you might have felt upon hearing of someone close to you dying, or being terminally ill. The feeling of irredeemable loss, that De Profundis despair. Panic attacks are an unbearably intense mixture of the type of grief and terror described. The terror comes with a suddenness similar to the feeling of being taught something challenging you don’t really understand, when, unexpectedly, out of nowhere, “Ohhh, riiiight!” it clicks.

Gasp! The carpet is ripped out from under you, your mind replaces your daily thought with insurmountable, irrational fear of merely existing, and you’re a million miles from help or consolation, regardless of who you’re with or what you’re doing. Fascinating thing, the human body.

If there were any room for thought, you’d be thinking: “Another second of this and my mind will snap”. If there were any room for thought, you’d be thinking: “What on Earth could I possibly have done to deserve this feeling?” which is as rhetorical as questions get.

My father, when he was in his mid-thirties, was once also member of this psychosomatic elite. He told me that the only way he could describe a panic attack to terror-virgins was by saying it was like the feeling of suddenly finding yourself in the middle of a dark ocean completely alone. He probably did a better job of it than me.

The punch line is that nobody really knows what causes them. If you go to your doctor wild-eyed and distraught, explaining that you were sitting on the toilet yesterday and suddenly got head-butted by God, chances are he or she will ask you whether you’ve been anxious recently. This, of course, is a good question; if you pay bills, sit exams, and download music illegally, you’re a prime candidate for panic attacks.

This isn’t another newspaper article about the next horrific danger lurking out there, the next victim of which COULD VERY WELL BE YOU. Chances are, you won’t be any more a victim of terrorism than you will of inexplicable panic. Nor am I seeking solace by turning my personal tragedy into tree pulp meant to litter and entertain. The point of this piece of writing, why I have strained and delicately teased out this excretion of my life now laying under your nose, digested by the soft, warm, sticky coils of my grey matter, is because I worry about you.

I used to give a lot of thought to the whole “life and death” deal; all the “who am I, what am I doing here, what’s going to happen to me” kind of nonsense. Then, one day, sitting on the toilet and picking my nose, God head-butted me and I was given an answer I feel the need to share, because I worry about you. Thanks a lot, God. Sure, I’ll pass the word along and smite whoever doesn’t listen.

Remember the bit above about “fight or flight”? Doctors try reassuring you by explaining that the terror and shrivelled penis are your body’s natural response to a threat which you perceive, whether consciously or otherwise, and which it does its best to prepare you for. This would mean that that kind of terror is only felt, given a healthy brain, on a plummeting elevator, trapped in a burning building, suddenly diagnosed with irreparable kidney failure, or any other situation in which death is imminent and out of your control.

Like I said, God head-butted me, so I’m qualified when I say: Don’t listen to Lester Burnham; your whole life doesn’t flash before your eyes the second before you die. But he’s probably right that you’ll feel grateful for all of it, because man, a few more seconds would mean the world. Literally, as far as you're concerned.

Read Dostoyevsky’s account of approaching the firing squad, or the testimonies of failed suicides who threw themselves from the Golden Gate Bridge. Life really is precious, so precious, in fact, that regardless of how badly you asked for it, or how prepared you think you might be, when it’s about to be taken from you, and death is all up in yo’ grill, the panic you will feel will be completely automatic, and completely out of your control. Terror so immense that the thought of rational thought, if such a thought could be entertained, is absurd. So immense it’ll wipe your mind clear of any sense of who you are or what you’re doing, and replace the memories, hopes, fears, ambitions and whatever other nonsense that defines you with an utterly overwhelming awareness of the totality of death. Trapped in that torn, depressurized cockpit, you won’t be thinking of your loved ones and the 78% you got in your last exam. You won’t be thinking, full stop. More of a sensation than an emotion, really.

I’m not aiming for the shock-factor. Panic attacks aren’t fear. Fear is a human, comprehensible, daily life thing; it keeps you away from snakes and drugs, and keeps your head down during exams. When you wake up, the monster isn't there, and you'll have forgotten about it until tonight.

Panic is a lesson that can’t be unlearned, something too primal to forget even when it’s long gone. I’m glad I’ve had a foretaste, because it’s taught me something important. I’m not telling you that life is short and death is final, so make the most of it while you can. Like I said, I worry about you, I wouldn’t lie. Panic attacks are horrific only because they’re untimely and other-worldly; during a panic attack, you’re not actually you. Panic erases your consciousness the way alcohol does, or severe pain. Whether you’re Pol Pot or the Pope, you have a brain geared for the exact same survival for which a drowning cat strives, and that mechanism is going to click into gear whether you’re actually scared or not. Fascinating thing, the human body.

Like I said, this article is about the things that we, being the same species, inescapably share. Like wanking, eating and living. Especially living. Life isn’t good or bad. Whatever life you’ve led, it’ll be wiped clean just before the end, and you’re lucky enough to get to watch. The secret God told me when he head-butted me while sitting on the toilet is that life is neutral. Spectacularly neutral.

Thanks a lot, God.