How I Developed Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia

This article tells the story of how I developed agoraphobia.

Panic first struck me hard, unexpectedly, and out of nowhere. I was an eighth grader playing right field in a baseball game one night when suddenly everything seemed unreal. My body felt like someone else’s and I felt light enough to float away into the sky. I started breathing fast, as if sucking in lots of air would make me heavy enough to stay on the ground but I was afraid that I might keep getting lighter and lighter until I floated away like a helium balloon.

The stronger this fear became, the more my breathing sped out of control. Pretty soon I felt like I was choking, or maybe even drowning, as if I couldn’t get any air. That’s when panic kicked in. I had that same dreadful feeling that you get when you have been underwater too long, your lungs are about to burst, and you look up and realize that the surface is high above.

That inning was the longest inning of baseball I can remember playing in my life. I could never slow down my breathing and looking in from where I stood in right field, the batters seemed fuzzier and fuzzier to me. Eventually my arms and legs got tingly and I felt weak all over. My feet went numb in my shoes and my hand felt dead inside the leather interior of my glove.

I didn’t understand what was happening to me and was completely terrified. It was all I could do to stay out in right field and sweat out each pitch, just waiting for the inning to come to a merciful end. By the time it ended, I was so dizzy and weak I could hardly jog off the field.

Back in the dugout, I finally caught my breath. That’s when the feeling returned to my arms and legs, and my vision cleared up. The panic went away, too, but I still felt uneasy. I was afraid that if I went back onto the field it would happen again. I also felt like I couldn’t tell anyone about my experience because they might think I was going crazy.

Because these unpleasant sensations came over me that night in the absence of warning or logical explanation, I felt extremely vulnerable in the following days. I was afraid the experience might revisit me at any time.

Both spring and summer passed that year with thoughts of this waking nightmare lurking in the back of my mind like a foreboding specter. I didn’t feel safe. No matter what I did or where I went, the experience hung over me. I prayed to God it would never happen again.

My prayer wasn’t answered. At least not in the way I wanted it to be. Those same sickening feelings I had felt on the baseball field came back. They broke in on my education and rudely disrupted my life on the Monday morning of my third week of high school. It was my fifteenth birthday.

During my first period algebra class, I lost all sense of security and well-being. My heart’s heavy pounding grabbed my attention first. My chest tightened, and I had trouble catching my breath. It was like I was suffocating from a lack of air in the room.

Almost gasping, my vision blurred as I lost my sense of balance. Desks, chairs, and even the other students seemed to swirl all around me. My disorientation and dimming sense of sight triggered intense waves of panic.

For several minutes of this, I suppressed my terror, in hopes that the symptoms would just go way. Instead, they only got worse and a terrible nausea came over me. I could feel drops of sweat falling onto the cloth of my shirt. I didn’t know what was wrong and hoped I wasn’t having a heart attack. Finally, when I couldn’t sit at my desk another minute, I raised my hand and asked for a pass to see the nurse.

I ran all the way across the campus to the nurse’s office and dialed home with shaky fingers. Waiting for my mom to pick me up seemed like forever even though it was probably only ten minutes. Since I thought I was sick, I went to bed as soon as I got home. For some reason, once I was under the covers, all the bad feelings went away and I felt fine. I was totally exhausted from and confused by the experience, but felt pleasantly relaxed.

The experiences I just described, which I can now identify as panic attacks, started happening closer and closer together after that day in algebra class. Since at first they mostly happened in classrooms I got in the habit of staying home from school to avoid them and continued going everywhere else. However, I eventually had panic attacks in other places and the fear slowly generalized. I had panic attacks at church, in the mall, at friends’ houses, and so on. I stopped going to every place I had experienced panic for fear that I might have another attack. My world slowly shrank until I hardly left home anymore.

It wasn’t long before I was diagnosed with panic disorder with agoraphobia.

Article Source: http://www.agoraphobia.net

Stephen Price is a recovered agoraphobic with an informational website on agoraphobia. It is found on the web at: www.agoraphobia.ws

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