You're riding south to a reunion when a warm flush begins to spread through your body. Your chest grows uncomfortably tight, making it hard to breathe and your heart begins to race. Before you can react, a tingling sensation creeps up your arm, you get dizzy and begin to sweat. Your unease turns to terror as you realize you're having a heart attack.
Because you don't know where you are, you hail a stranger for help, who summons an ambulance. The last thing you see before the doors slam shut and you're carried away is the frightened face of your husband.
At the hospital, you're hooked up to IVs and monitors, then x-rayed, though the feelings have started to subside. When the tests find nothing wrong you're released, relieved but bewildered and shaken.
Weeks go by and you begin to forget about the episode. Then, while driving, you get another attack. It comes in waves, each more intense, each longer than the last. This time you manage to make it home before calling for an ambulance.
Now the attacks begin happening frequently, around the clock, without warning or apparent cause: while curled up in a chair reading a good book, sitting in a movie theater, shopping, sleeping. Each time you feel as if you're dying.
You're afraid to be alone, so you start following your husband around the house, not letting him out of your sight. You're scared to go to bed at night, knowing you'll wake to an attack. You avoid going out except to work, where you have to concentrate on your breathing in order not to faint. Finally it's impossible to work at all.
One day on a walk, nothing looks as it should. You're convinced you're going crazy, the most terrifying feeling of all. Too embarrassed to go back to the hospital, you park outside the emergency room so you can get help if you can swallow your shame. You've reached rock bottom.
An estimated 6 million Americans -- many of them women in their childbearing years -- experience the nightmare called panic disorder. I know someone who is struggling with it now.
While hormonal imbalances, drugs or alcohol, stress, or other situational events can cause panic attacks, panic disorder has been linked to chemical imbalances in the brain. It's a real and treatable disorder that often runs genetically within families.
If it happens to you or someone you know, don't let the stigma of "mental illness" keep you from seeking a doctor's help -- and the sooner the better. Left untreated, one in three people develop agoraphobia, or the fear of being in places or situations where you can't escape or get help if a panic attack occurs. Panic attacks can also lead to other complications like depression, substance abuse or medical complications.
For more information on the disorder, visit www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/panic-disorder.
Reach staff writer Marta Hepler Drahos at mdrahos@record-eagle.com.
