The
worst panic attack I’ve ever had was several years ago while I was
spending six summer weeks in Berlin.
This was a few short weeks after the first major depressive episode I
had ever had (which began with a weeklong stint during which I barely left the
house) and even fewer, shorter weeks after I had started, in response, taking
antidepressants. In light of this new problem of debilitating depression, I had been
very nervous to take the trip.
The
host family I was staying with had a gorgeous apartment in the neighborhood of
Mitte (“Middle”)—a relatively more affluent, residential part of the city. I
had my own bedroom, which had its own entrance from the hallway (as the
apartment had presumably once been two apartments that were now combined).
The
bed, I remember, was a shape and size I wasn’t used to, and the covers were
somewhat scratchy, and somewhere frustratingly in between being sheets and
blankets. The pillows were much taller,
fatter rectangles than the American version—practically perfect squares, which
to my out-of-place American sensibilities made them seem more like throw
pillows than actual pillows-for-sleeping.
To
be clear, the apartment was beautiful and I had anything I needed. But I was in a new place with new, weird
things that coiled my senses like string around their odd foreign fingers. The strain of that was enough to inspire in
me my most intense panic attack to date.
On
this particular night (which was fairly early on in the trip), I was especially
worried about getting to sleep because I had signed up, via the study abroad
program through which I was in Berlin to begin with, to take a weekend bus trip
to Dresden. I lived quite a ways from
the campus of the Freie Universität, where the bus was to leave from; therefore
I really needed to sleep, as I would have to get up well before the dew had dried in
order to make it in time. This pressing
need to sleep, in anticipation of an equally pressing need to wake up early,
coupled with my already-poor ability to fall asleep, and all strung together with a taut thread of
jet lag, made for a filthy fucking stew of grime and anxiety.
I
don’t actually remember how it began. I
remember lying in the strangely-shaped bed, resting my head on the strangely-shaped
pillows, feeling a stifling disconnect between my body and the bedding, as if I
were trying unsuccessfully to convince it I belonged there sleeping on top of
it.
Eventually,
lying supine in the dark on my reluctant blanket-sheets (having given up on my
body’s discourse with the furniture), I started to notice that something wasn’t
right with my breathing. I sat bolt
upright in frigid panic because, I realized, I was taking air in easily enough, but
when I went to exhale, nothing was coming out.
I was pushing, trying to release the carbon dioxide inside my lungs, but
it was like breathing through a straw with an ornery valve that only allowed
the air to flow one way.
As
I sat and tried to breathe like normal, I felt my panic building in proportion
to the CO2 building in my body, precariously inflating me like a tired-out
balloon.
At
this point, I have to take a step back and confess that I still harbor an
amount of heartfelt pity for the piece of me still living that moment right
now. And that is because in situations
like this, there is almost nothing you can do but Wait It Out. I was really and truly convinced that my
respiratory system was failing to perform one of its most basic functions;
exactly as convinced of that as you are of the fact that you are reading this
right now. What can one do to help a
brain so misguided? Take a deep breath?
In
this case, I took a pill. I ended up
missing the bus, but at least I got some sleep.
