37 years and counting…….
By Louise Timmons
It was February of 1969. I was 18, had a decent job, engaged to my high school sweetheart, and all set to be married on June 7th. I should have been the happiest girl in the world. I was traveling with my future sister-in-law and her husband, going to pick up my future husband for dinner and a night of bowling. As we were approaching the Champlain Bridge ramp, I started to sweat, I couldn’t breathe, I made them stop the car in the middle of the ramp, I got out and told them to meet me back at the restaurant a few blocks away. As I walked to the restaurant, I tried to calm down, tried to figure out what had just happened and finally just brushed it off as “pre-wedding jitters.”
As the wedding approached and the panic attacks became more frequent, I suggested that maybe we should postpone the wedding. My fiancé said “no,” that it was all just nerves and it would disappear as quickly and mysteriously as it had come.
Wrong!!!! It got worse so I sought treatment at the Douglas Hospital Behavioural Clinic. That didn’t work and then it got to a point I couldn’t even get to the clinic. I lay in bed at night literally shivering, with my teeth actually chattering as my husband slept beside me. He couldn’t understand it. Hell, I couldn’t understand it or explain it, so how could I expect someone else to understand? Actually, I hid it because I thought people would think I was crazy. How do you explain to someone that you can’t take a bus, you can’t go over a bridge, you can’t walk down the street, you can’t sit in the backseat of a two-door car, youcan’t take an elevator………..on and on. So you avoid going out, avoid being in public, you lie a lot (make up excuses for not going somewhere because you don’t want to expose yourself or the truth). I think I’ve told every imaginable excuse ever. How do you think it feels when your mother is actually dying in a hospital bed but you can’t even get up to the hospital to see her? How does it feel not to be able to go to your brother’s wedding with the rest of your family? I sat home alone, crying, contemplating suicide. You know what, I was even too afraid to do that.
In May of 1975 I had a miscarriage. When I started hemorrhaging, my husband rushed me to the hospital. I was in the Emergency Room and refused to go in the elevator up to the 5th floor. They tried to give me a tranquilizer, they gave me an injection to calm me, but I fought it all off and was wide awake. They told my husband that if I didn’t go up to the operating room, that I would hemorrhage to death. I really didn’t care but my husband told them that we were going upstairs no matter what. As sick and as weak as I felt, I still had a panic attack. But I did survive and I made it upstairs.
In 1977 my marriage came to an end. I’m guessing that the agoraphobia had something to do with it. I couldn’t get to the courthouse downtown, so I depended on a legal aid lawyer to fight my case for me, which was to get child support for my two children. He didn’t work very hard because all I got was $25.00 per child. So I basically raised my two children on my own. To this day I do not know how I did it. They were not told that I was agoraphobic because they wouldn’t have known what that was. All they knew was that mommy was sick and couldn’t go far in the car. My children did not suffer too much though, or so I thought, because my family took them everywhere. But one day, when my youngest daughter was in her teens and we had a long talk, she told me that she never went without and she thanked me for that, but then she told me something, not to hurt me, but just so that I would know. She said: “Mom, it was nice being in the country with our grandparents, but we would have much rather been with you, and we missed having you there to share it with.” So I realized that they too were suffering.
I have 37 years worth of horror stories I could tell you, but I can’t do it all in this one story. I would, however, like to tell you about the stage that I am at right now in my life.
I am 58 this year. I have two beautiful daughters and four wonderful grandchildren. I’ve remarried a second time and we live a quiet and uneventful life, without vacations or travel. I am “condemned” to my area of town (my “safe zone”), which is Lasalle, Verdun, a little area of downtown Montreal, and, recently, I have been able to go to Chateauguay to visit my daughter who moved there. Before I go, I have to check the road conditions, the bridge conditions, the traffic conditions. It is unimaginable what the brain can hold, all the fears, worries, stresses, questions, excuses, reasons, etc. etc. etc.
I hold down a good job, my husband is retired, and life goes on. Or at least what “life” is for me. Maybe it’snot living. I would say it is surviving, because that is what I do, every single day of my life since I was 18.
I must survive, one day at a time.
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