panic attack

Filed under: Themes, The Wandering Agoraphobe, Irked Videos

Rib-tickling hilarity…after the jump!

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Filed under: Uncategorized

Quoting UPI.com:

KANSAS CITY, Mo.—Two U.S. researchers say dogs appear to be helpful to soldiers and former soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Craig Love, a research psychologist, and Joan Esnayra, founder of the Psychiatric Service Dog Society, discussed their work Thursday during a conference on military health research in Kansas City, The Kansas City Star reported. They are about to begin a $300,000 study, funded by the Defense Department, at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington. Love and Esnayra surveyed 39 people with PTSD who were given service dogs and found 82 percent reported a reduction in symptoms. There are now about 10,000 psychiatric service dogs in the United States. What they do depends partly on the symptoms experienced by the people with whom they are paired. In the case of people with PTSD, the dogs can be trained to nudge them when they show signs of panic attacks. They can also help calm PTSD patients down by reacting calmly or not reacting at all to something the person perceives as a threat.

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Filed under: Regular Contributors, Brian Segal

Man’s Best Friend (Or how the windows in my home were replaced)

by Brian Segal

I’m not really sure where to start this story so I guess I’ll take the advice of the king in Lewis Carroll’s story Alice in Wonderland and “Begin at the Beginning and go on till you come to the End.”

For as long as I can remember I have always had a dog. Click to continue »

Filed under: Themes, The Wandering Agoraphobe, Books & Book Reviews

THE LOWDOWN ON PANIC ATTACKS

During a panic attack your brain perceives a threat and sends the signal to trigger the fight or flight response. You might think that since there’s no real threat, a panic attack is a misfired signal … Well, you’re right! But that is not necessarily a bad thing. Click to continue »

Filed under: Themes, The Wandering Agoraphobe

My Old Companion

by Thérèse

What’s in a name?

I can put a name to this often misdiagnosed ailment that afflicts me, but does that make it any better? Have my many symptoms faded away? Has the persistent fear vanished? No.

At least I do have the comfort of knowing there is a specific term for my condition: Agoraphobia. Some comfort, I suppose, considering I used to believe I was slowly losing grip with reality. So now that I know what is wrong, how do I go about making it right? Is the problem simply all in my head? Can I just decide to change my negative thought patterns and be rid of panic for good? Or should I blame my issues on faulty genes and declare that nothing can be done?

Change in any form can be either exciting or frightening. I usually opt for the latter. On the few occasions that I forget to be anxious, I invariably pause at some moment to look for my old companion. Life without anxiety has become strange to me. The sensation is unfamiliar and I frankly cannot imagine such a state of being. Perhaps I’ve been secretly resisting therapeutic aid because of my fear of the unknown. The fear of being free. Like a prisoner who has grown up incarcerated and doesn’t know life “on the outside,” so have I forgotten what freedom is.

But could an old dog possibly learn new tricks? Is there a glimmer of hope that I can change? Time and lots of self-help will tell. My phobias have been 30 years in the making. I can only hope that it won’t take another 30 to undo them.

Hope, courage and best wishes to all my fellow phobics.

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Filed under: Themes, The Wandering Agoraphobe

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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