The nurse was wrapping the arm band around my left biceps last Monday to take the routine blood pressure reading.  As she squeezed the bulb repeatedly, she made conversation.

“So, you’re, uh . . . having an anxiety attack right now ?”  I could tell she didn’t believe me.

“That’s right,” I said.  “It started around lunch time.  I just figured I should come in after work to take care of it, otherwise it’s going to be a miserable night.”  It was 5:30 PM.

She finished the blood pressure reading.  Her eyes bulged.  Now she believed me.

“You must really be . . . uh . . . well, it’s 160/98.  Do you take blood pressure medication?” she wanted to know.

“Yes, and thank goodness for that, or there would be no telling what the B.P. would be right now.  Three days ago it was 118/74, but the whole anxiety thing messes it up just a little.”

I know I’m having an attack when I suddenly am unable to breathe.  Then come the headaches, fatigue, and the pain all down the back of the neck, and all of life suddenly becomes like 5:00 AM on a Saturday morning.

Since 1996 I’ve been asking doctors about what I thought was my breathing problem.  “It’s like I can’t get any air.  I breathe as deeply as I can but nothing helps.”  No physical tests ever revealed any problems with lungs or blood-oxygen levels.  Not until April of this year when I walked in to Palouse Medical Ready Care after a particularly miserable day at work, and decided that I wasn’t going to leave until I had an answer.  God is merciful, and Judith Turner was on call that day.

I never knew before that the body could react to erroneous panic signals from the nervous system without ever involving the conscious mind.  I say that the conscious mind isn’t involved, but I think that’s just because I’ve lived with it for so long.  I just assumed that everyone was nervous most of the time like I was.  It was just background noise to me.  It adds a lot of new perspective to my past experiences.  I don’t have a lot of achievement to reflect upon, but I can certainly feel some relief and even pride at the things I was able to do in life even as the cold, black talons of panic raked at my chest.

It might seem strange that I worked the whole afternoon whilst the anxiety tightened around me like an inflating blood pressure cuff, but now that I know what it is, now that the monster has been exposed and identified, there’s no need for me to, uh . . . panic . . . for lack of a better word.