Panic Attack or something else

[MrSandman]

I had an incident again that is assumed to be a panic attack and I want to get other peoples very detailed descriptions of their own panic attacks. Please feel free to PM me if you wish to remain private so we can chatter back and forth about this.

My latest episode I went to working all night two weeks ago so I am sleeping during the day. I went to bed Saturday at 8am and around 10am I woke up and felt really scared or anxious and I tried to go back to sleep but I felt like I was just getting too much air or something so I took off the swift lt and killed the machine. I then sat there and felt a scared feeling but didn't feel I could sit still but knew I really needed the sleep. I just felt a scared feeling and began to get hot flashes. I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin and I was focused on my breathing and though something was wrong with it. I wanted to scream out for help but help for what? I decided I was going to take 1mg of clonazepam which I haven't taken in months and pray for the best. I started to walk down the hall but my head was spinning and I was bumping into the walls. I made it to the kitchen and my head was spinning so bad I couldn't read the bottles. My wife was asking what was wrong and I grabbed the stove to steady myself. The nest thing I know I hear a noise and my wife is standing over me asking me if I am OK. I guess I blacked out and my knees buckled and I went down hard on my butt. My kids were scared and crying. So after this I felt really good for a minute and told my wife to hand me the bottle of clonazepam and I chewed up two .5 milligram pills and made my way to the couch where she held my hand and I went through waves of hot flashes then cold and clammy until I fell asleep(no cpap). I slept off and on till 8PM then got up feeling that scared,shakey feeling and decided to go to the ER just in case and maybe to get to the bottom of this.

So went to the ER and was given EKG and gave blood and urine and some push,pull checking reflex tests and blood sugar. Everything came back normal. I was given an IV with Ativan. I couldn't really tell much difference but was discharged and got home at 230AM and intended to stay up all night and sleep during the day. Well I fell asleep and slept off and on 230Am to 6PM on the sofa with no cpap. So since I got up all I can think about is this fear of going through it again among other fears and I feel shakey. I did take a .5mg clonazepam tonight. I can't help but wonder if this is really an anxiety issue or an illness. I did have the runs for the day prior to this. I just figured I ate something bad.

Does this sound familiar with anyone. I mean the feeling is so scarey and real and you feel like you would almost rather be dead than go through it. Then fears that you are losing your mind and what if you can't get well enough to go to work and what if work finds out and on and on...

Can anyone relate

Mike

[ozij]

Mike, I once (maybe twice) had a 24-hours or so intestinal virus that made me so dizzy I couldn't walk. I had to crawl, and the lie down on the floor till the dizziness passed. It is very frightening to feel like that - I can easily imagine it triggering a panic attack.

O.

[junie]

I felt just like you are explaining your attack I broke my left arm in three places they put a cask on it I was in so much pain
I just couldn't take it so I took off my cask and put on a arm brace I could slide it right off then 4 weeks later then
I put the cask back on he cut it off took xrays told me it was still broke so he left it off then 2 weeks later I went to
therapy Good luck to you,

[MrSandman]

I guess it is a mental thing but I still think it is brought on by something else. I guess I just hate to admit I may have this panic issue. It is so hard to describe. You feel like you want your mommy to make it all go away as silly as that sounds from a 41 year old. It is just scarey as heck and this is the second or third time in 20 years.

Now the fear of it happening again is almost enough to bring it on and then all of the what if thinking. I almost don't want to be alone and I am almost scared to use the cpap again for fear of waking to the same feeling.

My wife says I just need to stop obsessing about it and not think about it now.

I thought cpap took care of a lot of this for me. I had hoped.

Could I have hyperventilated from cpap?

[COVERER]

MR SANDMAN I HAVE HAD NUMEROUS PANIC ATTACKS OVER THE YEARS AND WHEN IT FIRST HAPPENED I THOUGHT I WAS HAVING A HEART ATTACK OR SOMETHING SO I WENT FOR TESTS AFTER TESTS THEN WAS TOLD I WAS HAVING PANIC ATTACKS. IN MY CASE IT WOULD HAPPEN WHEN I WAS DRIVING. I USED TO LOVE DRIVING BUT NOW I AM DRIVING LESS. I WOULD, LIKE YOU, HAVE THIS OVERWELMING TERROR THAT SOMETHING BAD WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. MY HEART WOULD RACE, HOT FLASHES AND THE NEED TO STOP DRIVING CAME INTO PLAY. I HAVE SINCE LEARNED TO CONTROL THE ATTACKS BY REALIZING THAT THEY ARE JUST LIKE MIND GAMES THAT ARE BEING PLAYED OUT IN MY HEAD. IN THE CASE OF HAVING AN ATTACK I LEARNED TO CONTROL MY BREATHING. THEY TOLD ME THAT WHEN MY HEART STARTS RACING I SHOULD TAKE DEEP BREATHS AND IT WILL AUTOMATICALLY STOP MY HEART FROM RACING. I HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT IT DOES WORK. AND ONCE YOU COME TO THE REALAZATION THAT YOU ARE HAVING PANIC ATTACKS YOU WILL BE ABLE TO GET THEM UNDER CONTROL. I USED TO HAVE ALOT OF THEM BUT OVER THE YEARS I LEARNED TO CONTROL THEM. I EVEN DRIVE BY MYSELF ON LONG DISTANCE TRIPS. I USED HAVE TO SOMEONE WITH ME FOR THE FEAR OF HAVING AN ATTACK BUT LIKE I SAID IT GETS BETTER.

[moombeam]

Mr Sandman
I can understand how you feel, having been in your place several times in
my life. Your symptoms are very familiar and not unlike mine. I did miss out
on the fainting though. I visited ER and had ambulance calls because along with
your described symptoms I had a rapid beating heart that scared the living
daylights out of me. My Dr assured me it was not a life threatening situation
I learned adrenalin and carbon dioxide contributed to my feelings of panic
My adrenalin would build up in my system and cause the feeling of fight
or fright and mostly fright and set my nerves on edge . ( screaming yeammies)
Hyperventilate was there also.what happens there is one builds up carbon dioxide which
gives one the feeling of fear, (I called that gloom and doom.) Also causes rapid heart beat.
With me if I knew or know what is happening I can deal with better. I read up on anxiety attacks and realized I wasn't alone in the symptoms. I could learn to cope with this feeling.
One gets caught in thinking about what happened and when; so they don't want to do
that for fear it will happen again. It becomes a merry-go-round pattern and one must step
off. However hard that may be the emotional and physical memory of that event is
vivid to say the least. We sure as H don't want a repeat.
But if we do we will make it through we did all the times before. If we think
it something else causing these feeling and or symptoms track it down. So we can eliminate
from our thoughts or cure it.

Sleep deprivation may be contributing to this feeling it does uncomfortable things
to one's mind and body.
Please brave through CPAP and remove that fear from your thoughts. A least you
can say you won that one.

God bless Moonbeam

[Bigburd2008]

Mr Sandman, if you can get your doctor to loan you a O2 meter that downloads to wear during sleep. I had the panic attacks and it turned out to be low O2.

[MrSandman]

Thanks for the replies. It is a humbling experience. I had it a couple of years ago for no known reason and was out of town. I guess it was stress dues to changing jobs and I wasn't on cpap at the time but should have been. I had the same symptoms I mentioned and very high heart rate. I went to the ER on my own and everything came back normal and after a few hours and two bottles of IV fluid I finally felt better and was discharged. I had brought a bottle of clonazepam which I really didn't use much but after that attack I used it everyday for the entire time I was out of town. So then I was scared to death to go out of town again for a long time but I had to do it for work. I had many near panic experiences and avoided going out to dinner which was where the attack above started. Now it is morning and I have to go to bed since I have to work overnight tonight and I am about scared to go to bed and hook up to cpap. I know I could fall asleep on the sofa watching tv without cpap after a morning dose of clonazepam but I guess I want to avoid the situation or place where it last happened. I hate living in fear like this. I know people say well would you rather die or use the cpap and I have to say that death looks better than the fear I felt in that panic attack. I would rather live a normal life and not a fearful life and enjoy my kids more.

When I woke up all the sudden fearful feeling I felt like I was just breathing too much air and ripped the mask off and then I couldn't quit focusing on my breathing and that has been bugging me since. I am too aware of my breathing and feel I am either not getting enough air or getting too much. I shouldn't have to think about breathing right! Why am I so concerned about my breathing.

I am supposed to follow up with my Dr. but last time I did this I paid a fortune for a bunch of tests that were normal so I keep thinking - why bother. Do I follow up with the shrink - I feel like he will just try to push me onto a different antidepressant and that scares me cause I was on a different one when I had the first panic attack.

I wonder why it can't just be a thyroid issue - I can deal with a physical problem.

Sorry to whine on here but what the heck - if it helps me or someone else in the future.

[MrSandman]

What if I fell asleep and rolled over and blocked the exhaust? Could that make me wake up after a bit feeling fearful?? Just grasping for a reason. I think I was on my back though. I did look at the data and in that 2 hours I had a AI of around 7 and a higher HI and several Central HI's. I am just wondering if maybe something made me wake up fearful and then I freaked myself out and into a panic attack. The dizziness was real bad and I guess according to my wife I just gracefully buckled at the knees and then went down hard onto my butt onto the kitchen floor and I think smacked my face on the way down.

I have never fainted in my entire life so this scared me...

Thanks for reading,
Mike

[DreamStalker]

Maybe you really didn't have a panic attack ...

Just kidding.

Have you ever had your heart thoroughly checked out by a cardiologist?

You may be experiencing arrythmias of some sort. Long periods of undiagnosed OSA can lead to long periods of undiagosed severe nocturnal hypertension which can lead to an enlarged heart (left ventricular hypertrophy) or a cardiomyopothy and leaky arterial valves, which can cause various arrythmias and symptoms such as you described. I would get a referral to a cardiologist if you have never visited with one.

I had a couple of similar "panic attacks" though not as severe as blacking out or falling on my ass ... but a bit scary nonetheless. My PCP referred me to a cardio and I got checked out with a bunch of specialized tests ("nukeyuler" stress, calcium scoring, and sonar). Turns out I have the cardiomyopathy thingy that caused my arrythmias and I was put on a beta blocker which seems to have worked. The cardio doc told me that it may take a long while for my heart to get back to a normal size and beat even though I have my OSA and hypertension well treated ... or "faked out" as it were.

[dieselgal]

My panic attacks started years ago when I was about 24 years old. At that time I can assure I never in my wildest dream considered that I was having panic attacks. The odd thing with me is that it could come on almost instantly with no warning and within seconds I was hyper ventilating, dizzy , pains in the chest, shaking so hard I could walk and my jaws would sometimes clench and lock.
Then does sound crazy for a 24 year old but my back story is that I married at 16 years old and had 3 children by the time I was 21! NO STRESS THERE! Oddly I didn't feel totally stressed but apparently it was bottled up and I was putting forth my happy face but it slipped out when I least expected it.
My muscles would tighten up and it was scary! My best technique for helping that was to sit in a hot bathtub and try to relax the muscles but like COVERER says most of this revolves around the breathing. That is how I finally learned to get through these sessions and control it. I use to carry around a paper bag in my purse to help when I would hyperventilate or if I felt myself start to get light headed. If you check yourself when this happens you will most likely find that your breathing pattern is off. I use to start taking very fast shallow breaths when I was going into panic mode.
I begin to change the pattern by forcing myself to stop and realize that this was an emotional response. I was NOT dying. I also told myself that if I did pass out my body would take over and breath for me and that I would be fine. Then I would start counting breaths, I would inhale to the count of 10 and breath out to the count of ten as slowly as possible. Either lie down or sit down and just let it run it's course. Keep the paper bag for emergency and if all else fails breath slowly in and out with the bag over your mouth and nose. I always knew when the end of the attack was near because I would break out in a cold sweat.
That has been 30 years now but every once in a while it will still happen. Generally when I am very tense and just don't realize it.
Good luck with your problem and keep us informed.
If you ever need to just vent feel free to PM me too.

[LoQ]

Well, it could be a lot of things, I don't think we are going to be able to tell you what it is. You might be able to figure it out better than we can. For example, people go through alcohol withdrawal without telling anyone, and it can be very hard for a doctor to figure that out if he doesn't know that one piece of information.

Also, whatever you have, I would suggest that anxiety is just making it worse. You seem to have some emotions that are not helping you. Why the guilt/shame ("I hate to admit I have this panic issue")? If you were going through alcohol withdrawal, guilt might be understandable, but otherwise, it seems out of place.

I have a heart condition that sets off attacks similar to what you describe. My heart begins to race, and I feel like something very bad is about to happen, but I don't know exactly what. There is a feeling of absolute panic. And irrational thought. Lots of emotion, and it's hard to control my panic feeling, which makes me think I'm losing my mind.

But the truth is, this is 100% physiological. The panic response in the mind is the result of a chemical change in my brain generated by the mis-behaving heart.

In my case, the condition is harmless itself, though if I faint or fall or something, I could have an injury from that. But it sure seems at the time that I'm gonna die.

What I have learned to do is to tell myself during these attacks that it is not going to kill me, that I've lived through it before, and that I'll make it through this one. I try to slow my breathing down by taking deep breaths, which will slow my heart down. Take a deep breath, hold it for 4 seconds, and exhale slowly.

By allowing myself to hyperventilate and increasing the anxiety, all that does is increase adrenaline, which isn't going to help. Indeed, that will make it worse.

My advice to you is to find out what it really is. This is going to be hard, because often attacks like this are over by the time you get to the doctor. The doctor is going to need to see it in person.

You've had 2 in twenty years. Your anxiety over having another one is inappropriate, and it may be making it more likely that it's going to happen, not less. You are living with a false belief, that somehow by being vigilant you will be able to prevent another attack. Unless you are drinking, I don't think you can prevent it by vigilance.

In my case, I can lessen the likelihood of a panic attack by avoiding stimulants like caffeine. But at the end of the day, my heart has a defect. If it goes nuts, there isn't a whole lot I could have done to prevent it, assuming I have avoided caffeine and other stimulants. You can try that. You can also educate yourself. For example, perhaps you have a heart condition like mine. If you knew that for a fact, a lot of your unhelpful emotions should disappear based on believing fact. Heck, you could just tell yourself that it might be that (it might), and if so, there's not a whole lot you can do about it, other than avoiding alcohol/caffeine/pseudoephedrine/stimulants, and learning how to cope during the attack.

But I would suggest to you that your runaway thoughts about it are borne of ignorance and are not helpful to you. You are irrationally associating "going out of town" and "using CPAP" with the cause of these attacks, and I think those are both highly unlikely to be related. You don't really know what the cause is, you are just assuming it is whatever you were involved in at the time of the attack. If I were to use the same logic, I might think that using a computer causes my panic attacks. See how irrational that is? The truth is my heart was going to flip out while I was doing something....I can't just associate whatever I was doing with the cause.

Next time you have an attack, try reminding yourself that you lived through this before and it's not going to kill you. Also try taking a very deep breath, holding it, then exhaling very slowly. This WILL slow your heart down if you do it enough times. Get a pulse-meter of some sort and try it right now. You'll see that you can slow your heartrate down with slow breathing. Practice now so you'll be skilled at it when you need it. The great thing about this technique is that you can do this anywhere, anytime, and no tools needed.

[N6CRV]

Hello Mike, sure can relate! I get them all the time, if I'm not in total control. What I mean is that I have to be able to leave if we are out shopping or driving. It has really messed up our lives as I no long go out for dinner and if I go shopping I need to go in and get what I wanted and leave. It would be nice to just go out for a nice dinner or shopping. I have been on Xanax for over 10 years now and it gotten to where it does not do much good. I have been doing OK with the Cpap as I know that I can remove it if I need to. Medical makes you wear it for 4 hours at least a night. There have had times where I set up and wait till the 4 hours are up. I did try a shrink and was told to talk to myself saying all is Ok. Just remember that YOU are in control! If you start feeling a little strange when you have the Cpap on you CAN remove it! It might make it better to try it in steps instead of trying to go the whole night. Once you see that you can keep it on or take it off it will be better. Good luck and remember you are not alone!.
Don

[tattooyu]

As you can see MrSandMan, you are not alone. I know we spoke in private about this issue, but as you can see, it is not uncommon. I don't know how long it took me to finally believe that during a panic attack, I was not going to die (hence the three ambulance calls in a six-year period).

LoQ, do you happen to have MVP (Mitral Valve Prolapse)?

[Guest]

Mr Sandman, I am currently being treated for anxiety and panic attacks, although since I've found the right doctor I haven't had one in almost two years. I do still have a fair amount of anxiety and this is how it started. About two years ago I woke up in the middle of the night, this is prior to being diagnosed w/OSA, in a complete state of incomprehensible fear. I was gasping for air, heart racing, tight chest and feeling like I was going to die. To this day I do not know what triggered it but from that night forward my anxiety was so intense, especially at night, that my chest physically hurt. After several doctors prescribing sleep meds, I was up to 3mg of Lunesta + 3mg of Xanax a night and it would still take me 4 hours to fall asleep and then I would only sleep for about 90 minutes, I went back to my GP and asked if I could be tested for sleep apnea. That is how that was diagnosed but I was still having tremendous anxiety and panic episodes (I also went through 3 anti-depressants, all SSRIs). I was also diagnosed with hypothyroidism during this time.

My panic attacks were similar to what you are describing and if you compare the symptoms of having a heart attack you would swear that that is what is happening to you. All in all I made 3 trips to the ER over the span of about 1 year and every time my heart and everything else they checked were fine. I never experienced the dizziness; it was always shortness of breath, rapid heart beat, tightness in the chest and an overwhelming sense of doom (if that makes sense). Since you mentioned thyroid, my panic attacks seemed to coincide with a high TSH level. I am not saying they were the cause, it was just an observation that I became aware of.

How have I eliminated the panic attacks? I went to see a psychiatrist and she prescribed Remeron (15mg 2 hours before bed), however I still experience the anxiety at night so I also take 2mg of Clonazepam as well. I see that you wrote you were taking an anti-depressant during one of your attacks. I don't know which one but I will guess it was one of the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, please correct me if I am wrong. Remeron primarily blocks the reuptake of norepinephrine and to a small degree serotonin. So its pharmological action on brain neurotransmitters is quite different than the standard serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Which include, Celexa, Lexapro, Prozac, and Zoloft. I couldn't tolerate any of these types of compounds. They actually made me feel more anxious. Remeron has helped a lot but my sleep routine is still very fragmented, sleep for 3-4 hours wake up sometimes fall right back to sleep and then wake up 1-2 hours later (this is with CPAP). A lot of times I take 1-2mg of Xanax to get back to sleep. My work schedule is more average than yours, work days try to sleep nights. I know a lot of people are reluctant to endorse meds as the only recourse but sometimes it is. I have tried diaghphramatic breathing as well as relaxation CDs to minimize my anxiety at night but they do not help me.

Sorry for the long read but I hope there is some useful information in what I've written. I am not a doctor just an average guy relating some life experiences that are similar to what you are going through. Good luck.

Cheers

Travis