If you are able and willing perhaps you could explain your symptoms a little more.
You indicated that you had severe pain in your legs, your heart, and severe headaches. Did that happen all at the same time or what order did they occur?
Were there any stressors that occurred that day that could have triggered a panic attack?
You mentioned, "I would cry for like 10 seconds than just stop and feel fine." Crying is a natural indicator of your body successfully relieving stress. So if it were a panic attack, what you just described makes sense.
Did you lose your ability to move? Were you frozen during this episode? Did you go unconscious? Did you lose the ability to speak during the episode?
There are different types of panic attack that vary by the degree of the symptoms.
A panic attack is a sudden episode of intense fear that triggers severe physical reactions when there is no real danger or apparent cause. Panic attacks can be very frightening. When panic attacks occur, you might think you're losing control, having a heart attack or even dying.
Many people have just one or two panic attacks in their lifetimes, and the problem goes away, perhaps when a stressful situation ends. But if they have recurrent, unexpected panic attacks and spent long periods in constant fear of another attack, it can develop into a condition called panic disorder.
So a reoccurance of panic attacks can throw the body out of balance making it more likely for other attacks to occur in the future; for the condition to become chronic. When this happens, it is referred to as a panic disorder.
A symptoms of panic attack generally includes 10 physicologic symptoms and 3 psycological symptoms. These symptoms are:
* shortness of breath,
* heart racing,
* dizziness,
* chest pain,
* sweating,
* chills or hot flashes,
* trembling,
* choking,
* nausea,
* numbness or tingling in the limbs or entire body,
* feeling of unreality or being detached from the world,
* fear of losing control,
* fear of dying.
Nicole Martin described the three stages of her deep panic attack:
Stage 1: The Fog
When an attack is in its earliest stage, I enter a sort of mental fog or blur. If I am reading a sign, I know what I am seeing is numbers or letters. However, my brain cannot process them. I cannot follow what I am trying to read and lose focus quickly. Sounds around me become static-like, as if they’re all jumbled and indistinguishable. For instance, when you are fully submerged underwater and it’s raining out, you might hear the raindrops hitting the water, but you’re unable to pinpoint where they’re coming from. Or like the game you play as kids in the pool. You talk to each other underwater and try and guess what the other is saying. [feeling of unreality or being detached from the world]
Stage 2: Senses Awry
As my hearing starts to get muffled, my fingertips have grown numb [numbness] and my stomach feels cold, as if I hadn’t eaten in days. My mouth is dry, and I get an iron taste in my mouth, as if I were just sucking on a dirty penny for the last hour. In this stage, my husband has noticed from an outside perspective that I’m within the onset of a panic attack. According to his description, I’m expressionless, and my responses become delayed or I don’t respond at all. [shutdown of left cortex called Broca's area, which is responsible for speech] I’m almost zombie-like. As my brain begins to catch up with the rest of my body, I enter fight-or-flight mode, with fight stuck on max. My heart rate rises rapidly [heart racing] and my breathing becomes labored, entering the hyperventilation phase [shortness of breath]. Within seconds it becomes difficult to breathe, my legs weaken and I can barely keep myself upright [tonic immobility].
Stage 3: Shivering
This final stage tends to last from 15 to 30 minutes depending on the circumstances prior to the onset. At this point, my body manages to both collapse and yet stiffen [tonic immobility], with my arms clenched to my chest [chest pains]. It feels like I lose control of my muscles [fear of losing control] as I begin to shiver uncontrollably — but this is not a seizure, it is shivering. [shivering – method used by animals for venting unused stress energy after a fight/flight response]. It’s as if someone has thrown me into a freezer [chills], and yet I’m sweating at the same time [sweating]. And in my head, it’s as if there’s a horribly filmed home movie from my childhood stuck on a sort of fast-forward/repeat mode of the abuse I suffered in my childhood. During this stage, I tend to partially blackout. I can still hear what’s going on around me and see, but I cannot remember exactly what’s happened or how much time has passed after I’ve come out of my episode. I just remember bits of sounds and people’s faces.
How well does your experience match the 13 symptoms listed above? If it is a close match, you may have experienced a panic attack, just more serious than those you experienced before. There are different intensities to panic attack. They can become more severe.
Richard Maguire described his meltdowns in the following way:
As a child and teenager, I felt helpless against meltdowns; they had me in a destructive cycle. I hurt people, lost friends and got into all sorts of trouble. My meltdowns were either the explosive sort, or I would run for miles. A meltdown is the result of anxiety and the resulting excess of adrenaline. There are three ways a meltdown can manifest: as an explosion of violence (the fight response), running away (the flight response), or becoming totally passive and playing dead (the play dead response). I think all three responses are equally serious and indicate that someone is terrified beyond coping, even if only the fight or flight responses seem serious to onlookers.
I developed play dead meltdowns in later teens as they attracted kinder responses. I have hit out at people, trashed my room, self-harmed and lots of other things in meltdown. These all scared me, as did the inevitability of the next meltdown, which then made a meltdown come sooner. I had play dead meltdowns several times daily, and explosive meltdowns at about 18-month intervals in early adulthood.
16 May 2019, 7:41 pm
