Autobiography of an Agoraphobic

Imagine that you are in a plane at 30,000 feet. Suddenly two men start to pull you toward the door.  Then a third man opens up the door.  As the two men pull you closer your fear is building. You know something terrible is going to happen.  When you get to the door of the plane, the three men push you out.  You’re falling, and you know when you hit the ground you will die.  You start screaming, but no one can help you.  You continue to fall, and fall, and fall, but you never hit the ground.  You are in a perpetual, terrifying fear, and you know it will never end.  You can’t breathe, your heart is racing, and it will never stop.

If you can imagine how you would feel if this event happened to you, then you could get the idea of what a panic attack is like.  My name is Michael Patrick I live in the Midwest, a suburb of the largest city in the state.  I have experienced the above event several hundred times in the 24 years I’ve had agoraphobia with panic disorder.  I’m 49 years old, I’m Catholic, and by the time I was 30 years old I had been hospitalized for my condition three times.  I’m writing this book because I want other people to know my story, and how God saw me through a living nightmare.  I want to give hope to those who have panic disorder, and to enlighten those who don’t.  Since I led a fairly ordinary life until I was 19, I will begin my story there, at the age of 19, when I had my first panic attack.

In 1973, at the age of 19, I was attending college at a large state university in the Midwest.  I was a normal college student who was very intelligent and tended to be a perfectionist. I had recently had my tonsils out the year before, and a short time after I had contracted mononucleosis, which I had for almost six months, causing me to miss the second semester of my freshmen year.  Just before returning to start my second year of college, I had contracted a virus, which caused me to have fatigue, loss of appetite, and a low-grade temperature.  I went to college still sick, in the hope that I would soon be well again.  Unfortunately, this was not to be the case.  Two days later, with a temperature of 103°, I went to the University health center, which misdiagnosed my illness as a cold. The doctor ran no tests, nor did he do a physical examination.  All he did was look at my throat and told me to rest for a few days.  I went back to my dormitory and I was so sick I didn’t leave my dorm for two days.  My friends on the floor brought food from the cafeteria to me.  Since I wasn’t getting any help from the doctor at the university, I called my own doctor, who was 50 miles away, and made an appointment.  The day before the appointment I felt somewhat better, so I went into the recreation room to watch TV with some friends.  All of a sudden, I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. I inhaled more, and breathed deeper, but the sensation never went away.  I said to my friends, “I can’t breathe!”  Then it got worse.  I was taken to the emergency room of the local hospital, and the nurse on call told me I was hyperventilating. I thought certainly I would die.  She gave me a shot of tranquilizer, which helped, but not much.  For two hours in the emergency room I hyperventilated.  I thought almost certainly I would die, but never did.  My friends drove me to my hometown hospital, where I was admitted for tests.  My doctor discovered that my liver was enlarged and tender, and after doing some blood tests he discovered that I had walked off a case of severe viral hepatitis, and he told me later that I could have died from it.  He told me I was in no danger now; but I was still having attacks of hyperventilation, and the only advice I received was to breathe into a paper bag each time it occurred.  This, however, never relieved the terror I had experienced, a terror that haunts me even to this day.

I was told I needed to see a psychiatrist, because in addition to the problem of hyperventilation, I had become very depressed from all that I had gone through, and had

lost 30 pounds due to having no appetite for food.  I was convinced that I had a heart problem, but my doctor could not find anything wrong with my heart, after listening to it and giving me an EEG.  Many years later I would find out he was wrong, but since at the time everything pointed to a psychiatric problem, he recommended that I see a psychiatrist.  So I made an appointment with a local psychiatrist, and this began my long road back to being normal and functioning, a road that did not come to an end until recently.