Panic attacks

Yep, panic attacks.

Wikipedia describes it like this: "Panic attacks are periods of intense fear or apprehension that are of sudden onset and of variable duration of minutes to hours"

I'd never had one in my life, i've seen my fair share of them, but never experienced them..but hey, this journey was full of surprises in the first place anyway...

In hindsight, i'd probably had been close to one a couple of times over the last couple of months... one time when we had friends over from Edinburgh and we had ventured into a massive department shop, and all the lights and sounds were hitting me senses and on top of that I had sort of lost sight of them pretty early on. but i kept rational  and just walked to the entrance off the shop figuring that at some point they would have to come this way anyway... which they did.

Once I had made my way to the gym with my girlfriend, as initially I figured some swimming might not be a bad idea, but then after the sinus surgery i figured, maybe a stationary bike might be a better idea...she helped me to the bike and off I went...  again, I got hit by an overload of attack on my senses.... too much blinding light, too much (amplified) noise... luckily I felt it coming, and just stopped, sort of worked my way back to the locker rooms,and just sat for a while...

Now these might already be categorised as panic attacks, I really don't know... but what I do know is that this was nothing compared with when suddenly out of the blue at our apartment i had a proper one... not triggered by lights, or sounds, just... emotions....fear, worries, whatever you want to call it...

I was going through my previously mentioned daily routine, listening to talk radio, and there must've have been someone on there talking about not having a job or something along those lines, and it must have gotten into my head that that could be a possible future for me as well, loosing my sight (at this stage i still did not know what the problem was) and the implication that would have.. work wise, life wise, relations wise... and on and on ... its just stacked on top of each other.
Suddenly I found myself shaking uncontrollably  crying like there was no tomorrow, breathless wheezing, dizzyness and what else.... about 20 minutes later I came back to my senses and found myself sitting cowering in the corner of our bathroom...exhausted... so i went to bed in the hope to sleep it off. and i did... so much that i didn't even tell my girlfriend about it, in fact, i've never told anyone the severity of it until now....

After that i had another 2 attacks, which luckily were the last ones, but the good thing is that it made me realise i had slipped into a wrong frame of mind, and maybe it was time to go and seek help...