***

I suffered my first panic attack when I was a fifteen-year-old waitress at the Brown University cafeteria. As I stood behind a counter dishing out peas, I felt an electrical current tear through my body. My heart raced, skipped beats, and flopped around in my chest. My lungs tightened up so fast that I was breathless. Or so I thought.

I was actually breathing too quickly. I began to hyperventilate. My throat closed up, my body trembled, my arms grew rigid and my fingertips tingled. I thought I was dying.

But I managed to get home, curl up in my parents’ bed, and watched dazed as a family physician paid a house call, examined me and announced that I was “just a little bit nervous.”

Was I ever.

He wrote me a prescription for a tranquilizer, and I carried the pills with me everywhere, on high alert for the next attack. Now that I’d been prescribed a drug, my condition was official: I was a freak.

I knew that for sure.

None of my teenaged friends had a defective central nervous system that reared up and exploded, catching them completely off-guard, turning them into a quivering mess.

Back in 1968, no one ever used the term panic attack. Nobody was in rehab, or at least admitting it. A few kids were messed up enough to disappear, leaving town for places unknown. But I was normal enough to stick it out. Or try to, as I played the role of a mentally healthy adolescent.

I didn’t have panic attacks every day. And I didn’t take Valium all the time. I never talked to my family or any of my friends about the fact that I faced death on dozens of occasions when the all-too familiar symptoms of an attack – tightening lungs, a pounding heart – snuck up and clobbered me.

To continue reading Priscilla’s story, click here.

Follow Priscilla’s journey from panic to peace at http://priscillawarner.wordpress.com.