Panic in the streets of London

Some of you will recognize the title of this post as a line from a Smiths song. But for me it was a real-life event, although it felt much more like a hallucination. A very nasty one at that.

Saturday night as I was on my way to Sainsbury's to get some groceries I had a panic attack. Not just any old garden variety panic attack: it was a whopper. Not that I have a lot to compare it to; I've only ever had one prior to that, and it was about six or seven years ago now. At that point I had no idea what was happening, having never lived through such an unusual experience before, except I assumed that it was all the chemical badness that I had ever ingested during my rock 'n' roll years come back to haunt me, all at once.

If you've ever had a really, really bad trip, it was kind of like that, only you haven't taken anything for donkey's years and you're perfectly straight when it happens, so it's that much more bizarre and inexplicable -- which of course makes it that much more frightening. It's not like you can just console yourself by saying, "Bummer. I'm having a real bad trip. But I'll be okay in a few hours." Because you have NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT'S HAPPENING TO YOU, except maybe you think you're losing your mind, and/or you are dying, and/or the world is coming to a horrible end. Or rather, you're certain of it. And that certainty increases as your oxygen supply slowly dwindles, and you feel dizzier, and all you want to do is throw yourself off the railway bridge and onto the third rail or under the oncoming Routemaster double-decker bus to end it all, and quickly.

Saturday's panic attack was something like that. But worse. Much, much worse. Because it lasted for hours, not minutes. And I'm thousands of mile away from my own country, my wife and family and friends.

Luckily I was able to get Danika on the phone and she talked me in for a rough landing back at the residence, where even more luckily fellow Canuck and Harrow hall resident Amy and her fiance Adam were home when I knocked. Adam, you see, is a physician in residence at Cambridge University, and he happened to be visiting Harrow this past weekend (they alternate visits). So when Danika had to go, Adam and Amy came to sit with me and keep me breathing.

And as if that doesn't make me the luckiest cat in the hat, I also happened to have a couple of Valiums (Valia?) left over from when a kind colleague took pity on my chronically sleep-deprived self and laid a modest array of pills -- some herbal and some not -- on me a few weeks ago. Preferring as always the natural route, I'd left the heavy-duty stuff well enough alone, but was ever so grateful to have it handy Saturday night. If nothing else I was able to get a good night's sleep, which I desperately needed.

To cut a long story short, I've spent most of the last few days recovering because the whole episode took a great deal out of me, physically and emotionally. I also spent a couple of days bouncing from doctor to doctor, making sure that there wasn't anything more insidious going on, which there doesn't appear to be (thank god).

I have another visit to the school shrink scheduled for Tuesday, and a full exam scheduled with my own family GP when I get back to Vancouver. Which is mercifully very, very soon.