Is this a panic attack or food poisoning?
A sentence I never thought I’d google, and three things that helped
The minute I woke that night I knew something bad was going to happen and that I needed to get out of the room where my daughter was sleeping beside me immediately.
It was 1am and I had woken up feeling seasick. Struggling to sit up, I instinctively looked for an unmoving horizon line to hang onto to try to settle the feeling, like you do when you’re car sick.
We were staying with friends. I got out of bed quietly and got myself downstairs to the couch, trying to get as far away as possible from everyone sleeping upstairs.
Earlier that evening as we had returned from the beach I had noticed a feeling of something settling in my body. It had felt entirely physical, not at all emotional, somewhere low in my chest. Feck, a cold, I remember thinking. We had had a lovely day with our (combined) four children; a walk to the local town, lunch outdoors in the sun, ice-cream, playground, beach. It’s a day we have done countless times, and even though it had been a very stressful few weeks I had felt myself immediately relax into the familiarity of this easy routine, more unwound than I had been in weeks.
Now, I think that was part of the reason for what happened that night. There had been an unconscious letting down of the guard. A feeling of getting to a safe place, that allowed a realisation, if only a physical one, of the anxiety I was keeping at bay to rush in.
It is a year later and even now, every time I go to work on this piece, I feel sick in my stomach thinking about that night, a nervousness that even describing it might bring back that feeling.
When I made it to the couch that night I sat there for an hour as waves of nausea passed over me that caused my entire body to shudder. Eventually I started to actually get sick. My friend’s husband woke and came down to look after me, the next day he told me he’d never seen somebody be so violently ill, and he still looked a bit shook. We assumed it was something I’d eaten, or an extremely short-lived bug.
Two weeks later, the same thing happened when I was at my boyfriend’s house. Again, waking in the middle of the night, that sense of immediately knowing something was wrong. This time going down to lie on the bathroom floor (is there anything better than a cold tile on the face when you feel sick?), another very trusted person sitting beside me.
The third time I was awake, at bookclub. There was an unexpected message regarding my daughter (she was fine, but it involved her). I was awake now to watch it unfold, the impending sense of…doom? Horror? Fear? General unsafeness.
Actually the most overriding thing, for me anyway, is a sense that you might soon not be in control of your body. You are on the precipice of something dreadful, it might come bursting out of you, and you need to get somewhere you can safely deal with that. I made my apologies and left, driving home in the throes of horrible nausea, slow breathing to try to stop the repeated spasms I could feel in my tummy, to no avail.
My poor dad, babysitting, opened the door to me gasping I’m fine but I might be sick, then dashing past him to the bathroom. I wasn’t sick this time, just bent double with stomach cramps. And the realisation that this was not food poisoning, or a bug. This was a panic attack.
I was three in before I realised what was happening, which feels kind of silly, but they were so physical it took a while to realise it was a manifestation of mental stress. It’s something people say to me all the time in interviews, that stress shows physically. That diagnosing things is not a straightforward, immediate thing, that they didn’t know it was anxiety, because it didn’t seem like anxiety.
It made sense, it had been a stressful year, with big financial difficulties, as well as other stuff going on.
I googled it, feeling, if I’m honest, a bit ridiculous. This had felt so innately, so dramatically physical, that it seemed impossible that it had been caused by something so ephemeral as emotions, or thoughts. I typed in can anxiety make you puke. And then I texted a friend who is a psychologist, slightly mortified, sheepishly asking if a panic attack can present as being violently sick, assuming I’d get a polite wtf in reply.
Turns out it can.
I should know this, it’s something that comes up in interviews all the time, mental health issues presenting initially as a physical thing.
Those first three were the worst, but I still occasionally get them. Sometimes, it’s because I’m somewhere safe, and that allows the panic in. Like a recent dinner out with my boyfriend after a really intense week. Or it might be a situation that is stressing me out; there was one night before a public speaking event (textbook). In a very busy restaurant recently I felt one coming on. I have discovered three things that have helped, I did one of them and was able to make it recede.