A Moving True Story on Panic Attacks

I'd heard about panic attacks. My father told me that he once ran down the street in the middle of the night with just his pyjama bottoms on in the pouring rain, a bare footed and chested Welshman thundering down the middle of the road. You wouldn't have wanted to see that coming towards you…! “What were you running from?” I asked him. “Death” he said.

What he was running from I later discovered was fear of fear. He was having a major panic attack. One where your throat and chest become constricted, your arms start to tingle, you can't breathe, you feel faint and the overriding sensation is that you are going to die.

It may sound dramatic but it is very real. I know this, not because he was explicit in his description of his symptoms. I know this because twenty years later I too became a victim of severe panic attacks...