It is so hard to pinpoint when my mental illness first reared its ugly head. We could start with the first time I was hospitalized at 13 because I was so depressed and deranged in love with my abusive boyfriend that I thought I couldn’t live without him. We could talk about when I was 2 or 3 and I had severe abandonment issues where every single day when my mother would drop me off at my Grandmother’s house I would scream bloody murder trying to keep her from going and I would sit in the window crying long after she’d gone convinced she’d never come back to me. We can talk about the vague time that spanned several years where I had an intense phobia of strangers and the idea that I would be kidnapped so much so that when I would go outside to play and a car would turn down our street I’d make a b-line for the front door (those are all stories for another time). But the time I really want to talk about is the summer between 3rd and 4th grades. Because that was when the doctors first got involved.
The year I turned 8 was not a good year for me. Soon after my 8th birthday my mother’s friend died. She was a lot younger than my mother, closer to my older brother’s age and I loved her. She died in a drunk driving accident and I watched my mother grieve her and I felt the pain of my first real loss in an abstract and surreal way, as if it wasn’t real. A few months later, I was hit by a car crossing the street in front of my house. By sheer luck the side mirror clipped my arm but it was enough to throw me back onto the ground and fracture my right arm so I had to go to the hospital and get x-rays and wear a sling to keep it immobile for months. Before that had fully healed, I was in a car accident with my brother. He and his friend were fucking around as I laid stretched out in the back seat, playing imaginary games (no seat belts because kids in the 80s were tough!) and he hit a parked car totaling my father’s pride and joy. As if this wasn’t bad enough, 3 days after school let out for the summer my Grandma Virgie died. The one who lived down the street and babysat me every day and whose house was basically my second home.
Her death was not exactly sudden. At 64, Virgie had severe emphysema but still smoked even with her oxygen tubes hooked up to her nose. She simply wheeled her oxygen tanks around the house from room to room and held her cigarette in her other hand. Knowing as an adult how incredibly and insanely dangerous It is to smoke with oxygen hooked up, I am honestly thankful for not having died in a violent fireball that engulfed the entire house. Virgie had not been doing well at that point and had been in the hospital a few days before. They told her she had “hardening of the arteries” in her heart and that there wasn’t a whole lot they could do for her. She died of a heart attack.
After my grandmother’s death, something happened to me. I was home one night doing whatever the hell I did at 8 years old on a week night and something just started happening. My heart started racing for no apparent reason and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I started sweating first, then got really cold, then hot again. I was panting and felt like I was drowning sitting there in my room. I went to my mother and told her I was afraid my heart was going to stop. She assured me it was not and she sat with me for a few minutes telling me to take slow deep breaths. She was clearly concerned but wanted to give it a few minutes before taking me to the emergency room. After what seemed like 5 hours (but was in reality about 5 minutes) the feelings subsided and I started to go back to normal. But I kept my hand on my heart almost constantly after that.
I wish I could say that was a one-time event. But a few nights later it happened again. And I was convinced my heart was going to just stop and I was going to die just like my grandmother had. Perhaps my arteries were hardening right then as we sat there. This was it and I had so many things I wanted to do with my life! My mother worked evenings and so I sought comfort in my father, who offered me a range of terrifying reasons that I could be having this kind of awful and terrifying reaction. He was very helpful. Again, after about 5 or 10 minutes the feeling subsided and I went to bed, hand on my heart, glad that I had faced down death once again.
It started happening often, lasting for hours rather than minutes, and after a few weeks, my mother took me to a doctor who listened very carefully to my symptoms and then put the stethoscope to my heart. I was sure he was going to find some defect that was causing these episodes and he would tell me that I had just weeks to live. But he told me everything seemed perfectly normal. His diagnosis: Anxiety Attacks. At that time, panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder were just not things people ever said. And certainly, they never applied such things to children. I was a rare case apparently and at that time there was never any suggested treatment or solution offered. I was simply told to “stop worrying so much. We will bill your insurance, thanks.”
My “anxiety attacks” (which are now commonly known as panic attacks) went on for months, all throughout the summer. They rarely happened anywhere but at home and almost always late at night, either when I was lying in bed or I was supposed to already be in bed but wasn’t. I had learned through experience that going to my father when my mother was at work just tended to make things worse so I called the only other person in the world who I was sure would be awake late at night, and happy to hear from me at 10:00 on a weeknight. I called my other grandmother, Grandma Giampa.
Grandma Giampa had a very soothing and simple way of talking me through it. Although I know she thought it was completely bonkers that an 8-year-old was so worried she’d work herself into a panic, she would just talk to me as if everything were normal. “How was school today? What did you have for dinner? Did you watch anything good on TV tonight?” And sometimes, when that wasn’t working she would call attention to the obvious: “but your heart IS beating and you ARE breathing. And although this happens a lot, it always passes. It doesn’t last forever.” She became the only person who could talk me down from that ledge and after a while, once the panic attacks started to subside, I would call her up late at night just to talk and hear about what was happening with the characters on her “programs”.
It was never something that was diagnosed or treated. No one suggested I talk to a therapist or get on medication. Every time my mother took me to the doctor (and I demanded to see a doctor many times because I knew I was dying) they would all just tell me to stop the worrying. Super helpful. Looking back on it now it is almost comical compared to how we rush to medicate and treat every little unpleasant feeling that comes over our kids. On the one hand I probably suffered unnecessarily for longer than I should have or might have had I gotten some kind of help. But on the other hand, I am glad that they didn’t, at 8 years old, just offer me some pills and send me on my way.
After a few months, the panic attacks subsided on their own and I went back to being a normal (as close as I was capable of) kid and went about my life. Unfortunately, the experience of being “normal” wouldn’t last long, and within a few years I’d find myself with an official diagnosis.
Cooking with Klonopin 