Wednesday 25 August 2010

leechcraft

I gave everbody a bit of a scare when I needed to be rushed to the emergency room, with all the signs, I had decided in the car, of a stroke or something else catastrophic.  I was admitted to the hospital and with friends and family, sort of puzzled through what else may have set off this frightening episode.  Going stepwise, it made sense what the less traumatic causes might have been and did wonders to relieve my worries, which I am sure just exaserbated and magnified every misplaced sensation.  At first, to me, nothing seemed particularly out of place, but it seemed I had succumbed to a terrible coalition of too much coffee, barometric pressure, aspirin, an empty stomach, laissez-faire tensions at work that conspired with a sinus headache and a panic attack.
 They seem like sensible and common enough experiences--shared to the extent I am sure I was not the first to make that mistake, but I suppose not intelligibly communicable until one experiences it for ones self.  A battery of tests, including an MRI that was a strange and artistic experience, isolated among the sounds of laser blasts and techno whale music, and an ultrasound scan on the veins in my neck eliminated the most dire causes.  The physcian admitted to me that 90% of the time, they never know what causes these things before discharging me the next day.  I just never though a series of mundane irritants could mimic--at least what I imagine it to be--the feeling of something scarier and much worse.  A panic attack, and I hope I am using the proper terminology, is by no means something innocent, and neither are the underlying anxieties and vulnerabilities that invite it in.