going through hell

i’m pretty much going through hell right now, with panic attacks. it’s gotten to the point where i have them almost every day. and it’s the usual: i think i’m dying, i become a hypochondriac, heart racing, uncontrollable shaking all over my body, stiff painful muscles, heavy sweating, tingling hands, diarrhea, flatulence, belching, strange pains all over my body, wet hands and feet, feeling hot and cold at the same time, racing thoughts, a feeling like i am going to black out, and an overwhelming fear that i am about to die in less than 5 minutes. i hate panic attacks more than anything else in the world. why on earth do i keep having so many of them? i can’t calm myself down when i have one, and rational thought does nothing to help me. if i explain away my physical symtoms as those of a panic attack, and think about how panic attacks are safe and don’t harm me, and work my best to calm down, then all of a sudden the panic attack comes back 100 times stronger, overpowering me, and then i am thinking, holy shit, maybe i’m wrong, maybe this time i really am dying, because i never remember having one this powerful before. i start wondering if people have actually done scientific studies to prove that panic attacks never kill anyone, and thinking that i may turn out to be the exception that proves the rule. i start thinking i have tardive dyskinesia or serotonin syndrome or some other horrible side effect of the medicines i take to prevent panic attacks from happening in the first place. i have to go to the bathroom so many times and shit so many times and wipe my ass so many times it gets sore and starts bleeding. and i can’t eat food because i would immediately vomit it back up. panic attacks are pure hell. i wouldn’t wish them on anyone except those who commit genocide. they are worse than death could possibly be. because in a panic attack, it is like you are locked into the final throes of agony in death, stuck there in limbo, perpetually almost about to die, but you never quite get around to finishing dying, and then, paradoxically, after a while the attack starts to go away, and you un-die, and turn into the un-dead. there have been so many times i thought for sure i was dying, i lost count long ago. at least several dozen, probably 100 or even 200. it will be so anti-climactic when i actually die, because i have experienced it so many times. except that time the physical sensations might be a little different. but i am sure a lot of it is the same. the uncontrollable shaking, the overwhelming fear, the heart racing, all the sweating, vomiting, diarrhea... the same stuff all happened to my dog mokka when she died, probably happens to people too. but the thing that really makes it scarier than you could possibly imagine is, i don’t believe in god or satan or heaven or hell or anything like that. for me, death is the final end. so it is a hell of a lot scarier for me than for a bible-thumping christian to deal with. if you are a true christian, there is no reason to have any fear whatsoever, because your faith in god’s salvation is enough to move mountains. but i don’t have that luxury. i can’t innocently pretend the world is flat or that the sun orbits the earth. i know reality. and in reality, death is real. it is a real thing that happens. it is the end of life. and there isn’t any more life for you, after you die. and that is a very, very bad thing. but there is nothing we can do to change it. and i am so frightened of death, i am constantly thinking i have medical problems, and i am a hypochondriac, and always thinking i am about to die. it is really quite awful. i can see quite easily why people like to believe in a god that obviously doesn’t exist. it would give me a hell of a lot of comfort if i believed in that. but, unfortunately, i think belief in god or an afterlife is self-contradictory and ridiculous, having come up with several mathematical proofs of this, a few of which i shared with everyone in a previous blog post here if you are interested. i am not happy or glad about god not existing, i don’t think it is anything to celebrate, in fact it is a very bad thing, but there is nothing we can do about it. there is nothing we can do to bring god into existence, because he simply cannot exist. and we cannot evade death forever, only for a certain number of years before our time runs out. and for me, i am constantly on high alert, thinking my time has run out, when it hasn’t yet, and this is ruining those few years which i am granted the high privilege of existence as a sentient being on this great and wondrous planet of earth. nothing would please me more than to believe in god and heaven, but i feel it is simply beyond the scope of that in which i can believe. last night i actually went so nuts i called 911 since i really thought i was dying. they ended up sending not just an ambulance, but also a policeman. boy was i embarrassed! all the trouble i put them through, just to deal with my psychological inadequacies. i apologized to them of course, but they said it was their job to deal with people like me, and do stuff like that. oh well. and i didn’t even have to pay them anything! it was free! a lot better than the other times before i called 911 and got sent to hospitals because i thought i was dying... i had to pay through the nose for that shit! most of the time when i think i am dying, i have to convince myself that my death isn’t as important a consideration as the money i would waste on an ambulance and hospital bill if i were taken to the e.r... and that is a hard sell! i can’t think straight when i have panic attacks, and i am usually at least a little panicky all the time, just on the brink of an attack but not really having one. this is no way to live, and i have to find some way to cure myself of these panic attacks. my parents bought me these 5 hypnosis recordings, and i listened to the one about panic attacks once already. the guy in them has a british accent. they are from hypnosisdownloads.com. it calmed me down a whole lot when i listened to it, but i don’t know if it will have much of a permanent effect. i should probably listen to it every day. sometimes i just feel as if my head will explode, and there will be blood and guts and bits of brain tissue scattered all around the room. although that never actually happens to anyone in real life, i still think about things like that. i wonder why. and if i have come so close to the brink of death so many times, or at least thought that was what was happening at the time, why is it that i always miraculously find a way to survive completely unharmed (except emotionally)? isn’t that a miraculous coincidence, that i could be close to death so many times and survive unharmed every single time? of course i am being sarcastic, since none of those times i was really in any danger, i was just deluded into thinking i was. i just wish i knew more about medicine, because whenever i try to explain how i am dying to a doctor or nurse or paramedic or psychiatrist or whoever, they always find my explanations ridiculous and in direct contradiction of vast amounts of medical research. whether i say i am having a heart attack, or a ruptured spleen, or serotonin syndrome, or an aneurysm, or whatever, they always find something that directly contradicts it. like... “people with that condition can’t walk and talk and remember what their birthday is and tell people what their name and address are.” and, when you think you are dying, and you find out the probable cause of your imminent death is impossible given your current abilities at your current stage in the dying process, it is a real let-down, and just confuses you even more. and you are left to wonder, so what the hell am i dying from, anyway, if that’s not it? later on, the next day, when you feel fine, the whole thing seems ridiculous, in retrospect. i just wish i didn’t have to go through the panic attacks in the first place, to find that out. how many more times do i have to die and miraculously live to tell about it? i am getting really sick and tired of this crap, and it is starting to really piss me off. i feel like writing myself a letter of complaint, or suing myself in a court of law. because i have experienced what i am doing to myself with these panic attacks and i just cannot abide such a brazen defiance of acceptable conduct. these panic attacks are utterly despicable and i condemn them in the harshest possible terms. they need to stop happening and never happen again, ever. or else i will be forced to have more of them, for revenge. or something. i forgot. dammit. anyway, i hate panic attacks. period. they are awful. if hinduism is correct, i probably was a real bastard in my past lives. luckily hinduism is ridiculous and false, and there is no such thing as karma, which means good people can suffer while bad people can be happy. for me, my religious unbelief ties in very closely with my panic disorder. but i cannot abide by believing in something i know to be false, even if this would help get rid of panic attacks. it is just too much of a stretch for me, even though i am often perfectly fine having the false belief that i am dying from some medical condition i don’t really have, i just want to have as few false beliefs as possible, because that way i can stay more reality-oriented in my approach to life.
when you have frequent panic attacks, your grasp on reality is very tenuous, so you want to grab onto as much reality as possible to believe in. that’s how it is for me, anyway.