What is Anxiety Attacks?

Surely many of you are looking at the headline and are shaking your heads in wonderment. What in the world are panic attacks (otherwise known as Anxiety Attacks). There are quite a few of you out there who know just exactly what I am talking about and your pulse is racing right now.

It is racing at the thought of the aweful feeling of losing complete control over your body as well as your mind. That is the only way to describe one of these attacks. The heart palpitations, speeding up and sometimes the awful feeling of the heart slowing down to near stoppage.

The sweaty palms, shaky legs. Not even being able to support yourself while sitting, let alone standing. These are just some of the symptoms of an impending anxiety attack. These attacks can manifest themselves in so many ways that it baffles even the smartest doctors.

Sometimes a person can feel one of these attacks coming on so he or she is able to brace themselves for the onslaught of tension that washes over ones body. The wave after wave that hits you with such a force that you keep thinking in your head, my God, this is it, I going to die! when it is all over you are left exhausted and sweat drenched, feeling like you just went twelve rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard and lost. This is just when you can feel it coming, imagine if you are one of the poor souls that never know when a panic attack will strike. You could be going about your business of the day, calm as the day is long when BAM!

Out of no where there is that overwhelming feeling of having an elephant sitting on your chest and just having that impending feeling of doom, like any second you will be breathing your last breath. That is the way it feels when someone goes through one of these attacks, every attack feels like it will be your last, you feel like you will die. It doesn matter if you have been having these attacks for years, you never get used to the feeling of utter fear and helplessness.

You would think by now, with the advancement of technology and medicine that the doctors would be able to spot an anxiety attack but half the time they don treat it as such. They will do tests and when nothing conclusive shows up on the tests, the doctors then end-up branding the patient as either just plain crazy or depressed.

Its a sad fact but it is indeed true. Myself, I have been having panic attacks since the age of 18, the doctors all thought I was nuts, that is until one of the doctors took it quite seriously, he was one of those doctors that doesn give up on a patient, no matter how tense things get.

To make a long story short, he was the one who figured out what was wrong with me. Thank God he did because I was dangerously close to the edge. I had been having them day and night and I couldn take it any more, I was ready to kill myself and he knew it.

Well, I am now 33 years old and I still have panic attacks but the good news is that I fight them with a stronger will than I did before, it is because I have a loving husband who believes in me, as well as a doctor who is really supportive. He prescribed ativan for me to take when I can control the attacks. But there is hope people, I am living proof.