Welcome back to high school

I get attacks. Everyone wants to call them panic attacks, which I resent. I'm not paniced - in fact on many occasions I've felt an uncanny calm.

However, I do have pains in my chest, my heart pounds, and I often sweat and feel like I'm going to pass out. Then, at times, I enter a "final" stage in the whole process that I would call a panic attack where there's definitely some fight-or-flight going on.

Had an attack about an hour ago at the Dr.'s office with my little girl. I broke out in a sweat, my stomach cramped, and i would have sworn that I was going to pass out. This is actually no big deal and happens to me all the time, in fact I didn't even mention it when the Dr. came in. Pretty much just my life at this point, no use whining.

No one wants to hear about it anymore. I suppose I'm a bit like an old person complaining that their bowels won't move or something.

I get it -been through this before.

When I was in high school, I hurt my knee part way through my junior football season. Not only was the pain intense, but I couldn't get the crazy thing to work anymore. I went to the trainer, who told me to ice it. All I heard from the coaches as my play quality deteriorated were phrases involving "goddamit" and "head out of your ass". When I finally went to a sports Dr. after the season, he marvelled that I could still walk on it.

I want to be clear - this is no one's fault. I did the best I could do, and the people who were charged with my care / coaching did the best they new. Sh*t happens. However, I learned a very important lesson from all this:

It's a "you're my guy until you get hurt of I find someone better" world. Unfortunatley, due to my little attacks, I'm playing hurt. But I'm still playing. I'm not sitting on the bench nursing this thing - I'm drugging up and bringin' the pain! Or, to be less metaphorical, I'm not curling up in a ball and wishing quietly for death, I'm using self-hypnosis, taking low doases of drugs designed to prevent such attacks, and continuing with a life in which the demands are seemingly endless and often overwhelming.

You'd think that, for all of that, I could warrant the occasional disengenuous "wow - that must suck. I'm impressed that you get throug hit so well without loosing your d*mned mind."

You'd think...