The problems with my breathing began when I was ten years old. We hadn’t been in Raithswaite long the first time it happened and there was no forewarning, nothing to suggest what was coming, so when I woke in the middle of the night feeling like I was suffocating, unable to get air into my lungs, it was terrifying. I tried to think my way through the panic. I couldn’t breathe, you need air to be able to breathe, and all the air is outside. I opened my bedroom window and pushed my head out into the cold night, but it made no difference; even though oxygen was all around me I couldn’t get any of it through my nose and into my chest. I was drowning inside myself. My panic trebled at this realisation. I banged through to Mum’s room, slammed the light on and shouted, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!’ Before she had chance to do anything I charged down the stairs, flung open the front door and ran out into the street. I fell to my hands and knees, gasping, still trying to get air into my lungs. Mum followed me out, grabbed my shoulders and pulled me up. She held my head in her hands and looked me in the eye and told me to stop panicking. I didn’t know what she was talking about, I wasn’t panicking; I was dying. ‘I can’t breathe,’ I gasped, ‘I’m going to die.’ She told me she’d rung an ambulance and that we should wait inside where it was warm. She helped me into the house. The operator on the phone had told Mum that I should have a glass of warm milk before the ambulance arrived. ‘A glass of warm milk?’ I was unsure. How could I drink when I couldn’t breathe? Mum made me sit with my head between my knees while she warmed the milk in a pan. We’d been sat at the kitchen table for thirty minutes before I realised that no ambulance had been called, no rescue was coming. But at some point in that half an hour I’d remembered how to breathe again. I was still shaky and scared, but my lungs were working and my nose was allowing air to pass into them. When I finished the milk Mum took me upstairs and put me to bed and told me I needed to calm down. ‘If you let yourself get wound up like this you’ll be in for a very long life.’ I lay in bed frozen stiff, expecting death to return at any moment. But I did make it through the night and by lunchtime the next day I’d started to forget about it, forget how terrified I’d felt.
Two weeks later it happened again, and then again a couple of days after that. It started to happen so regularly that it was a relief to get through a day without feeling I was suffocating. Each time I was sure that I really was dying, that all the other times had been leading up to this one, and that now survival was impossible. But Mum didn’t believe me. She told me it was a reaction to what had happened back in Clifton. She said my mind was playing tricks on me and I just needed to calm myself down. ‘Stress can do funny things to your body,’ she said. I’d never heard anything so stupid. I didn’t think I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get air into my lungs. It was nothing to do with stress; something had gone wrong with my body and unless it was sorted out I would die. After much pestering and pleading I was finally allowed to see a doctor, but she made me promise that I wouldn’t mention Clifton. ‘If you breathe a word about that they’ll want to get inside your head. They’ll want you to tell them all about it and how it feels and that will set you back.’ I didn’t want to mention Clifton, I had no interest whatsoever in mentioning Clifton. I wanted help breathing and staying alive. Clifton was the last thing on my mind right then.
The doctor was an old man with a white beard. He looked like Father Christmas.
‘What’s brought you here today then Donald?’ he asked.
‘He says that he can’t breathe and he’s dying,’ my mum said.
‘Is that true Donald? You think you’re dying?’
I nodded.
‘That sounds serious. Let’s have a look at you.’
He asked me to take my shirt off and pushed a stethoscope to my chest, then my back, and listened. ‘Take a deep breath now Donald please.’ Then he held my tongue down with a little wooden spatula and shone a torch in my throat and my ears. He told me to breathe into a plastic tube as hard as I could and made a note of the result. He took my pulse and blood pressure and asked me to do twenty star jumps and ten press-ups.
‘How’s your breathing now?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes I can’t breathe.’
He made some notes on his computer and looked at me and said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you Donald. You’re as healthy as any ten-year-old child I’ve seen.’
Despair hit me. Tears started to come. If a doctor didn’t believe me, how was I going to get help from anyone? He saw my distress and cocked his head at me. ‘I’m just going to ask your mum a few questions Donald. Is that OK?’
I nodded.
‘Is he an anxious child?’
‘He has his moments,’ my mum said.
‘Has there been anything recently that could have caused him upset?’
‘We have just moved here from another town. He’s started a new school.’
‘Is that it Donald? Do you miss your old friends?’
He was so far away from understanding that it felt impossible to steer him in the right direction. I didn’t say a word.
‘It’s a big change for a young lad. Especially if he is a bit sensitive. It will take time for him to adjust. Give it a few months and he’ll be charging around Raithswaite like he was born and bred here. Physically there’s nothing wrong with him. Nothing at all. Get him playing football, get him playing outside, wear him out. He’ll be so tired that he’ll forget he’s supposed to be dying.’
He smiled at us both and Mum stood up to leave.
It happened again that afternoon at school. Dread filled me from the inside. ‘I can’t breathe,’ I told Mrs Sutton. She sat me down in the school office and made me breathe into a brown paper bag. She rang my mum but my mum refused to come and pick me up. She told Mrs Sutton that we’d been to the doctor and there was nothing wrong with me. I was putting it on for attention, she said, and they should send me back to class. Mrs Sutton didn’t send me back to class straight away. She left me with a glass of water and my brown paper bag and I sat on a chair outside the office for the rest of the lesson. I carried that brown paper bag around everywhere after that day. I never left the house without it. I was convinced that it was the only thing that could save my life.
It took me years to work out that I was suffering from panic attacks. I heard a woman interviewed on the radio and her words froze me to the spot. She was describing exactly what had been happening to me for years, and those two simple words summed up the terror so well. Panic attack. I took myself off to the library and looked for books. There was a whole shelf of them to choose from so I went with the one that had been borrowed the most: Live a Life Free from Panic by Sue Cotterill. The attacks kept coming, but the book did help, I learnt to cope with them better. The threat doesn’t go away though, the threat is always there, and even when there hasn’t been an attack for weeks you know one may be waiting in the wings. They are clever like that. You can’t drop your guard because as soon as you do, as soon as you think you are safe, an attack will charge at you from nowhere and leave you terrified and shattered. What I never understood was why other people had panic attacks. I had good reason but why do housewives and accountants and dinner ladies suffer? Not everyone can have done something as terrible as I had. What reduces normal people to shaking, quivering wrecks?