Doctors Thought I Had MS, Chronic Fatigue, and a Heart Condition - Article Health

I can point to the exact, pivotal moment when anxiety became a serious problem for me. It was a normal day in December and I was a college student, registering for classes for the following semester. I was in college before the Internet existed and so I had to go into the basement of this old campus building to choose my courses. I remember checking out sheets of paper taped to a cinder block wall and feeling fine. Sure, I was tired from studying late into the night and it was becoming chilly outside, but I was okay. And then, a second later, I wasn’t.

My heart started to race, I broke out into a sweat, and I started breathing rapidly, unable to catch my breath. All of a sudden, the words on the wall before me started to warp. There were grey blotches in front of my eyes and I was gripped with this overwhelming terror that I was going to die because something in my body had suddenly gone way wrong. What was happening, I now know, was a panic attack.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, panic attacks typically peak 10 minutes after they begin. But my first panic attack experience ushered in about a month where I felt terrified—the racing heart, the shortness of breath—pretty constantly. The terror immobilized me so much so that I landed on my parents’ sofa and hardly got up for a four-week period. When I did get up, it was so my parents could take me to a doctor who checked me out, took some blood tests, and did an EKG. I was diagnosed with mitral valve prolapse, which is an anomaly of the heart valve, and a generally benign disease. That was the end of that line of exploration.

I took incompletes in my classes that semester because I was in no shape to take my finals. When the new term started, I went back to school. I spent the whole year on a medical odyssey, trying to figure out what was going on with me. Things got fairly better: I got off the sofa, I was able to take a couple of classes, but I was very impaired. Fear was my baseline and I was tired all the time—when your body is constantly on high alert, it’s exhausting.

My mom would periodically drive up and we would go to various specialists. Because my anxiety was a whole-body illness, I saw a specialist for every part of my body that I was feeling symptoms in. A cardiologist checked out my heart, and a neurologist scanned my brain. Doctors speculated about what was wrong with me—saying it might be multiple sclerosis or Epstein-Barr virus, or chronic fatigue syndrome—but never formally diagnosed me. Whenever an intense panic attack occurred, I ended up in the emergency room, but left every time without a diagnosis.

A year later, I was desperate. I couldn’t see how I could live like this anymore, or how doctors could possibly help me. After seeing another neurologist, who sent me to a psychologist, I hit my breaking point. “I’m not leaving your office until you help me,” I told her. “I can’t keep going like this.” She said that she could prescribe me Prozac, an antidepressant that had been released three years prior, or she could send me to the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the University of Michigan hospital. That was the first time anyone had mentioned anxiety. I finally received the proper diagnosis.

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