'Peace From Nervous Suffering'
Jokers Wild
By PAUL VANDEVELDER, NYT
Even if I live to be a thousand years old I won't forget my first panic attack, that first surreal journey into the paranormal dimensions of my cerebral cortex. Decades later, the memory is all white heat and jagged edges. Psychologists call these acute anxiety episodes "little deaths," but victims of them will tell you there is nothing little about them. Next to a panic attack, death, when it finally comes, will be skipping through tulips.
It was a sweltering July day in 1980 and I was sitting in a Manhattan restaurant a few blocks from the Plaza Hotel with 70 carats of emeralds in my pocket. The stones were fresh from the infamously lethal Muzo mine in Colombia, and as a favor to a good friend who had smuggled them into the country, I'd flown to New York the day before to meet with a gem dealer, the father of a college friend from Brooklyn who had "connections." Drinks with friends until 3 a.m. the night before was not the best idea, and the pitcher of black coffee I poured down my throat in the Palm Room a few hours later flooded my central nervous system with Jamaican voodoo and high-voltage insults. So after a testy morning of bickering over occlusions and color and squinting through jewelers' loupes, I was a little on edge when the gem dealer invited me to lunch.
I first noticed the seizures in my fingers when we were seated - bizarre, neurological twitches that made my digits dance like grasshoppers on the linen tablecloth. A tic in my left eye kept shuttering my vision. The dining room was jammed to the fleur-de-lis wallpaper with red-faced white guys in blue suits and harried looking waiters in penguin costumes. Not my crowd. I remember hearing a muffled "linguine Alfredo" and the clinking of glasses at another table, and then the film snaps. This, as I've come to think of it, was the moment my first life stopped, where the film broke and the reel spun around and around, flogging itself.
I couldn't move. I was suddenly, inexplicably, paralyzed with anxiety. As researchers would learn years later when they peered into our brains with PET scans, the electrical messaging between the amygdala and the anterior cingulate in my brain had gone "Tilt!'" The sudden storm of impulses surging between these tiny glands lit up my central nervous system like a Christmas tree hit by lightning. A neurological journey measured in milliseconds launched me across a threshold wider than any ocean, from my happy-go-lucky, anything-goes carnival of a life to a place that was scarier than the hospital scene with Heath Ledger's Joker playing Russian roulette.
(More here.)
Even if I live to be a thousand years old I won't forget my first panic attack, that first surreal journey into the paranormal dimensions of my cerebral cortex. Decades later, the memory is all white heat and jagged edges. Psychologists call these acute anxiety episodes "little deaths," but victims of them will tell you there is nothing little about them. Next to a panic attack, death, when it finally comes, will be skipping through tulips.
It was a sweltering July day in 1980 and I was sitting in a Manhattan restaurant a few blocks from the Plaza Hotel with 70 carats of emeralds in my pocket. The stones were fresh from the infamously lethal Muzo mine in Colombia, and as a favor to a good friend who had smuggled them into the country, I'd flown to New York the day before to meet with a gem dealer, the father of a college friend from Brooklyn who had "connections." Drinks with friends until 3 a.m. the night before was not the best idea, and the pitcher of black coffee I poured down my throat in the Palm Room a few hours later flooded my central nervous system with Jamaican voodoo and high-voltage insults. So after a testy morning of bickering over occlusions and color and squinting through jewelers' loupes, I was a little on edge when the gem dealer invited me to lunch.
I first noticed the seizures in my fingers when we were seated - bizarre, neurological twitches that made my digits dance like grasshoppers on the linen tablecloth. A tic in my left eye kept shuttering my vision. The dining room was jammed to the fleur-de-lis wallpaper with red-faced white guys in blue suits and harried looking waiters in penguin costumes. Not my crowd. I remember hearing a muffled "linguine Alfredo" and the clinking of glasses at another table, and then the film snaps. This, as I've come to think of it, was the moment my first life stopped, where the film broke and the reel spun around and around, flogging itself.
I couldn't move. I was suddenly, inexplicably, paralyzed with anxiety. As researchers would learn years later when they peered into our brains with PET scans, the electrical messaging between the amygdala and the anterior cingulate in my brain had gone "Tilt!'" The sudden storm of impulses surging between these tiny glands lit up my central nervous system like a Christmas tree hit by lightning. A neurological journey measured in milliseconds launched me across a threshold wider than any ocean, from my happy-go-lucky, anything-goes carnival of a life to a place that was scarier than the hospital scene with Heath Ledger's Joker playing Russian roulette.
(More here.)
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