So I'm driving down North Second Street on my way to the main library downtown, and suddenly I'm clutching the steering wheel like a madwoman, blinking and blinking to try to clear my vision, fighting for breath, sweating and swallowing and shuddering. I hear my own voice, tight and hot and half inside my head and half outside, hissing, "Shit, shit, shit, what's the MATTER with me?" I punch the wheel with my fist til my fingers sting. "What's the matter, what's the matter, what's the matter with me?"

Panic? You said it! My pulse roared in my ears. And it wasn't the first time - I'd had a half dozen such horrible sessions in the previous several months. By this time, I knew enough to identify them as "panic attacks", but I still had no idea of where they were coming from or how to deal with them. I'd done some research (in that same library - this was long before the internet - so I knew what to look for in myself, but none of it was there.

I'd never had migraines, had no kids to worry about, no diagnosed illness or "triggering event" that I could put my finger on. I was in my late thirties, more than ten years into a marriage that is now heading for its fortieth anniversary, and I was teaching gratis at an alternative school, a job that I loved.

But there I was, having to pull over onto the shoulder of the road out of fear that any second now I would simply lose control of the car and kill or injure myself and/or anybody else within reach. I knew by now that the attack itself wouldn't kill me; I'd already lived through enough of them to know that I wasn't having a stroke or a heart attack.

I grabbed a tape from the glove compartment, fumbled it into the slot in the dashboard, and started a Dvorak quintet somewhere in the middle, who cared, it was music, it was loud, it sometimes helped.

But only sometimes, and this wasn't one of those times.

The summer afternoon was hot and bright. There was hardly any traffic on North Second, a four lane rural road paralleling North Fourth, the old Camino Real, through a stretch of the Rio Grande Valley. The big irrigation ditch on my right cut me off from the straggle of rural houses and fields between Second and Fourth, but I couldn't have gotten out of the car to look for help even if I'd known what help to ask for: my legs wouldn't have held me up. Besides, I knew instinctively that this - this THING - was something between me and me, that dragging anyone else into it would be futile

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