Thoughts Upon Thoughts

First Story

The first story here we go.

Story by Anonymous

To say that a lot has happened in my short amount of 18 years of life would be a lie. So I should have plenty of stories to tell. The only question is where should I start? From the beginning? Or work my way back? I haven't truly decided, but I might just give them scattered and you can piece it together how you please. So this is where I will start.

I have been in college now for about a month and I am actually a student-athlete at my college as well. I play beach volleyball here and we started practices about two weeks ago now. But I have actually been having a really hard time with that. During our very first practice, I made it about twelve minutes in before things started to go wrong. Honestly, I am not sure what exactly happened but I basically stopped breathing? My chest felt like it couldn't take in any oxygen. It was extremely painful, to say the least. I was so scared, which in reality probably made the situation worse but I did not know what was happening.

After a few minutes, our athletic trainer came to our practice and let me use the backup inhaler they had on hand because mine was back at home. It was by far one of the scariest experiences that I have had. I started to feel better even though my chest was still extremely tight. My teammates then came to check on me and told me that I had been as white as a piece of paper. Apparently, my lips were also turning blue before I stopped. Now I have nothing against them but why tell me after the fact? It could have been avoided had they told me a little sooner. But that is besides the point now. I then went to the rest of practice just chilling on the bench and watching the rest of my teammates.

Things in reality only got worse from that point on. The morning after the incident was the pinnacle of my problems for my first semester of college. Every other bad thing that happened stemmed from this next thing. The next morning I had to wake up at about 5 am because my team was having weights at 6. Now I woke up to my alarm and felt okay at first until I was awake for about 10ish minutes. My chest felt like it was being squeezed like someone was trying to make lemonade out of lemons by hand. This pain reached my heart as well. It was unbearable pain that made breathing hard as well. Yet it still got worse. The next thing is what scared me the most, my left arm started to go numb. Now I am 18 and my mother has experienced a heart attack so I know that losing feeling in your left arm accompanied by the squeezing sensation in my chest and heart did not mean good things.

This lead me to wake up my roommate and asking her to take me to the hospital, I mean I did not know what was happening or what to do. This then transformed into a five and half hour visit to the ER to be told I was okay. So yea that was one of my first college experiences, not the most fun. And to say that I am not still a little concerned is an understatement because the doctors couldn't tell me what happened to me. Then when winter came up I went to my doctor's at home. We talked about what happened and kind of came to the conclusion that I had a severe panic/anxiety attack. That is my story.