Small Nervous Breakdown

Or how it all started.

I was a 40-something working mom, newly diagnosed with ADHD and on the verge of burnout. And then, overnight, I burned out. This is what my year-plus journey to regain my health and heal my nervous system has taught me about the power of rest, retreat, creativity, and reclaiming my life.

It’s 5:45 am on a Saturday and I’m laying awake mired in existential crisis. I’m a 48-year-old mother of two under twelve, in the middle marriage years, and firmly in the throes of perimenopause, so you might think it’s right on time or maybe even overdue. Except that I am not new to existential crises. My anxiety showed up early in life, and I’ve been bouncing through these phases ever since I was a kid spending too much time in my head and scribbling angsty journal entries. (To be honest, I’ve never really outgrown the angsty journal entries.)

Once when I was 11 my grandma stayed with us while my parents were away. As I got ready for school that morning, for no reason I could articulate, I started crying, and then sobbing, and then I just couldn’t stop. “It’s okay, honey,” my grandma said. “You’re just having a small nervous breakdown.”

Small. Nervous. Breakdown.

She said this as casually as if she were talking about a scrape on my knee as she applied a bandaid…something she never once did because she was not that kind of grandma. She was the kind who would later teach me to drink a martini with one olive or three, but never, ever two. She exuded sophistication, and her casual pronouncement of me felt weighty.

Small. Nervous. Breakdown. Despite my adult awareness of my grandma’s penchant for drama, I’ve been thinking about that phrase a lot lately. It’s what has me up early this morning. Because that’s what’s happened to me over the last year.

“It’s your nervous system,” multiple doctors told me. The sudden onset and now chronic health condition I’ve been dealing with for more than a year apparently stems from my nervous system going haywire, for lack of a concrete medical term. If you’re thinking I need a second opinion, don’t worry…I’ve collected them. Over the last year I’ve seen 4 ER doctors, 2 primary care physicians, a GI specialist, an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, a GI physical therapist, an EMDR psychologist, a GI hypnotherapist, a dietitian, a head and neck doctor, and a speech pathologist. The nervous system, I’m told over and over, takes a looooong time to heal.

I’ve grappled over the last year with this sudden shift in my health, the mental and emotional whiplash of going from totally normal to, in mere hours, a physical condition that left me bedridden for the better part of a month, barely able to walk after that, struggling to eat and losing too much weight, unable to sleep for weeks on end without medication, and unable to care for myself let alone my kids. And to this day, sometimes, unable to speak, struggling to breathe. But the mental toll was far worse. In those early days I was unable to be alone without experiencing a terror I’ve never known…a terror of being left alone with my own body, which I no longer trusted.

So what’s actually wrong? I wish there were a simple, one-sentence answer. It’s taken more than a year to untangle the web of symptoms.

That first day we were at our vacation house which is located in the highest unincorporated town in North America, above 10,000 feet and with a population of 200. We’d been there a week. It was summertime in the Rockies and the wildflowers were in full bloom. It was beautiful and peaceful and I felt lucky to be there. Some nights I struggle to sleep there because of the high elevation but that morning I woke up so fully rested that I was sure it was going to be a good day.

But by late morning, I started to notice that my breathing was no longer easy; it was becoming strained. At first I wasn’t even sure that’s what was happening. But eventually it made me nervous enough that I told my husband I wanted to go to the ER. The closest was a small urgent care clinic 25 minutes away. Halfway there I made him pull over. I felt silly, foolish. Surely I was imagining this. What could be happening? I had been diagnosed with mild asthma when I was kid but I had never experienced anything like this, this feeling that I consciously needed to breathe in and out every single time, and still I struggled to get a full breath. It was unnerving.

After 20 minutes of waffling, I agreed to continue to urgent care. There the doctor listened to my lungs and confirmed she could hear shallow breathing. “No problem,” she said. “We’ll give you prednisone to open you up and do a breathing treatment too.” I explained I’d never experienced anything like this before, asked what she thought caused it. “It could be a number of factors,” she said. “Maybe the elevation combined with allergens that are especially strong right now. Could be a perfect storm.”

I had taken prednisone months before for a muscle spasm and had no problem with it, but when the doctor gave me two large pills, a dosage much higher than I’d had before, I hesitated. My body has always been sensitive to medication and I’ve had some bad reactions in the past. But she reassured me I needed to take it. “We need to get your lungs opened back up.” That sold me. All I wanted was to breathe normally again.

I took the medication and had my first ever breathing treatment while my husband and kids got a snack at a nearby restaurant. I joined them after and already I was feeling pretty good…the anxiety that first gripped me when the breathing issue started had waned. I’d seen a doctor. She’d validated something was wrong and she’d given me medicine and sent me on my way. I was fine. I helped my family finish the nachos and then we headed back to our vacation house.

But on the way there my breathing felt labored again, and again it unnerved me. By the time we made the 25-minute trip to the house I decided I wanted to head home to Denver. Maybe lower elevation would help. My kids were heartbroken…we had promised our then 6-year-old we’d go fishing that week, and I felt guilty about it. But there was no way I could stay. We quickly packed the essentials, me mostly sitting and pointing, and piled the kids and dog into the car.

The drive from our little mountain town to Denver takes an hour and 45 minutes. When we’d purchased the vacation house the year before we’d focused our search on this area precisely because we wouldn’t have to navigate the crazy mountain traffic of I70, which can add many hours to a 2-hour trip. In contrast, this drive is both scenic and spare, dipping into and through only a handful of tiny towns. Normally I loved it. But as my breathing worsened, I only noticed how there was nowhere to stop for help along the way. No medical care facility anywhere.

As my husband sped along, my physical condition deteriorated quickly…my breathing grew shallow and my anxiety grew deep. This was definitely worse than when I walked into urgent care an hour ago. I inhaled on the puffer they’d given me just in case. I was starting to feel panicky and trying not to cry. I couldn’t understand what was happening to my body and now I was more than nervous. I was scared. I glanced back at my kids every few minutes. For once I was thankful for the screen time distraction…I didn’t want them to see me like this.

The next hour went by as if in slow motion. I grew more desperate to reach medical help. My body no longer felt like the body I knew. My heart raced, and breathing was a struggle. I felt like I couldn’t breathe deeply enough, couldn’t fully take air in. “Please go faster,” I urged my worried husband between breaths. When I spotted a volunteer firefighter station I ordered him to pull over. They could at least check me. I desperately wanted someone to tell me what was happening to my body. But my relief was short-lived because no one was there.

When at last we were only minutes away from the second ER, I felt like my body was collapsing. My chest hurt. Could this be a heart attack? What were the signs again? I couldn’t remember and my mind was spinning so fast I couldn’t think clearly. I was slumped over in my seat, my body heavy. My husband quickly pulled up curbside and grabbed a wheelchair because I no longer seemed able to walk. I worried as we left the kids and the dog in the car, our 10-year-old in charge, but he promised he’d be back to get them once he had me checked in. I could see the worry in his eyes and I didn’t have the energy or breath to argue.

Again a doctor listened to my lungs and again confirmed my breathing was not right. They examined me more fully, X-rayed my lungs. They gave me more steroids, another breathing treatment. They seemed flummoxed. After pumping me full of more drugs—which I would later learn have side effects like agitation, pounding heartbeat, noisy breathing, and trouble breathing at rest, amongst other worrisome symptoms—a nurse, not unkindly, told me, “You just need to calm yourself down.” Only later would I become angry at this condescension. How could I possibly calm my body when the medication they’d just given me caused these specific reactions, especially when I didn’t yet understand that?

Eventually the second ER sent us to a third where, thankfully, a doctor recognized that I had too many drugs in my system and, whatever symptoms I had originally experienced were now surpassed by my body’s reaction to the drugs. The best thing to do, he advised, is go home and wait for them to be metabolized and leave my body.

We finally arrived home around 2am to my sister who had come earlier to rescue our kids and dog. She hugged me as my husband tried to explain what had happened, but we still really didn’t understand it ourselves. I felt shell-shocked and exhausted, my body still thrumming with all the drugs in my system. My breathing still shallow and ragged.

That day was long and scary, but it was that night when the despair began to set in. Some part of me recognized that my life was shifting for the worse. In the wee hours of the morning I lay in bed, envious of my husband’s easy sleep, one hand gripping a pulse oximeter to check my oxygen, the other clutching my phone. I couldn’t rationally explain why I was holding tight to my phone but it felt like a lifeline. I didn’t know who I would call—911? my mom? —but I felt certain that at any moment I might stop breathing and would need to call someone, anyone, for help. I lay there emotionally and physically exhausted but unable to sleep, my mind filled with terror, silently chanting to myself, “breathe in, breathe out” over and over and over again. Because I truly thought I might forget to do it.

This is how my next few nights would pass. Because, despite that last doctor’s prognosis, this hell wouldn’t merely last for hours or days or even weeks. This was the first day of a hell that would extend over and beyond the next year. In the coming days, I would barely be able to leave my bed. I developed an array of symptoms that had a domino effect…one leading to another, all crashing down on top of me, crushing my spirit under their weight.

In the weeks that followed I became bedridden yet unable to sleep, focused only on breathing. I developed a terror of being alone that I had never known even as a child. I could barely eat and lost 20 pounds from my already thin frame. I had muscle tension so severe it hurt, and I could’ve sworn there were metal rods in my neck. I struggled to swallow and felt like something was stuck in my throat much of the time. My nervous system was stuck in fight or flight. It felt like I was living in a panic attack that never stopped.

Eventually we’d learn an adhesion was effectively strangling my vagus nerve, probably from being bedridden, and had likely led to a multitude of nervous system and GI issues, including globus (the feeling that something was stuck in my throat) and my lower esophageal sphincter getting stuck open…perhaps why I was experiencing extreme acid reflux-like symptoms of frequent, painful burping for minutes at a time that effectively cut off my breathing.

That first two months I completely stopped working. I stopped parenting. I didn’t have the focus to read a book or even watch a TV show. I couldn’t be home alone without panicking. I was afraid of my own body, desperate for outside intervention to fix it. I spent my days in a constant loop of breathing exercises, meditation, journaling, yoga, tapping, and then starting it all over again. I thought of it as white-knuckling calm—an oxymoron for sure—because I was so desperately trying to hold tightly to any bit of peace.

Then I developed a new symptom…a near-constant choking sensation, the feeling that my throat was closing. Though I now had the energy to walk, and even drive myself to my many doctor’s appointments, the latter became difficult because my airway would sometimes cut off as I was driving, leading to spiraling panic. Once the panic attack was so severe that I lost all feeling in my hands and had to quickly pull over, my knees mostly guiding the steering wheel.

“The nervous system takes a long time to heal,” the doctors continued to reassure me. But this felt like I was getting worse, not better.

As I was being treated for these many symptoms, I sometimes felt like I had to defend my sanity, too, to prove that my symptoms were real. From the outside I looked normal, though pale and thin. But on the inside, it was as if I had been run over by a truck. “No, I’m not imagining this,” I thought in response to imagined criticism. “Yes, I really can’t breathe.”

It would be almost a year before a 1-minute throat scope would provide one last diagnosis to complete the picture: Vocal Cord Dysfunction. “Your vocal cord flaps are malfunctioning and closing up when they shouldn’t, cutting off your breathing,” a head and neck doctor, and then a speech pathologist explained. An extreme case, though one that was probably lifelong and undiagnosed, the VCD was likely aggravated to this degree by the sudden-onset and severe acid reflux. A VCD episode was probably also what caused my initial breathing incident. This validation that I really was being choked led to instant relief, mentally if not physically. At least I wasn’t losing my mind.

It’s been more than 15 months since that first day in the mountains, and I’d say I’m functioning at about 90% of where I was before this happened. I still have physical therapy and speech therapy. Most days I feel normal, though my nervous system is still healing.

But here’s the thing I can’t help wondering…this sudden onset, this acute health deterioration seemed to happen all at once. But did it really? For years I had been running on near empty, pushing myself to get all the things done, forgetting to take time for myself. This behavior was almost certainly exacerbated by my ADHD, a diagnosis I only received two years ago, and one that would explain so many of the ways I felt I was “dropping the ball” in life. Would this health crisis have hit me so hard if I hadn’t already been feeling so physically, mentally and emotionally depleted?

Now that I’m mostly on the other side of this, I’d love to say I’ve completely changed my routine…that I do yoga and journal and meditate and all the things every single day. That I always prioritize my health over less important things like cleaning the house or running errands or a work project. But the truth is, as more of my days feel normal, it’s been easy to fall into the old habit of forgetting to take time for myself. Inevitably, my symptoms flare up when stress does. There are plenty of days I’m still white-knuckling calm.

But, here’s what else I’ve learned, what I’m learning over and over again because sometimes I forget and have to relearn it: we can find joy even in the middle of shit. For me, it really has been those little mental health habits, like journaling or meditating or walking or yoga that help me to find joy in the everyday. I’ve learned to just hang on during the worst days, to embrace the things that help me find balance, and eventually something shifts.

It also helps to know I’m not the only one struggling. So many of us were conditioned to keep our bad feelings to ourselves, and that helps no one. Connection is what helps us to get through. I definitely couldn’t have survived this past year without the help of so many others. The medical professionals who didn’t give up on me and helped me to put my body back together again. But also my husband, my mom, my dad, my kids, my best friend, the other family and friends who supported me.

Now that I’m nearly recovered, I can’t help but wonder what comes next. When faced with the inability to fully live your life, ruminating over what to do with a second chance certainly makes sense. (Cue the existential crisis.) But these days I feel better equipped to deal with that mental spiraling. The more I lean into positive mental health habits, the less power the anxiety has over me…even on the worst days when I’m literally being choked.

And I’ve learned, though our nervous systems impact our quality of life in so many ways, we really do have more control than we realize. After living through months where I was afraid of my own body and desperate for outside intervention to heal me, I now understand that the most crucial healing isn’t going to come from anything or anyone else—it comes from within.

Day by day I’m still learning. Whether I want them or not, these lessons keep coming.

So many things got me through the last 15 months, but books and podcasts were a constant source for helping me to navigate my physical and mental health. With each post, I’ll share a few resources I found especially helpful. If you purchase a book, please consider following the link to buy from an independent bookstore. (Note: When you purchase books through a link here, I may earn a small commission.)

Books:

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessell Van Der Kolk

Moving Beyond Trauma: The Roadmap to Healing from Your Past and Living with Ease and Vitality by Ilene Smith

The Mind-Body Stress Reset: Somatic Practices to Reduce Overwhelm and Increase Well-Being by Rebekkah LaDyne

How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis (Because in certain seasons of life, you can’t do it all. Okay, in no season of life can you do it all…but there are seasons where you can barely do any of it. And, that’s okay, too.)

Podcasts:

The Healing Trauma Podcast (See episodes: Mind-Body Stress Rest, 10/10/21; Therapeutic Yoga for Trauma Recovery, 4/23/22; Why We Need the Body When Healing Trauma, 7/7/22)

The Adult Chair (See episodes: Using the Polyvagal Theory to Balance Your Nervous System with Deb Dana, 3/12/20; Healing Your Body through Breathwork with Niraj Naik, 8/26/21; Trauma Healing with Ilene Smith, 3/3/22; Unlock Your Body’s Ability to Heal with Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary, 6/9/22)

Pulling the Thread (See episodes: When Illness Is Not Validated, 4/21/22); When Stress Becomes Illness, 9/15/22; It Begins and Ends with Breath, 1/19/23)

Image credit: Photo by boram kim on Unsplash

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which means if you purchase a book by clicking on that link, I may earn a small commission.