Higher Connections

Panic Attacks

One night, after getting home from dinner out with friends, I had one of the weirdest experiences while high. When we came back home around 10 p.m., our three-year-old was up and running around all over the place (of course), but when I went upstairs, I found the two boys asleep in our bed. I shook them awake to get them the hell out of our room so I could watch some TV.

The eleven-year-old woke up just fine and said, “Goodnight, Dad,” but the nine-year-old half shrieked as if he’d been startled awake and jumped up. It took him a few seconds to realize what was going on, but he eventually crawled out of my bed and stumbled to his room. I didn’t think anything of it and I wasn’t worried about him being freaked out so I went to go pee.

As I went into my bathroom, I immediately felt my heart starting to race—slowly, at first, but then faster and faster. It got to the point that I became scared about what was happening, so much so that I went downstairs to tell Alexandra that I didn’t feel right and was nervous about my heart rate. Then I started getting chilly, and my body was trembling uncontrollably, as if I had a fever.

For the next twenty minutes, I was essentially experiencing a full-blown panic attack. I walked around my kitchen, trying to breathe deeply, drinking water, and talking to Alexandra about random topics to distract myself. She kept talking to me, and I kept breathing, and eventually I went upstairs to lie down and try to warm up while she made me some tea.

After another twenty minutes, the panic attack began to die down. I felt better, and my heart stopped racing. As I calmed down, I took some time to speak with Alexandra about what happened and why the hell I had a panic attack. After some discussion, we realized a few things that are important to note:

1. It is possible I had an increased heart rate because of the THC, and I freaked out and had a panic attack because of that. However, my heart had never raced that fast while high before, and I hadn’t taken any more edibles than usual (around 20 mg). However, it could have been a different strain of THC that caused my heart rate to increase, which gave me a panic attack.
2. I have had a few panic attacks in my life, but the last one was close to twenty years earlier, when I was buying my first house. However, I haven’t had any since then. There was nothing else going on that would have led to a panic attack in this moment.
3. My heart started racing almost immediately after I woke my son up from a deep sleep, and he appeared to be scared and didn’t know what was going on.
4. I wondered whether, in that moment, I was connected to my son, which manifested itself through me physically reacting to how he was feeling—which was scared.

Interestingly enough, the next morning, we casually asked him how he’d felt when I woke him up, and he told us that he was scared, that his heart was racing, and that he was shaking in his bed from being woken up. We did not prod or lead him on in any way; we just asked him how he’d felt and that was what he told us, which leads me to believe he may have had a small panic attack.

So, the question is: What caused my panic attack? Was I connecting to my son because I was high, or was I just feeling the impacts of marijuana on my circulatory system and my heart? I can’t answer it for sure—all I can say is that I believe I was connected to my son and that the connection physically affected me, similarly to some of the other experiences I have already summarized.

I also had a heart-warming moment after the panic attack, when I realized that Alexandra’s voice and her reassurance that nothing was wrong were the main reasons I started feeling better. It was exactly what I needed at that moment. She explained to me later that my son has told her that the sound of her voice helps him whenever he is scared or panicking, which apparently does happen a lot.