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A Total Attack of the Heart

  The first time I had the kind of anxiety attack that makes you feel like you’re going to die, I was standing next to a friend’s car in the parking lot of a combination gas station and Subway. I tossed my sandwich onto the passenger seat and pawed at my chest while trying to catch my breath. What a fucking terrible place to die, I thought, surrounded by cabdrivers shouting unintelligibly into Bluetooth headsets and people in wheelchairs from the nursing home down the street rolling up to buy candy bars and beer.

  I assumed I was having a heart attack because I had been in line at Subway behind three of my people, each of whom had a long list of complicated instructions for the sandwich artist tasked with preparing his evening meal. Since we can’t get reparations, we will make it up in toppings. “I want provolone cheese and cucumbers and spinach and lettuce and red onions and tomatoes, olives and banana peppers and giardiniera. I need the chipotle southwest sauce and the ranch, and extra meat, but I don’t want you to charge me for it. Also, let me get the green bell peppers and the herbs and spices, oil and vinegar, too, on the Italian herbs and cheese bread, then I want you to toast that shit but don’t, like, toast it toast it.” It’s nerve-racking—please just let me get my plain scoops of tuna on wheat bread before I sweat through my clothes with anxiety over this transaction not turning out the way you intended because most of those things don’t even go with meatballs but what the fuck do I know God just let me leave.

  —

  It took less than two minutes to get to my place and I spent the entire car ride wondering whether my outfit looked good enough for my ghost to float around in for an eternity. I got off the elevator in my building and stood in place, gasping like I’d just run a marathon, and I felt this weird pain radiating from my left shoulder down my arm and into my hand and the crushing realization that now I was going to die in a hallway that doesn’t get vacuumed often enough before the next Game of Thrones book comes out made me dizzy with rage. After struggling to get the key into the lock, I finally stumbled into my apartment and collapsed on the bed, gulping air and wondering if the paramedics would keep my dying with a footlong tuna sub crammed into my mouth a secret. Seriously, I for real thought I was having a motherfucking heart attack, and while balanced precariously on the precipice of death, my biggest concern wasn’t life insurance or whether my toilet had been bleached or if I had time to write a list of who would get my worthless belongings, it was SHOULD I TAKE A BITE OF THESE TUNA FISHES BEFORE THEY GET SLIMY OR NAH?

  I spend an inordinate amount of time fantasizing about death. Not normal shit, like wondering if heaven is real (no) and if my parents have reunited there to continue that one argument from 1983 over the light bill (probably), but about how and when and what I’m going to be wearing when it finally comes for me. You would think that someone this preoccupied with dying would take better care of her plants and apartment, but nope. I prefer instead to lie awake, petrified that I’m not going to wake up and that whoever finds the stinking meatsuit rotting away in my two-week-old sheets is going to know I was too lazy to wash off my mascara before I went to sleep. Sometimes I feel ready to die. Like when I have to sit through the painful drunken rambling toasts at a wedding, or when a stranger accidentally grazes my skin with his visibly dirty, overgrown fingernails. But other times I think I need to stick around longer, because I haven’t gotten to see Ben Affleck as Batman yet or had a really good pineapple upside-down cake since the ones my mom used to make.

  I really do think about dying every day, though. Sometimes I think about what would happen if the electricity in my brain just suddenly shut off, like a light switch. Like what if I was just sitting there watching that same Mike Epps comedy special I always watch (does Netflix track that? Is someone in a windowless Silicon Valley office counting that I have watched Mike Epps: Under Rated & Never Faded 237 real times?!) while unbeknownst to me a giant clot was creeping its way from behind my knee up to my lungs? Somebody from work, pissed off that I’ve missed so many shifts, is gonna find my dead body next to a pile of dried-up baked beans I had been eating in the dark out of the can. In a robe I didn’t even bother to cinch shut because who the fuck is even here. I would be dead in my fancy black robe, tits splayed, tomato sauce congealed in the corners of my mouth as Netflix asks judgmentally, “Are you still watching this?” If you are the person who happens to find me, please at least switch the television to something educational before you call the police.

  I turned on Family Feud (if I gotta die I want to be watching something wholesome in case I’m wrong about the heaven thing) and called my number one call-in-an-emergency-especially-if-I-think-I’m-dying friend, Carl, who is a total idiot in most instances, but dude has been a paramedic supervisor for ten-plus years, so I figured I could defer to his judgment. He’d talked me through a couple of bug bites and mysterious rashes previously with mostly satisfactory results. Before I even finished describing my symptoms, he was like, “Call an ambulance.” Slow down, homie. Having an ambulance come to rescue me from the warm embrace of death is my biggest fear other than whether the people who deliver my takeout are secretly judging how many quarts of soup I order every week. I assume that everyone is as simple as I am, and if I were an EMT, while my main objective would be to save a dying person’s life, I would definitely notice the overflowing cat box in the corner of your bathroom as you writhed on the carpet clutching at your throat while trying not to die. Sure, I’d put out the grease fire threatening to engulf your whole kitchen, but only after Firefighter Sam paused for a second to check out the spines on those haphazardly arranged books on your shelf. I might need a suggestion for book club.

  I glanced at the pile of Lands’ End catalogs I’d tossed into the laundry basket full of balled-up socks and possibly an empty McDonald’s bag. “Not doing that,” I gasped into the phone, feeling the cold grip of death wrapped around my lungs grow tighter. I texted my sister Carmen, and after she picked me up, I instructed her to please drive me to the good emergency room. I’m not kidding. If I gotta die, that’s fine—it just has to be at a hospital with individual rooms and satellite television. So we left the car with the valet (I told you guys this place was dope) and checked in at the desk, where they pulled my chart up instantly. “It’s not my intestines this time, I am definitely dying,” I wheezed at the receptionist. “Do you still have United HealthCare?” she asked drily, never once glancing away from the computer screen, and I tried to explain with my eyes that I, too, know the agony of manning a desk where I am expected to facilitate care for inconsiderate jerks. I nodded and slid the flimsy plastic card across to her with the hand that wasn’t clutching the invisible knife wounds in my chest. She pointed to a chair in the waiting room and told me to wait for triage.

  —

  “Aren’t you having a heart attack?” Carmen asked, looking up from a magazine as I approached. I shrugged and slumped in a chair next to her while apologizing to the air for those Little Debbie oatmeal pies I stole from the corner store when I was a kid. WHAT IF THERE IS A HELL, OKAY?

  A dude with a black eye and severed thumb he held against his hand with a dish towel sat down across from us. My heart was seconds away from stopping and homeboy’s thumb was indisputably detached from his hand, and they had us just sitting out here with all the stomachaches and bee stings?! A tech came to get me, guiding me through a crowd of influenza and broken arms to a small room in back. He explained that the hospital was undergoing some construction and that he’d be administering my echocardiogram in this closet while I sat in a recliner. There were no ill-fitting gowns, no drawers full of gauze, no dispenser full of crinkly blue vomit bags. I took off my shirt so he could try to affix electrodes under my sweaty boobs, then sat in the recliner and closed my eyes while trying to picture something relaxing. The tech suggested a beach, in Tahiti. But I hate the beach, that dirty sand getting in all your moist cracks and bugs feasting on your sunburned skin, so instead I focused on something that would actually calm me: one of my en
emies choking on a salad.

  Twenty minutes later I was in a real room with a bed, my sister Jane, who’d met us in the waiting room, next to me yammering into her phone. The doctor pulled back the curtain and gave me one of those condescending sad smiles. The kind you give a child who says 2 + 2 = 7 and believes it. Apparently, I hadn’t had a heart attack. No, instead of “life-threatening cardiac event” the reading on the EKG came out “not right emotionally.” Not kidding, all those lines and squiggles on that mile-long piece of tape spelled out the words “MENTALLY ILL” like an electric Ouija board. Did you know that a panic attack can feel just like a heart attack? I didn’t, but I learned that shit quick as the phlebotomist jammed an IV into my arm and the doctor loaded a big dose of Ativan into my veins and knit his eyebrows together with concern while batting around words like “therapy” and “anxiety.”

  When I have a panic attack, my throat closes up like someone has a big, meaty hand clasped around it, and my chest hurts and I can’t breathe and I become 100 percent certain that I am going to wither and die right then and there. I know when you feel it coming on, you’re supposed to relax and do the breathing exercises your very sensible doctor taught you, but it feels like if I lie down or close my eyes for even a second, I will never open them again. And most of the time I’m down with that, but this shit always happens when my sheets need changing or my garbage can is full of freezer-burned Hot Pockets I tried to salvage, and I get even more stressed out at the thought of whoever finds my corpse discovering the last thing I googled was “Shark Tank bonus clips.”

  Not being able to deal with your life is humiliating. It makes you feel weak. And if you’re African-American and female, not only are you expected to be resilient enough to just take the hits and keep going, but if you can’t, you’re a Black Bitch with an Attitude. You’re not mentally ill; you’re ghetto. Sitting in that hospital bed, talking with a dude who was fresh out of medical school and looked like he was playing doctor with his father’s stethoscope looped around his neck, I was so fucking embarrassed, ashamed to be talking to him about being so mad and so sad most of the time. Letting Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman down by talking about my silly little feelings.

  —

  I was born to one of those mythical black hero women, a single mother who somehow managed to graduate both high school and a nursing program despite having had her first child at sixteen, a woman I never saw pop a pill or take a drink or bury her head under a pillow for three days at a time. Every single time I just can’t…get…up I beat myself up a little, because it’s not like I have children or a job I hate and there’s probably nothing the matter with me other than laziness. When I was growing up, no one in my house was talking about depression. That’s something that happened to white people on television, not a thing that could take down a Strong Black Woman. Which also destroyed me on the “Why are you listening to Smashing Pumpkins instead of [insert name of popular early nineties R & B artist]? Are you even black?!” level.

  So I was (1) super fucking depressed, (2) super fucking depressed with no one to talk to about it who wasn’t going to immediately suggest child services remove me from my home, and (3) super fucking depressed while clocking in on the low end of my skinfolk’s negrometers because I identified hard with Courtney Love and read Sassy magazine because Essence wasn’t really speaking to me yet, so wasn’t this whole thing yet another way I was desperately trying to be white?!

  When I was young I was frequently described as “moody.” Or dismissed as “angry.” According to the social worker who routinely pulled me out of class, I was intellectually bright but “quietly hostile.” Never mind that I was basically living in squalor with my mother’s half-dead corpse, subsisting on the kind of cereal that comes in a five-pound bag and whatever nutrient-rich meals were being served for free hot lunch; I was diagnosed as having “an attitude problem.” The Black Girl curse. So I rocked with that. When you’re a kid it’s sometimes just easier to go along with other people’s definitions of who you are. They’re adults, right? So they’re smarter? I would listen to this Faith No More tape on my Walkman (DO YOUNG PEOPLE UNDERSTAND WHAT THOSE WORDS EVEN MEAN) over and over while sulking and looking morose or whatever it is poor kids get to do when we have no access to semiautomatic firearms or prescription drugs. It was the only thing I could do to make it to the next goddamned day.

  I tried to take my own life in 1993, and the general response when it failed was basically LOL TOUGHEN UP. My first-semester freshman report card:

  English: C

  History: C

  Gym: D

  Band: B+

  Algebra: A (Because Kate Lewis helped me do my homework. I love you, Kate.)

  Suicide: F

  I just slept straight through the rest of the weekend and went back to school the next Monday. I kept doing the same shit I’d always been doing and figured that if I wanted to try again, I needed to wait until I was old enough to get a car and drive it off one of suburban Chicagoland’s many cliffs. I think my mom started watching me a little more closely? But what was she really going to do? She was severely disabled. My being hopeless all the time was trumped by “You know I can’t walk, right?” and I get that. I was a kid, and it was my job to go to school, so I did my job. I would deal with it when I was off Medicare and making enough money to pay for cognitive therapy myself. BAHAHAHAHAHA *choke sob* AHAHAHAHAHA!

  Even when my fucking parents died in 1998 and I had an actual thing I could point to as a source of my unrelenting depression, a cause to substantiate the effect of my simmering hatred, I played it off. I don’t know if it feels like this for anyone else, but I definitely come from the kind of people whose response to “Hey, man, I’m pretty bummed out” is “Shut up, there’s nothing wrong with you.” Or how about “You just sleep all the time because you’re lazy.” Like, if it isn’t broken or hemorrhaging, you need to bury it under these dollar-store snack foods and work it out by your fucking self. OH, OKAY, COOL. So then I developed very glamorous coping mechanisms like covering myself with grisly death tattoos and eating food out of the trash. And then, because I wasn’t actively trying to kill myself and could keep a job and make friends and pay my rent and not do heroin, I made peace with it. This is just how I am. I’M FINE. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this undercurrent of sadness that, if I’m being honest, I don’t totally mind. It was easy to ignore because it doesn’t bother me that much. And I don’t want to be some shiny, happy idiot. This is gritty; this is real.

  One of my most favorite extracurricular activities these days is taking a Klonopin. But not just taking it—also making a big production of getting up to get the water, then swallowing it and looking up potential side effects that I really don’t give a shit about yet am mildly terrified might actually occur. I would like to meet the person who gets a medication to fix a for-real fucking problem and is like, “Hold up, appetite changes?! Unacceptable, doctor dude.” And then, like, dramatically flushes all the pills down the toilet before collapsing into an anxiety-ridden stress puddle. I will take anything, at any time, if a doctor tells me it will repair whatever is wrong with me in that instant. Maybe I’ll read about it if I have to spend a little extra time on the toilet, but that definitely happens after I’ve already swallowed the pills dry and set a timer to see how quickly they start working. I will also take any combination of NyQuil, antihistamines, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories, vitamins, and assorted syrups at the first sign of a weepy eye or scratchy throat. To hell with my liver: FIX THIS.

  I am just an old garbage bag full of blood patiently waiting for death to rescue me, but sometimes when I tell people that, their immediate response is HOW CAN YOU BE SAD, YOU’RE HILARIOUS!!!!! and then for five seconds I’m like, “This person who has never met me before is correct. I’m so funny I should stop thinking life is a trash can.” But five seconds after that, some human roadkill yells at the grocery store bagger or pulls his scrotum out on the train, and I get the insatiable urge to pe
el my skin off like the layers of an onion and jam my thumbs into my eye sockets, just hoping that I’ll disappear down the garbage disposal of human existence straight into hell. Then it’s easy to just write the depression off as an irritation at the dummies I have the misfortune of sharing the planet with. “I’m not depressed, dudes who ride unicycles in rush-hour traffic are fucking idiots,” or “Nothing is wrong with me, the real problem is all these people mindlessly texting while their dogs shit in the middle of the goddamn sidewalk.”

  Two things happened that forced me to finally have the “sometimes I have a disproportionately rage-filled response to otherwise harmless shit” talk with my doctor. (1) I was at work and the worst person in the world came in to buy dog food. This is the kind of person who asks an unending stream of questions that I, as an unfamiliar customer-service representative, couldn’t possibly answer as she empties the entire contents of her handbag onto the counter in front of me. I hate that, the “Please don’t write a negative Yelp review of this business” trap that requires my standing there trying to look engaged while this woman uses me as a sounding board for questions like, “Is [redacted] going to eat three cans, or should I just get one?” She’s not asking me, but she’s not not asking me. I mean, we’re making eye contact and everything but how could I know?! And I had to wait there held hostage because one of these questions pouring like vomit from her toothless maw might be one I can actually answer. I felt the familiar rageheat claw its way slowly up my neck and into my jaw before finally scratching at the backs of my eyeballs. And as she kept rambling nonsensically to herself while pretending she needed my help for five minutes in real time, I calmly raised my hands to my ears and used my forefingers to hold them closed and said, “You have to get the fuck out of here or I will destroy you.” So much for that stellar Yelp review.

  My panic attacks usually don’t have any obvious triggers. The last time I was hospitalized for a bad one I’d had a surprisingly good day: brunch with a friend at m.henry, a field trip to the metaphysical bookstore for smudge sticks and oils, back home in bed watching eyeliner tutorials on YouTube for the rest of the afternoon. Bills paid, snacks in the fridge, clean clothes folded and put away and then bang: pain I couldn’t ignore snaking up my left arm before encircling my heart and squeezing it so hard I thought I was going to faint. I remember thinking to myself, “CHILL OUT, BITCH, YOU KNOW WHAT THIS IS,” but you know how that goes. I just freaked out harder and tried to breathe and get my shoes on, but every breath felt like an ice pick to the center of my chest and I couldn’t lace them up. I called an Uber, then sat in my lobby wearing headphones and disgusting Crocs, and when the car arrived I tried to say hello as cheerfully as possible, so I wouldn’t tip the driver off. The emergency room was slow that night and they saw me right away and talked to me in their most soothing voices. I got some X-rays and a CAT scan and when the doctor came in to tell me my heart was enlarged, I asked, “Is it because I love too much?” and we both had a hearty laugh before he was like, “STOP EATING MEAT” and put through the order for me to be admitted and hooked up to a ventilator for two days.