Surviving a Car Crash and Soothing Panic Attacks

A panic attack arrives fast and takes over. Fear and anxiety flood in, and you feel certain something awful is coming even when nothing around you explains why. The body joins in: a racing heart, breath that won't come, dizziness, nausea, pains in the chest. These attacks sometimes show up more than once in a family, and stress or any number of other things can set them off.

A friend of mine lives with panic attacks and headaches, some of them mild, some of them bad, and they trace back to a car accident she alone walked away from. For years she worked as a secretary to a senior government official. When he died, he was buried at his rural home roughly 300 miles from the city. She and several coworkers decided to drive out for the funeral and come back the same day. Five of them went: two secretaries, the driver, the tea girl, and the messenger, all from the same office. A vehicle was assigned to carry them there and back. The day went exactly as planned, right up until the drive home.

She calls the spot where it happened the place of blackness. Dusk was settling in. A dog darted into the road and the driver swerved to miss it, and the swerve sent the vehicle rolling. Everyone inside died except her. When it finally came to rest, she was the only one still in the car. She screamed, calling again and again for the woman beside her, a close colleague, and heard nothing back. The others had been flung out, nobody wearing a seat belt, and the car rolled over them. Drivers behind them pulled over, helped her, and got her to a hospital.

Her sister collected her that night. The next day she phoned me and asked me to come to her sister's house. She was shaking with fear when I got there, so I left work and stayed. I let her talk it all out and gave her someone to lean on. Later I drove her to the home of one of the friends who had died, so she could sit with that colleague's husband and daughter and offer whatever comfort she could.

Grief is hard to carry, and the people buried deepest in it are the ones who most need others around them. Simply listening to someone who has been through something terrible takes a little of the weight off. Being trapped somewhere you cannot escape, in real danger, leaves a mark, and that mark can surface later as panic attacks that hit without warning. For her, the same scene kept replaying: the car stopping, the silence, finding herself alone in the wreck with darkness all around.

In the weeks after, I kept showing up. If I left her by herself she slid back into reliving it, the flashbacks returning, so staying nearby was what let her calm down.

Getting professional treatment mattered. Left alone, the attacks could have hardened into a lasting panic disorder. Having someone to listen, a friend or a relative, builds a sense of safety, and that sense of safety carries a person a long way. Alongside that, breathing and relaxation exercises help quiet the body's stress response. The dread of going through it all again can be its own kind of terror, but time does mend things.

She married after all of this. She is a happy mother of three now. She speaks about the accident openly and counts herself lucky to have come out of it without injury. Rather than circling the losses, she holds onto the fact that she got through the pain, and she turns around and encourages other people facing their own hard stretches. She is one of my closest friends today, and whenever a problem lands on me she keeps pushing me until I find my way out of it. A friend in need is a friend indeed. I get panic attacks myself now and then, out of nowhere, and breathing practice usually settles the anxiety.