High Anxiety

There was an article in yesterday's paper about selective mutism in children. It's a fascinating but distressing phenomenon, tied to desperately high levels of anxiety in children you'd think would have no reason to be exposed to or have developed such feelings. Last year I watched a documentary about two kids in England suffering from the condition - they refused to talk in public at all - and there was a distinct sense of oddness that they were acting as they did, particularly since they came from very supportive, loving families, yet this was tied to an equally odd sense of inevitability - this was how they were, or how they were choosing to be, and the situation wasn't going to change in a hurry.

For many people the reality of the anxiety they feel being utterly debilitating is one of those facts about the world that is difficult for those who don't have such problems to accept. In fact, I would suggest that it's useful to have been exposed to such feelings in order to have some little appreciation of the struggle some people face in dealing with the ordinary business of living, and the heroism with which they do so.

I had the great good fortune of being made to understand something of this some fifteen years ago when I was recovering from the first operation I had on my spine following a slipped disk (of major proportions, the doctor said.) The insight was granted me the day after the operation at a point when I seemed to be recovering nicely. I was talking to some visitors in the evening when I suddenly began to feel very strange, completely detached from the conversation, as if my friends were not quite there anymore. The strangeness continued and intensified when I was alone. I'd intended to watch a performance of The Prince of the Pagodas, a ballet based on Britten's music, which I had been looking forward to, which was showing on the then Channel 12. I found it impossible to do so. Everything about the music (which I love) and the dancing was somehow disturbing. It occurred to me that I was going mad.

Whatever it was that was worrying me was distinctly outside me but threatening to come inside. My brain was racing. Patches of skin began to get hot. The door of the room (I was in a single-bedded room) was shut and I wanted, needed it to be open. Time slowed down.

I'd had a bit of an odd time under the anaesthetic the day before, and felt that I had been more aware of the operation than one might normally expect. I thought I remembered being cut open. One or two of the odd images I'd encountered now came back to me, but didn't. They remained disconcertingly on the edge of my consciousness but never quite made themselves manifest. Yet they wouldn't go away either. It became obvious to me that I wasn't going to make it through the night. At one point I pressed the call button for the nurse and embarrassingly had to apologise for bringing her in for no good reason. I certainly wasn't going to tell her how I was feeling.

Then I remembered something I'd been told long ago, relating to my Aunite Norah. It seemed that once she'd had a particularly nasty reaction to some sleeping pills she'd been on when she was trying to give them up. I called something about burning skin and overwhelming fear of nothing in particular - and a vow that she'd never go near the things again. I'd been put on sleeping tablets, something I never took before, after being admitted, and had taken them in the nights prior to the operation. This seemed reasonable at the time as I was in considerable pain and it looked like the only way I was going to get any rest. After the operation I had immediately stopped taking them.

The explanation for what was going on suddenly seemed clear: I was suffering some kind of withdrawal symptoms from whatever I'd been given. This seemed logical, almost too much so, and I did wonder whether I'd made up the whole thing about Auntie Norah. But it got me through the night, though I don't think I slept at all. Certainly, by morning it was business as usual and floods of relief at escaping whatever it was had enveloped me. I was left with an incredibly valuable lesson: there are moods, states, conditions that lie beyond the individual and any control they may think they can exert and we are extraordinarily vulnerable in this regard. My problem had probably lasted twelve hours at the most. Imagine years of the same.