My Flask

by Priscilla Warner

I suffered my first panic attack when I was a fifteen-year-old waitress at the Brown University cafeteria. As I stood behind a counter dishing out peas, I felt an electrical current tear through my body. My heart raced, skipped beats, and flopped around in my chest. My lungs tightened up so fast that I was breathless. Or so I thought.

I was actually breathing too quickly. I began to hyperventilate. My throat closed up, my body trembled, my arms grew rigid and my fingertips tingled. I thought I was dying.

But I managed to get home, curl up in my parents’ bed, and watched dazed as a family physician paid a house call, examined me and announced that I was “just a little bit nervous.”

Was I ever.

He wrote me a prescription for a tranquilizer, and I carried the pills with me everywhere, on high alert for the next attack. Now that I’d been prescribed a drug, my condition was official: I was a freak.

I knew that for sure.

None of my teenaged friends had a defective central nervous system that reared up and exploded, catching them completely off-guard, turning them into a quivering mess.

Back in 1968, no one ever used the term panic attack. Nobody was in rehab, or at least admitting it. A few kids were messed up enough to disappear, leaving town for places unknown. But I was normal enough to stick it out. Or try to, as I played the role of a mentally healthy adolescent.

I didn’t have panic attacks every day. And I didn’t take Valium all the time. I never talked to my family or any of my friends about the fact that I faced death on dozens of occasions when the all-too familiar symptoms of an attack – tightening lungs, a pounding heart – snuck up and clobbered me.

Sometimes the attacks were so powerful that the Valium didn’t work fast enough. Desperate to counteract the terrifying symptoms, I enlisted the help of a secret friend. I opened my parents’ liquor cabinet and vodka bottle. The fiery liquid was a faster fix.

I’d wince while it burned my throat. But soon my terrified lungs would be bathed in a warm glow, spreading down my arms to my shaky fingertips, soothing my whole body. And slaying the dragon, which I knew I could not do on my own.

As my hormones shifted through adolescence, and I went off to college, it was comforting to know that I had two weapons in my arsenal against anxiety – Valium and alcohol.

They were a lethal combination, and I knew that, thanks to the tragic tale of Karen Anne Quinlan, a 21-year-old girl in New Jersey, who had collapsed at a party after drinking alcohol and taking Valium. She lay in a coma for years, a constant reminder to me of the dangerous path I was on.  As a result of her cautionary tale, I never mixed alcohol and Valium. But I wanted them both with me at all times.

A bottle of Valium was easy to conceal in a pocketbook, but I couldn’t carry around a pint of vodka. Nowadays you can buy flasks in many shapes and sizes, made of all sorts of material, including sterling silver. But I bought my flask in 1968, and it wasn’t even really a flask. I think it was actually a hot water bottle. I found it at a drugstore. It was plastic, white and bulky and eventually it turned dingy, rusty and scratched.

It was way too big, but I made it work. The cheap vodka I poured into it made a sloshing sound as I lugged it around in my purse – glug, glug, glug. But I didn’t care how it sounded as long as nobody saw it was there.

I took my secret flask with me everywhere – walking around town, in cars, on planes, trains, automobiles and boats, on dates, to college classes, on job interviews and into ladies’ rooms. A swig here, a swig there – whenever I felt a panic attack coming on, I took a gulp of medicine. For years, the fiery liquid distracted me from what was raging in my central nervous system.

Until finally I burned out.

The alcohol began to betray me. My body rejected the medicine that had soothed me. I’d wake me up in the middle of the night with a start. I’d lie in my bed wide-eyed, shivering and shaking. The warm, mellow glow turned into jolts of all too powerful, unwanted electrical energy.

So I dropped my old friend. I stopped drinking altogether.  I took the advice of a good psychiatrist and began taking a tiny dose of Klonopin instead. It’s tasteless, legal, unexciting and clinical. But it works.

The bulky, plastic drugstore “flask” of my youth seems comically out of place in the emotionally healthy life I’ve managed to build for myself now. It’s a relic, like the electric-colored bell-bottom jeans I collected for years. But the bell-bottoms were a badge of honor, hanging from my slim hips with a sexy, nonchalant air. And the flask was a dirty little secret, a shameful crutch that no one in the world ever knew about.

Priscilla Warner co-authored The Faith Club and is currently writing a memoir about her journey from panic to peace. You can follow her progress at: priscillawarner.wordpress.com

Tagged as: adolescence, panic attacks, teen drinking, valium, women and drinking