Panic in Space Needle Park

The other night I started a new medicine for my various lady problems, and a few hours later I awoke in the midst of a panic attack. What an awful and odd feeling. Some aspects were fairly familiar from my bouts with asthma -- shortness of breath, tightness of chest. But then there was the psychological part. Every time I closed my eyes I saw myself enclosed in a small colored box, like a tiny boxcar, fighting to get out. Where did I get this image? Even weirder was that it felt like a memory, not a dream or a fantasy. My mind kept reaching back toward it, you know how that happens when you can't quite recall something and you're getting pieces of it, like glimpsing at a vista through a tiny airplane window, you're speeding by it and never really get the whole view. Then I'd stop myself because being in this memory or whatever was just too physically threatening. I felt like if I let it take over, I would die.

Next day I still felt weird so I went to the doc, who only vaguely confirmed my panic attack suspicion. "The little box -- that's the ticket," he said, trying to diagnose me, but he never told me what the ticket was for. Did I have some kind of trauma as a child, was this a repressed thing? Or a past life surfacing? Or, more likely in my view, is the small colored box some kind of archetypal image that people see when their systems are shutting down? Was I seeing my own future death?

Now I'm fine but still feel uncomfy when I ponder boxcars. Also, I'm sad for young Nick Sylvester over at the Voice, who apparently really blew it . The question burns: why would you fabricate quotes for a fluffy lifestyle piece? In what universe would that risk be worth it? Also, seems he did it in re people he actually interviewed for the piece, whom he could expect to read it. Teenage suicide, don't do it! as the cast of Heathers once sang. Nick is slightly beyond teenage, and a charmer and a good writer too, but when I met him I did feel he was making too much of his youth. A journalist needs to know that even when you're writing in first person, it's not about you, the Person (or your youth and precocity or wisdom or coolness or whatever). It's about the STORY. Seems like Sylvester was trying to make points for himself and let his work matter less to him than it should. Sad.