One of
the biggest fears I had developed around the anxiety was the fear of flying. I had never been a huge fan in the first
place but the anxiety made it even more horrible. Suddenly I was very aware that I was locked
in a tube 10Km above the earth, completely at the mercy of the pilots who were
flying it.
Flying
turned out to be something of a trigger for me even before I was aware that I was experiencing anxiety.
Looking
back on the days when I first started out in the offshore industry, I had developed a cunning coping mechanism which
involved consuming copious quantities of alcohol before and during the flight
to numb myself from the scary reality of flying
So how did
I get to the point where I could fly again without losing the plot?
I had
better explain why I needed to change my initial coping strategy.
I often
think of the time before I suffered my first attack as my “stupid period”
As so
often seems to the story with me and this stuff, I never really realized it at
the time, but the way I was acting and behaving was heading me towards some
kind of downfall.
I think
the thing that knocked me around initially was that I didn’t sleep very well on
planes. I think it’s a bit of the old
brain ticking over and not letting me relax along with the anxiety that often
seems to be just lying under the surface.
Oh and throw in a bit of having a hard time getting comfortable sitting
upright for hours on end….
You can
start to see why I started drinking before flying.
My flying
and drinking strategy was pretty fine tuned… I knew exactly how much I could
handle and not get totally obliterated.
Over the years I grew into quite the alcoholic at airports. But there came a point where I started
slipping a bit, maybe over-shooting the mark just a little too much. Like the
time I wrote on the Australian departure card under the “which country are you
travelling to?” I wrote Australia.
I learned
all the tricks to travelling under the radar when it came to being drunk in the
airport.
Write
your departure card out before you start drinking if possible (hence the
failure above!) Look at your feet, don’t talk unless spoken to and only one
word answers - that way you won’t slur so much:
But then
I started messing up more and more:
Leaving
my cellphone at the bar because I was drunk and running late for my plane.
Nearly
missing flights because we were drinking in the flight lounges and getting
completely rancid… We found out that once you were through customs it was less
of a hassle to put us on the plane and let the stewards deal with the mess than
for security to have to take us back through customs and recover our bags of a
fully loaded plane.
Never was
this more true and more proven correct when our flight was delayed for 4 hours
on the way home from Perth. My drinking
plan was thrown well and truly out of kilter because I had been drinking to be
shitfaced as I got on the plane…. by the time the plane had been delayed I was
well on the way and hadn’t planned on having to develop a mechanism for putting
the brakes on. So after a 4 hour delay, a
very very very heavily intoxicated Brendan trots (stumbles) down the airwalk
and into my business class seat for the flight home .. I’m just clipping my belt up when I realize
that I have made a very serious mistake. I look up and I can see the plane
spinning and I know I’m in some serious trouble. I vaguely remember a voice booming over the
PA system as the plane was taking off and I was halfway to the bathroom “COULD
THE PASSENGER IN THE AISLE PLEASE MAKE HIS WAY BACK TO HIS SEAT IMMEDIATELY”
The rest
of the trip as I’m sure you can imagine was awesome… I think I may have passed
out in the bathroom and then somehow woke up at the back of the plane… (I’ll
leave the rest up to your imagination).
That was the end of that messy episode and time for me to start winding
back my drinking on planes and trying to find a new strategy to survive the
flights.
What is
intriguing about this moment is it came about barley 6 weeks before I had my
first anxiety attack. So the timing was
almost perfect when it came to reassessing my coping mechanisms.
After
finishing on the drill ship, I travelled around the USA for a few months. My
company emailed me asking if I was willing to come back from the trip a little
early as they had a ship on a long term contract that they were intending on mobilizing.
Conveniently the USA trip had put a larger dent in my coffers than I had
first anticipated. Securing an income for 6 or 7 months really appealed to me.
What
didn’t appeal to me was that I would have to fly halfway round the world to get
back to work. I arrived home in N.Z. and received the flight details
arrived for the new job, only to discover that I was not going to Perth
Australia but to Cape Town, South Africa - a much longer and more demanding
flight.
So I arrived
home after a 12 hour flight from LA to Sydney and then a 4 hour flight to
Auckland, spent 3 days in town and then flew out 4 hours to Sydney again and
then another 14 hour flight to Johannesburg and then 3 hours down to
Capetown. I found the thought of this
very daunting and to be honest I was not looking forward to it one bit.
So how I
have learned to deal with it ?
The short
and curlies of it are that I haven’t. Not
completely. I still get the racing pulse
every now and then, I still get hot flushes… sometimes I feel like I have to
just escape.
And then
I remember something a good friend and fellow sufferer once told me.
You need
to learn to take control of what you can when flying. Even the smallest of things make a
difference.
In his
words “If you have to get off the plane you can get off the plane, anywhere,
just about any time” What he meant by this is that yes, it’s scary being in
there when you are feeling anxious. and
you feel you can’t get out. But you
actually can. You can take back that
little bit of control, tell the hostess while you are still on the ground that
you need to get off. Hell, make up a
story if you need to. You can even do it
in the air… Feign a heart attack… sure
you may not ever be able to fly with that airline again. But that doesn’t matter. Because you are in such dire need of getting
out of there that you are willing to do anything to get out at that point.
For me
this is the amazing thing. When I’m
there, when I feel that bad, when I have made that decision, I feel in control
and then I feel better. And then I feel
I don’t need to say anything because I know that I have a way out if I need
it. But I don’t need it. It sounds perverse, but I have found a way to
take control of my situation, just through thinking the action, not actually
having to do it!
It sounds
a tad on the crazy side… but just knowing that there is a way out makes a
massive difference when I’m on the slope towards a panic attack.
It’s just
one more little weapon I can tuck away in my arsenal against this illness. And every little bit counts.
Other
things I do are plan, take books, have things accessible, bring things to keep me
entertained.
I
generally request (often firmly) to have an aisle seat as it helps ease the
feeling of being trapped. Although my
last flight (Perth to Bali) I had a middle seat and I coped, now that I think
about it Ha!
I steer
away from alcohol when I’m on the planes these days too.
I try and
strike up a conversation with the person seated next to me early in the piece.
That way if I’m feeling anxious I already have a dialogue with them and I don’t
get more anxious trying to figure out what to say.
