I'm back at work today, leaving Michelle with Joe. Already I've had a text from Michelle saying that this morning on his first venture out of bed at 09.00hrs on his way to the loo, Joe had a panic attack and fainted. This is something that has occured a couple of times - during the first two days of getting up and about and almost on one ocassion on his first trip to the loo on his first day back home. This seems to be brought about by a number of things - low sugar levels maybe from the lack of eating and more worryingly through a lack of belief that he/we can cope without support of either a 2nd person (Me being at work) or nurses. A slightly worrying development and not one that I'd want to see become an aspect of his personality - panic attacks...
I've just looked at the NHS website http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/phobias/Pages/Panicattacks.aspx
This looks like something we need to be on top of, I noted that in the hospital the physio had a good range of distraction techniques which I employed when he had the start of an episode at home on his first day back. Some of the technique looks quite harsh - talking to the sufferer quite sternly getting them to either sing or recite a list of England cricket players - something like that to move their mind away from the sense of hopelessness and not being able to do the thing that they are confronted with. In the short term if these panics are related only to the belief issues around whether he can walk on his crutches, that's promising as he'll surely only improve. What I don't want is for the panics to suddenly start occuring in other aspects of his life where he faces challenges as usually he's able to deal with these okay.
http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Panic-disorder/Pages/self%20help.aspx
