something to worry about

Shelia was referred to me after she spent a night in an ER, with a bad panic attack.  She is twenty-seven ears old, and her mother came with her to explain two things that she wasn't sure her daughter would tell me.  The first was that when Shelia was nine they thought she was going to die from meningitis.   Then, ten years later she was in a car that crashed into a pole, but she had a seat-belt on, and except of slight burns and scrapes she was not hurt.  The driver broke about seventeen bones and was in the hospital for months.  Her mother said that Shelia had spoken about each of these things once.

It took less than thirty seconds for Shelia to begin to tell me about these two incidents, and then several others that her mother didn't know about. She had gotten drunk and fallen off a roof.  She had skied off cliffs, and had done several other dangerous things, clearly not caring about the chances of survival. She knows she had the panic attack when she learned that her friend's mother was diagnosed with cancer. She feels that another person is going to die.  Everyone will die.

Shelia told me that although no one said anything to her, she knew when she was in the hospital when she was nine that everyone expected her to die.  She has expected to die ever since then. Every night when she tries to go to sleep she is afraid to close her eyes because she is afraid she won't wake up.  She told me that they love her at work because work distracts her and if she stops to think about anything else she wonders when she is going to die, so she works hard every minute.

Why bother to live when you're just going to die?  For Shelia, that question always hangs there.

She is quite an attractive young woman but she has never dated anyone seriously because she feels like she will die and leave them soon. "Life is kind of useless isn't it?  You live for a while, and then you die, so why put all that effort into doing all this stuff?

She told me that she knows she should have developed an appreciation for life.  She knows she is lucky to have so many chances.  But she doesn't feel that way.  She feels as if she has only delayed the inevitable.

I told her that I know how scared she is, but next I said that I know what's even worse is how lonely she is.  Then she just cried.

We have a lot of work to do, because I really can't answer a lot of those questions, but at least we have made a start.