The Panic Attack I Mistook for a Heart Attack

At 30 I ended up in A&E convinced I was having a heart attack.

It was a panic attack.

I was in the middle of one of the biggest projects of my career to date. But this was not caused by that project alone. It had been building for years. Seven days a week for months without a single day off. Day shifts, night shifts, long days back to back. Working at the limit, sometimes beyond it.

Financial pressure sitting directly on me as a freelancer. No buffer, no mechanism for switching off. Just the next job, the next site, the next delivery.

My body took it all. Until it did not.

My first thought when they told me: panicking about what? I was not a person who panicked. I did not know what a panic attack was. Mental health was not something construction talked about in those years. It barely existed as a concept in the environments I was working in. I had never once asked whether the pace I was running at was sustainable.

I went home from that A&E visit and had to look honestly at what I was doing to myself.

I talked to the directors. They listened. That was more than I had expected. I stopped the weekend work. I eventually moved from freelance to a permanent role with proper boundaries. Not because I was forced to - because I had finally understood that the pace I was running at was not something a person sustains indefinitely.

I started looking after myself. I became a qualified Mental Health First Aider. I attended training, ran toolbox talks, had real conversations with colleagues who were struggling. I thought I had figured it out.

I had not. More on that in the coming posts.

If you are managing a site right now, working 60-hour weeks, telling yourself it is temporary: it is not temporary unless you make it temporary. The industry will take everything you give it and ask for more.

You are allowed to draw a line.

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