To SSRI or not to SSRI?

I’m thinking of going on SSRIs again.

Actually, scratch that. I’ve decided to take SSRIs again. I have a doctor’s appointment on Monday.
The last month or so I’ve come to realise that my life is limited a lot because of my body’s anxious reactions. Well, I already knew that, obviously. But lately I’ve been feeling it more; where previously I might not have wanted to socialise and get involved in stuff I now find myself trying and failing miserably because I’m shaking with anxiety.

My hyperventilation has got worse, or if not worse more pervasive. I’m making a game with a friend and I can’t sit through our meetings (informally, at a pub) without silently starting to freak out and hyperventilate without realising or being able to stop it, which makes me really dizzy. So, I try to correct the dizziness with food except, wait! My OCD gives me a fear of choking so I eat incredibly s..l…o..w…l..y… and try to fight off the urge to cough wildly every time food gets to near to the back of my throat and I feel like this time I wont be able to get it down ( this gets way worse in company and it’s flared up recently from an old panic from school. Thanks, OCD!). So, finally I get so dizzy that I feel like I’m going to faint, and after excusing myself a few times to go to the toilet and calm myself down enough to last another 10 minutes, I can’t take the feeling that I could collapse at any second anymore and I make my excuses and leave. Really attractive, right?

The night that happened, I had horrible panic attacks in waves on the train home, one every few minutes or so, the worst anxiety I’ve felt for quite some time.

Last night, I saw a group of very old and very dear friends. We watched Edward Scissorhands. The perfect time, my body cheerfully informed me, for a health freak out combined with derealisation and panic attack. I started to feel that my right hand wasn’t quite right – it seemed numb and foreign. Then I flipped out thinking I was having a stroke, and left the movie to do a series of obsessive tests involving matching arm heights and reciting the date/ prime minister/ president in the hallway. I made it through the rest of the movie, but everything was strange and frightening, I realised I was having a panic attack with some unreality likely to be derealisation which I get sometimes and which goes hand in hand with anxiety. When the lights went on, my friends’ faces seemed somehow sinister, which I have to admit was very scary, especially as my major fear for years has been going mad. Okay, so I knew enough to be fairly sure that I was still having a panic attack, but it was really unsettling.

What makes me sad is that, even surrounded by friends I’ve known for ages and one of whom has OCD herself, even in a very familiar place to me, A) I had this pretty bad anxiety at all, and B) I didn’t feel able at any point to tell my BEST FRIENDS about my panic attack.
I’ve always been that way – I used to envy people who hyperventilated publicly at school and got the brown bag/ lots of fuss treatment. I used to suffer in my own mind, convinced that I was going to die at any second, yet never considering that I could speak up and ask for help.
To segue momentarily into a different rant: This is why we need better mental health education at school, people!

So, that’s been my anxiety experience over the last couple of weeks. And with university work becoming more pressured, I know it’s going to get worse.
But I don’t want to be so held back by my wild nervous system. I don’t want to avoid situations because I know I’ll hyperventilate and it’s not worth the discomfort and fear. I want to socialise more normally, and hopefully eradicate some of the fear I’ve been accustomed to towing around with me, and all the conditions and limits that go with that much fear.
Should I be considering starting SSRIs so close to academic crunch time?  Am I being short sighted considering the many possible side effects I could experience?
Should I be taking SSRIs at all, given that when I tried prozac 4 years ago I had a really bad reaction and had to stop taking it after the worst night of anxiety of my entire life?