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Teresa Bagan had every reason to be elated. After four years of bruising fertility treatments, stress and disappointment, she was finally holding her beautiful son, whose piercing blue eyes and sweet smile made her feel that at last all was right with the world. “I thought, The most difficult part is behind me,” recalls Teresa, 41, a manager at a publishing company in New York City. But just as her child was turning 2—and thriving—Teresa began to feel anxious. Though usually calm and deliberative, she felt easily unnerved. She grew impatient with her son. All she wanted to do was sleep. Doomsday scenarios flooded her mind. She developed stomach pain, which grew steadily worse. Soon she was convinced she had stomach cancer, but she refused to go to the doctor, in part because she didn’t want to face the diagnosis. “If you feel rational, ultimately you want to go to the doctor,” she says. “I wasn’t rational.”

At the office, Teresa found it increasingly difficult to maintain her composure. In the middle of a staff meeting, she couldn’t breathe. Her heart was racing. She excused herself, escaped to the ladies’ room, locked herself in a stall and sobbed. Though she could retreat to the bathroom at work, at home there was nowhere to hide. Her attacks of breathlessness and sobbing increased, sometimes striking in the middle of the night. Despite her exhaustion, she couldn’t sleep.

On a getaway weekend, she confessed to her husband that she thought she was dying. He insisted she go to the doctor. When she refused, he became angry. She walked around feeling “like a bad mom, a bad employee—and a bad wife because I was frustrated that my husband wasn’t rescuing me.”

One day, after three long months of veiled suffering, Teresa knew that she couldn’t continue like this for one more second.


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