I made it from Reagan National Airport in DC to Montevideo's airport--finally! I got a great price on the ticket, but it had 2 long airport layovers to change planes--one in Miami and one in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

I mostly did ok, but one flight from Miami to Rio was 8 hours long with over 200 people around me. I've been doing great getting out of the house going to concerts and baseball games this summer, but those only last 2 or 3 hours and then I'm back in my safe solitude again. 8 hours turned out to be too long for my PTSD to be around that big of a crowd, and I found myself building toward a panic attack.

Then it happened. I was watching the in flight movie Birdman, starring Michael Keaton. Good movie, I'm not knocking the movie. But I had already built up to a panic attack when--

(TW and SPOILER ALERT)

--the movie came to it's conclusion. Keaton's character puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger.

Not fun for old Muji. That's one of the ways I got PTSD in Uruguay when I was 16. A military death squad captured me during the war, an officer put his gun to my head, and it jammed twice.

Years ago I saw the movie The Deer Hunter with Jon Voight and Robert DeNiro. Good movie, too, but it had a Russian roulette scene that sent me into a major panic attack. So I usually skip movies that depict that particular scenario of handgun to head.

I would have skipped Michael Keaton's Birdman movie, too, just for my sake. I certainly wouldn't have watched in on a plane strapped into a seat with 200 strangers around me. Especially not when I already felt a panic attack building because of being around a crowd in public too long.

Yep, I couldn't breathe, broke out in a cold sweat, the whole bit. I must have pushed the flight attendant's button 20 times. It kind of made him mad, but I got him to bring me a bottle of water. Then I whipped out my laptop and wrote and wrote. I wrote the way I write here, the way I'm writing right now.

Thank goodness the years of bibliotherapy coming here getting stuff out in rants when necessary and knowing you all care brought me back to earth. Holy cow, I was losing it big time. I could see an air marshal sitting on my raving PTSD panic attacked self and ordering the plane to make an emergency landing to lock me up in some Latin American loony bin.

So I made it. One of the other flight attendants, a woman, gave me a hard time later on. She claimed I was too fat (and I know I am too fat, it's true) to sit where I was because it was an emergency exit (that's not so true).

She was just being mean (I had punched that other flight attendant's button too many times, it's true). I didn't have to fight back, though. The other passengers around me, a bunch of Uruguayans, got offended that she would talk tome that way and came to my defense in front of her. Then when the plane landed they befriend me and shared a cab from the Montevideo airport with me all the way downtown, which was a huge savings and a cool ride with nice people.

So I'm here. Boy, am I tired. Thanks for your support getting going on this trip. It turns out I needed it. But the tools I've developed facing panic attacks by coming here saved the day when I had that panic attack right there on the plane. Hooray for DS PTSD--its tools are portable!