what for "abortion"?

Uhhh... yes, #14. That woman has obviously experienced some sort of trauma involving abortion that she hasn't processed yet. She DOES need professional help to deal with this, she can't have panic attacks every time someone mentions abortions.

14: If she gets that emotional with the word abortion, she needs to get help with why she gets that worked up.

Especially if she works at an abortion clinic…

Must be a republican.

She may be getting professional help. You aren't cured from mental illnesses from going to one session of going to therapy. I've been going to therapy for 8 months for depression and it is really helpful but I still get incredibly depressed and can still be hard getting out of bed.

Too soon.

Too early

Past the first trimester, so it's too late.

#2 just stop

Not a bad pun!

She obviously suffers from an anxiety disorder seeing as how she has panic attacks.

So now the pen is mightier than the sword

No its not , maybe she had an abortion in the past?

@5 Panic attacks don't really need a stress word to set someone off. They mostly hit out of nowhere. A smell, a feeling ir even a random memory can trigger an attack.

^this. The smell of Old Spice is a trigger for me and so is being held down(like being pinned down by my wrists).

Yelling triggers me unfortunately :P I can never tell anyone because I'm too afraid they'll think I'm making it up (I wish I were).

...thats an extreme assumption

I was thinking along the lines of a "candidate for retroactive abortion." But #6 might have it right.

#8 - yeah but I can't think of any other reason why someone would do that other than what #6 said or she possibly might have had to get an abortion herself and she still carries guilt from it

#36. Look up. I think it just went over your head.

36, Wow, you're uniformed. It's extremely rare, but abortions can be survivable for the fetus depending upon the method used. There's actually legislation mandating that "born alive" babies in abortion clinics must receive medical care. And Google Gianna Jesson. She's a famous abortion survivor and pro-life activist.

the baby was like "**** you mom im coming out anyways"

Also want to point out that just because there's no memory of an event doesn't mean there's no trauma from it.

Can confirm. Apparently one night I woke up screaming and shaking my roommate because I thought tanks were attacking us. I have no recollection of what happened other than what he told me. People can have pretty serious mental breakdowns, even if they don't remember the exact cause.

No. This one I can't explain. I don't even remember having this dream. I don't know if you believe in past lives but that's the only way I can explain it.

36, Women were killed in illegal abortions, and women are still killed (though much more rarely) in legal abortions (here's a list: http://www.operationrescue.org/about-abortion/women-killed-by-legal-abortion/). So it is correct to call a woman who had an abortion an abortion survivor. Although I agree that it more likely refers to a fetus who survived an abortion.

#89 it would be dumb if you called yourself a birth survivor since the idea of SURVIVING would be that the risk of dying would be great or high. Otherwise you would say you survived everything..... Surviving would be like you were going to die or the probability you would die was high.... But you didn't and lived..... Surviving an abortion (whether a baby or a botched abortion on a mother) would make it a surviving thing since the probability of dying was high. I'm thinking maybe she was forced to abort or has guilt of an abortion (although her going through a botched abortion or her suppose to be aborted is traumatizing also.) just a thought but is it possible she had a sibling that was aborted and she was old enough to understand that it happened or found out later? That could trigger something like that too.

panic attacks? mathematics makes me wanna hang myself.

for me it's thermodynamics

for me it's thermodynamics

I suddenly want to whisper mathematics in someone's ear, see the reaction and then flee. Weird I know

for me, it's fluids. god, I hate Bernoulli

Mathematics is the most horrifying, panic attack inducing word I know.

What about 'exam'

#81: Depends on the exam. My husband had a panic attack when he heard his doctor utter the dreaded phrase, "You need a prostate exam."

*screams*

Though at the same time if simply the word 'abortion' triggers a panic attack then she should be getting serious professional help, rather than subjecting coworkers to not only having to deal with her when she has one, but also being extremely unfairly blamed for it. Not to mention, what OP described does not actually sound anything like a panic attack. Half the time you feel like you're having a heart attack, you can't breathe, or catch your breath and you have very little control over yourself as your body often sort of locks down.

In all fairness though, I suffer from Anxiety and a Panic Disorder, and triggering does not happen that way. True, if abortion is something that triggers her, it would make her very uncomfortable, but it's unlikely that it would cause a reaction like that, especially that quickly.

The way I understood the FML was that the employee had a panic attack (or something like that) but that it had nothing to do with what Op said, although the customers thought it did. If the employee had an actual panic attack I would assume that the attack came on by itself and wasn't triggered by anything said, the customers just assumed it was something Op said. I could be wrong, but this seems more likely than one word triggering all of that.

#25 I agree. Although I disagree on it being a call for attention since that actually is symptoms for PTSD. Maybe she has that? I have both anxiety disorders and PTSD and while I hyperventilate because of anxiety and avoid situations that cause it my PTSD is not as easily controlled because certain places, times of the year, or words can set me off. And it has caused me to curl up in a ball and repeat things to myself to stop my thoughts.... Although that's very rare since I'm far from those places and the words used are quite uncommon.