TL;DR mental illness.

My son used to have panic attacks. Every time he got in a car, he was convinced they were an undiagnosed heart condition. We spent a couple of hours every single day trying to convince him to go to work, not to call 911, and that he wasn’t going to die. For at least a year to eighteen months, every trip to work or the store or on his way home, we had to be on the phone with him for every mile of the trip.

Sometimes he’d go nonverbal and we’d just have to listen to him hyperventilating. Other times he’d be ranting about how no one took his symptoms seriously, despite getting maybe as many as 3 scans in the emergency room with no finding of anything physically wrong.

We couldn’t go to bed until he got home. We had to wake up for his trip to work. Two hours out of almost every single day. He’d call my wife at work. If she wasn’t available he’d call me. And he would get pissed and tell at my wife if we weren’t available.

Anyway, between therapy and meds, we managed to get over that, but that was so fucking exhausting and frustrating. And the sheer presumption that we had to accommodate him regardless of anything else going on.