Essentially, Spence claims that he had a panic attack. Apparently he had them a lot in the past, which is why he turned to the bottle so often. Now he is working on different methods of dealing with it, and he had a therapist on talking about panic attacks in general, and what you can do to win against them. He basically said the person that spread the rumor is an unemployed bum who is a liar, and that he simply took the day off.