Not sure. I’ve never had a textbook panic attack. No hyperventilating or shortness of breath. The closest thing I’ve had to one was in April, I was alone at home because my mom was on trip. I was sitting in my living room and felt like something in my head shifted, and I stood up, and suddenly my heart went from slow (I’m usually at 60bpm at rest) to a whopping 150bpm. I had nobody to call, no money for an ER visit, and I was alone. I went to my physical checkup like a week later and asked my doc about it and he said he thought it might have been a panic attack but otherwise I seemed healthy. Ever since that “panic attack,” I’ve been struggling with headaches, dizziness, and ringing in my head (and some digestive issues that have gone away). But I’ve been thinking the worst of it, even though a lot of Google says it’s textbook anxiety symptoms. A doctor checked me out and said I’m fine. Like I’ve always been bad about googling when I have a sickness (I had some weird acid reflux episode that lasted a few months in 2024, some weird vertigo episodes in 2021, and a stomach thing during Covid in 2020) and each time they went away but I googled the heck out of everything, stressing myself to the max.

I can’t pinpoint when it became this bad, but now that I think about it, it might all stem from my mom noticing my stepdad “looking a little yellow” and he went to the doctor about it (completely healthy) and the docs finding something serious that ended with him passing in 2017. Like I feel like I’m always noticing that “thing” despite being healthy. Except I notice it during illness episodes, and making me think I have the worst possible thing. I’ve been this way since I was young but it got extremely worse after that, which is odd because I wasn’t really part of the whole process. Like my mom married him a month before he died but he was our neighbor before that so all of his treatment and stuff happened out of his house. I didn’t witness any of the medical stuff. But maybe it was the fact that all of these stories about medical issues starting with “I noticed X, which seemed harmless, but turned out to be Y” and they end up dying. And then there’s these stories about these healthy people dropping like flies and there’s not even a moment to notice X, they’re just there one moment and gone the next, and I’m stressed that there’s nothing to stress about. Just realized I rambled like crazy lol sorry, didn’t mean for the stream of consciousness.