Hello, this is my first post. My mom died in January. I’m 27. I’ve been having more panic attacks since she died... very severe ones. A lot of them are caused by what I am pretty sure are symptoms of grief— horrible short term memory, having trouble forming sentences in conversation, extreme fatigue, constant headaches and neck aches, difficulty doing things like climbing the stairs.

What I wanted to ask you all about though is I think I’ve been dissociating during my frequent panic attacks. First I get a head rush and intense fear, tightness in chest, shaking limbs, waves of nausea, and then... it’s like I can’t relate to my body. I feel really tall or like I’m sinking. My limbs are moving but I don’t feel connected to them. In my mind I feel like I might be stuck like this forever, I might go crazy. I have a hard time focusing on what people around me are saying, even if they are trying to help me through the panic.
I don’t know what to think. I have health anxiety and was (stupidly) researching brain tumor symptoms a few weeks ago because of the intense pain in my neck, and my head actually feeling like it’s falling asleep and parts of it going numb (not associated with the panic attacks). Someone mentioned dissociating with brain tumor symptoms. Maybe that’s where I picked this up from? It’s very scary. I don’t take medication. I am afraid of it. My doctors don’t take me seriously anymore because of it. I miss my mom and wish I could call her and ask her and she could knock some sense into me as she always did but I can’t.