Hi Roux, I am rather new here as well. I’m struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts currently, but earlier in my life I had problems with panic attacks when my dad had a brain tumor. It was in the front part of the brain and was somewhere between a golf ball and a tennis ball in size. Like your mother, he lived about 12 or 13 years after that diagnosis and a subsequent surgery before he passed away from Alzheimer’s and a heart attack.
I’m not sure about continuous anxiety, since mine was a bit different than that - it was more a reaction on my part to my dad’s condition. I probably don’t have much to add that you haven’t already read or heard, you being a doctor and all, but perhaps my own idiosyncratic approach might be of some help, since I doubt it is in any books.
I had many many panic attacks until I learned to control their onset. I found upon close examination of them, that they usually started as tension or tightness in the area of the throat (part of the reason that the first time I had a panic attack I thought it was a heart attack), esophagus and esophageal sphincter (upper or lower, I never did know which - there was a vagueness to all of these feelings even though they were very intense and distressing).
What I found that worked best was actually quite simple - just gulping down a big glass of cold milk. The gulps were fairly hard gulps, with the emphasis being on the subjective sensation of the smooth cold milk stretching out the cramping muscles. Of the fluids I have used to do this, milk was best, then water, and if I had nothing else available, just air, although the relief with air tended to come more from finally burping it out rather than gulping it.
The mental state that I accompanied this with was a cessation of all inner conversation, stopping my non-stop ever-running internal motor-mouth. I tried to merely be present and aware of my surroundings, but without any particular conscious planning, thoughts of duties, the future, or indeed any abstract mental concepts at all - just simple awareness, nothing more. Seeing without internal commentary, hearing without meaning, awareness of my posture, smells in the air, relaxation of my skeletal muscles, that’s the sort of thing that I was striving for (not a trance state, but just simple being, simple existence, the sort of awareness a cat or a dog probably has).
Those things together seemed to be enough to allow me to head off about 99.9% of my panic attacks before they ever really had a chance to get started. I still have them on rare occasions, but not more than a couple of times a year, and sometimes several years elapse without any. If I do have one, more often than not it signals the onset of a cold - I have no idea why that should be one of the first signs that I’m coming down with a cold, but it is.
I know you asked for prayers rather than a verbal attempt at an online ‘cure’, and so I will add you to the list of people I think of when I pray the Rosary.
Give those things a shot, you have nothing to lose (other than a few experimental glasses of cold milk - pretty hard to get any cheaper or simpler than that), and know that people are praying for you too.
.