My husband has dealt with mild anxiety for years, but things have become very severe over the last two months. He has had some complications after a routine nasal/ sinus surgery - I won’t delve into a ton of detail but he is experiencing extreme insomnia as a result, and he’s become very anxious and increasingly depressed. He is coping by walking (a lot - like 25 km daily) and has been prescribed mirtazapine by his psychiatrist. 

A few days ago, he walked over to a pizza shop and called me in serious distress. He said that he felt like he was drowning on land. He wasn’t hyperventilating - he was making great effort to breathe slowly - but said he felt like he was suffocating. I was going to call him an ambulance but in the course of our phone call he started to feel better, and we got off the phone as I had tend to our baby. The episode lasted about 20 minutes, and then on his way home it happened again, for the same length of time.

I got on the internet and when he got home I suggested he may have had a panic attack. He was hurt by this suggestion because he felt like I was downplaying the physical severity of what had happened, even though I know that a panic attack really can feel like you’re dying. (He’s also had panic attacks in the past and they didn’t feel like this.) He attributed it to his lungs not getting enough air pressure because his respiratory system was damaged in surgery and his lungs weren’t filling (kind of like COPD, I think?) but it didn’t make sense to me that it would strike in such an acute episode if this were the case. 

I’m worried that he’s so dismissive of this possibility that he might not tell his psychiatrist for fear of having the torturous reality of it dismissed. Am I off base in thinking panic attack is a possibility? Is there a way I can encourage him to consider this without making him feel undermined?