Yes, the panic attack thing is pretty real. Know someone that had a severe allergic reaction, basically started choking to death, paramedics involved, all that. The experience imprinted itself deeply, such that she's deathly afraid of it happening again, and gets triggered with panic attacks. She's like two years on from the experience and through a lot of work she's much better, but it's pretty crazy how broadly it has impacted her life as an anxiety disorder. She knows it's not logical, but describes it as a fear of death and of a spiraling nature such that if she can't arrest it in the moment it compounds very badly, which reinforces the phenomenon - panicking about panicking. Anxiety over a panic reaction. So to be clear, it's not an allergic reaction she's experiencing but trauma from one in the past.

When I told my doctor about my oldest having a reaction to a chocolate bar with peanuts, one of his first questions was "did he react before he knew it had peanuts?"

He's pretty anxious about food in general, so it actually made a lot of sense.

I'm not sure it's fair to describe that fear response as "not logical."

Yeah, if I almost died from something I imagine I would have the same response.