skippy66
20-07-13, 16:41
This happened to me today and I thought I'd share it with you all:
There I was calmly watching a movie with my 2 young kids. I had just finished a cheese sandwich. All of a sudden I get this huge thud of chest pain from deep in the centre of my chest. It lasts 2-3 seconds. I go cold and clammy, and my heart begins to pound heavily.
I've had this before. It is utterly terrifying as the pain is so sudden and so deep within the chest that its easy to think you're having a catastrophic event.
The old me (health anxiety me) would have gone straight to Google for reassurance. I don't do that anymore but as an experiment I decided to google 'sudden deep chest pain 2 seconds'. As I expected, one of the results was from the Daily Mail with the headline along these lines: "All she felt were sudden sharp chest pains, and the following day she died". It's an article about a tragic death of a young girl from aortic dissection. The article says that it usually happens in older people but can appear in the young too.
Continuing the 'old me' experiment I googled aortic dissection symptoms, this led me down the path of pulmonary embolism which I'm actually experiencing quite a few symptoms of at the moment.
After 5 minutes I stopped: If I do have an embolism, I thought, I've just wasted 5 minutes of my life that I could have spent cuddling my kids. I used to waste HOURS of my life on Google when my health anxiety was at its most severe.
This is just a little lesson not to google your symptoms - focus on the important things in life instead.
There I was calmly watching a movie with my 2 young kids. I had just finished a cheese sandwich. All of a sudden I get this huge thud of chest pain from deep in the centre of my chest. It lasts 2-3 seconds. I go cold and clammy, and my heart begins to pound heavily.
I've had this before. It is utterly terrifying as the pain is so sudden and so deep within the chest that its easy to think you're having a catastrophic event.
The old me (health anxiety me) would have gone straight to Google for reassurance. I don't do that anymore but as an experiment I decided to google 'sudden deep chest pain 2 seconds'. As I expected, one of the results was from the Daily Mail with the headline along these lines: "All she felt were sudden sharp chest pains, and the following day she died". It's an article about a tragic death of a young girl from aortic dissection. The article says that it usually happens in older people but can appear in the young too.
Continuing the 'old me' experiment I googled aortic dissection symptoms, this led me down the path of pulmonary embolism which I'm actually experiencing quite a few symptoms of at the moment.
After 5 minutes I stopped: If I do have an embolism, I thought, I've just wasted 5 minutes of my life that I could have spent cuddling my kids. I used to waste HOURS of my life on Google when my health anxiety was at its most severe.
This is just a little lesson not to google your symptoms - focus on the important things in life instead.