Does it get better?

[Anonybrit]

I'm a 26 year old doctor living in the UK.

I know I've always been more of an anxious person than a depressed one but never in my life have I had problems with anxiety like I have in the last 4 months.

I started working as a doctor 1 year ago and have pretty much hated and dreaded it ever since, mainly due to understaffing at work and the menial bureaucratic work they make junior doctors do. So I have been frustrated for a long time trying to devise alternative career routes that would make me happy.

This was a constant source of stress all year but it was completely under control. Then I had a car accident 4 months ago that left me with floaters.

Not only were (and still are) the floaters very upsetting but initially doctors couldn't figure out how I got them and thought it might be a chronic eye disease. This triggered a week of intense anxiety, worrying about my sight and making google diagnoses. Eventually they told me that it had just been the force of the crash, but this triggered a health anxiety that has gone on ever since.

I began to find myself unable to deal with how much I hated work and every stressful event in my life seemed to be so much harder to cope with. I felt a constant underlying feeling that I was about to contract some terrible illness and went from testicular cancer to MS to bowel cancer and so on.

This stress eventually (seemingly) triggered muscle twitches, mainly in my legs but can be anywhere, for weeks at a time when I am anxious and sometimes even cause cramps. When I have a good few weeks of no stress, they go.

Fast forward to last Wednesday and I was due to start a new job in a new hospital with much longer hours. I found myself randomly crying when on my own as the day drew closer and on the morning of my induction I had a complete breakdown and couldn't go in at all, I cried for a few hours then I started to develop brain fog.

I've had that brain fog since then, it comes and goes but is always there in some form. At first it felt like depersonalisation/derealisation, now it just feels like being slightly spaced out/drunk and not 100% tuned in. The twitches are in overdrive and I am often bloated and nauseous, and can't sleep through the night.


I'm on zopiclone for sleep and propranolol for anxiety and that's it for now, I want to avoid medication but I'm struggling to be patient for these symptoms to subside. I'm not at work and starting CBT soon.

I just wanted to know if everything I've been through is normal and what to expect from the future. The last 4 months have been by far the worst of my life and I still have anxieties about health (whether to get a newly available eye operation for the floaters, whether the brain fog/twitches are some horrible neurological disease) so I think my progress is currently slow.

[aprilmoon]

Hi
I would say these symptoms are common with anxiety. I've been recovering from depression and anxiety over the last few months,but am much better now,thanks to a combination of meds,and talking therapies such as CBT.
Hating and dreading a job can put you under a huge amount of stress,its no wonder you're feeling as you do.
Ive had the brain fog you speak of,its awful.
CBT would help you a lot with the anxiety, and there are meds that can help a lot as well,although you say you don't want to go down that route,it may be something to consider,as they can give you your life back,as they have for me.
I have incidentally, had a big problem with floaters in one eye,after having a cateract op,and after time I have adjusted to them to the point were I hardly think of them any more.
Bert wishes :)

[Rennie1989]

Working in a hospital I can see the stress (physical and mental) that young doctors have to go through, expectations from consultants, nurses, patients and relatives, to perform to your best. And I can imagine being heavily involved with patient care (from diagnosis to treatment) that health and medicine rarely leaves your mind.

What is worth remembering is that if you fear or worry over an illness your mind has this annoying habit of mimicking the 'danger' symptoms. I once feared that I had something wrong with my ovaries and uterus and, somewhat out of the blue, I started getting pains. Once that fear left another replaced it with brand new symptoms. You have to keep your mind distracted from the symptoms, and eventually they will go.

[Anonybrit]

That's very true and I am guilty of that myself.

My problem is that the more severe somatic symptoms of anxiety are so similar to neurological diseases that I find it very hard to be reassured. Particularly brain fog, I haven't felt fully with it for a week now and I know that if I was a patient I was seeing on the ward, I would be ordering a head CT.

At the same time people are trying I reassure me so I have to admit that there is equal probability that my personality is just refusing to let me accept it as anxiety.