SmithsFan
12-11-15, 13:35
Have been sitting fighting the urge to google symptoms all morning.
Since learning about health anxiety and making sense of much of my life this is the first real challenge I've faced to believing that HA is at the root of my symptoms.
I started another thread about how alcohol affected me and a heavy night the other week had set me back in terms of the diseases (mainly dementia/MS) I have convinced myself I have. Despite this I was almost glad as it showed a definite link between feeling more anxious (as a result of over-indulgence) and the frequency of symptoms. The fact that I didn't google made me feel stronger. Naively I thought I was over my problems and it was merely a case of watching my life-work-drink balance and telling myself "it's just the HA" from then on in.
Things have been getting worse this week and today I've felt pain or tingling at various times in my: fingers, knuckles, face, head, upper left arm, lower left arm, lower left leg, upper left leg, upper right leg, shoulder blade, middle of back. What I'm now feeling is, "yes, I accept I have HA, but I clearly have MS as well" and those old images of me being pushed in a wheelchair and not getting to see my son come flooding back. I'm not in full panic mode yet but I can feel it building.
I'm not posting this for sympathy, because I know a lot of people here suffer from anxiety much worse than I do. i'm not really doing it for advice either, but just because I need to express my feelings of frustration in some way. My wife has been brilliant about my mental health problems over the years and while I continue to speak to her regularly about how I'm feeling she also has a lot on her plate and I don't want to overload her. I start counselling next week and am continuing to read up about anxiety so hopefully that will help but for the moment I just needed to vent.
I've not felt particularly anxious before the onset of these latest symptoms but I haven't been sleeping well and I've been feeling low a lot of the time and experiencing fairly severe mood swings, brooding on past mistakes and bad memories etc so I suppose that could have acted as a trigger.
I don't think I'll search the web this time but mainly because I've done it so often that I won't uncover anything new rather than me being convinced that my symptoms are being caused by HA and not MS. The sticky thread at the top of the board continues to be an enormous help to me but some time after reading it I will inevitably feel a fairly innocuous twinge, twitch or tingle and think "yeah, but..."
As much as anything else I wanted to have some way of getting across how accepting that HA is at the root of our problems, and really, genuinely believing it, is so much more difficult than it sounds. And I do feel better for writing this.
Bumps in the road, I suppose.
Since learning about health anxiety and making sense of much of my life this is the first real challenge I've faced to believing that HA is at the root of my symptoms.
I started another thread about how alcohol affected me and a heavy night the other week had set me back in terms of the diseases (mainly dementia/MS) I have convinced myself I have. Despite this I was almost glad as it showed a definite link between feeling more anxious (as a result of over-indulgence) and the frequency of symptoms. The fact that I didn't google made me feel stronger. Naively I thought I was over my problems and it was merely a case of watching my life-work-drink balance and telling myself "it's just the HA" from then on in.
Things have been getting worse this week and today I've felt pain or tingling at various times in my: fingers, knuckles, face, head, upper left arm, lower left arm, lower left leg, upper left leg, upper right leg, shoulder blade, middle of back. What I'm now feeling is, "yes, I accept I have HA, but I clearly have MS as well" and those old images of me being pushed in a wheelchair and not getting to see my son come flooding back. I'm not in full panic mode yet but I can feel it building.
I'm not posting this for sympathy, because I know a lot of people here suffer from anxiety much worse than I do. i'm not really doing it for advice either, but just because I need to express my feelings of frustration in some way. My wife has been brilliant about my mental health problems over the years and while I continue to speak to her regularly about how I'm feeling she also has a lot on her plate and I don't want to overload her. I start counselling next week and am continuing to read up about anxiety so hopefully that will help but for the moment I just needed to vent.
I've not felt particularly anxious before the onset of these latest symptoms but I haven't been sleeping well and I've been feeling low a lot of the time and experiencing fairly severe mood swings, brooding on past mistakes and bad memories etc so I suppose that could have acted as a trigger.
I don't think I'll search the web this time but mainly because I've done it so often that I won't uncover anything new rather than me being convinced that my symptoms are being caused by HA and not MS. The sticky thread at the top of the board continues to be an enormous help to me but some time after reading it I will inevitably feel a fairly innocuous twinge, twitch or tingle and think "yeah, but..."
As much as anything else I wanted to have some way of getting across how accepting that HA is at the root of our problems, and really, genuinely believing it, is so much more difficult than it sounds. And I do feel better for writing this.
Bumps in the road, I suppose.