BT fears! I just want to know i'm not alone

[Kayla1992]

Hi,

I am a 23 year old female of a healthy height and weight and a non smoker. I have been suffering with health anxiety for my entire life. I can not think of a time in my life in which I was not worrying about something.

This latest worry is hitting me pretty hard though :(

So for the past few weeks I have noticed that I have been getting a little muddled up every now and then with numbers. There have been 3 times lately where I have typed a number into my phone and dialed the wrong number. I then look at my phone and see that I have mixed a couple of the numbers around. This happened again yesterday and I have been in a constant state of panic ever since. What if this is a BT???

My auntie passed away from Melanoma a few years ago and it had spread to her brain.
Her main symptom was that when she was writing things, her words were all over the place and made no sense.

I am so scared to write anything in case what I write will make no sense. I have university exams coming up in a few weeks and I need to be free of my anxiety to write!

It has taken me hours and a few Valium for me to work up the courage to type this out.

I hope it makes sense!

I have no headaches, nausea or sweating, but I saw on someone else's post here that they knew someone who had no other symptoms besides the confusion.

I shaking as I write this!

Is it normal to get muddled up every now and then??

Sorry to ramble... I am at uni and have no one I can talk to about this

[furret]

You know, it has happened to me. Lately i've been struggling to type, i make a lot more mistakes than i used to and my thoughts are all over the place, sometimes i answer questions with words that are in no way related to what i was asked.
BUT: i recently started working and i am in my last semester of uni, something i've never done before, and i have a lot more responsability than what i was used to. My mind is always racing and it's actually like two steps ahead from my fingers (the mistakes i make are often skipping letters or, in the case of writing in english, typing phonetically the vowels). Plus, the words i have said that had nothing to do with what i was being asked were actually things i was thinking about in that same moment.

I have no other problems, and i know it's nothing serious because if it was, i would probably be dead by now, as those things started approximately on november of last year. I would say, it is pretty normal to get that sort of confusion every now and then, especially if you suffer from anxiety :D

[Kayla1992]

Im still struggling with this! Im so scared that every time I see some thing like "the boat house" and i read it as "the house boat" or put in a number the wrong way round or feel annoyed for no good reason that these are all cognitive signs of something serious :(

I also have had tinnitus for the past year and a half and I am now thinking that it is all related WAHH HELP

I'm so scared. I'm going overseas in a couple of months and I'm scared of something happening while i'm away from home :(

[Regnardgreeb]

I think what you're describing is potentially linked to your auntie's BT symptoms. Looks to me like you can type completely perfect.

I've had fears for a brain tumor as well, which has been dominating my health anxiety over all since the age of 13 (of course in periods) and started when my neighbor got one and passed away pretty quickly.

I haven't had BT fears since 4 years, until this time in february it started again. Irrational ideas of course. I was in a stressed period at school (university) and in the middle of night, I had completely forgotten that I turned on a specific lamp that I usually don't touch. Then the other night, I had forgotten where I put my alarm clock. Seems like very small things, but to me it wasn't. I usually have pretty good memory and I'm very organized, this didn't seem like me. However, tiredness and stress does a lot of things to us. Although, this triggered the worst anxiety I've ever had. In matter of days, I thought that I had difficulty concentrating and fixing the gaze. This followed by walking problems (after one week) and I felt like my feet weren't hitting the ground. I thought I had problems with coordination. I was so focused around this so the first symptoms disappeared. Walking is an automatic process but I was probably trying to control this on my own (I remember I had this the last time with anxiety as well and was thinking BT).

Then I experienced like numbness on left side of my face, I could feel things but it felt like you know, the feeling when an anesthesia is letting go when you've been at dental. This might remind of MS, but more related to anxiety I think. At this time, I've had 1 or 2 panic attacks as far as I can remember. It went away after 3 hours but could return after a few days or so. Today a few months later, I don't have these symptoms at all.

My point is, tiredness, anxiety and stress can do all sort of things to us. I don't think you should worry.

[Mindknot]

To me your posts are completely coherent, so no I don't think there is a problem there. And yes, I get muddled up ALL the time, it's normal.

I think it's anxiety (probably over your exams). Your thoughts are likely racing, you probably have difficult concentrating, it's easy to skip over or confuse things in that situation - then you're noticing and worrying about those things and overloading your mind with further worries... so yeah, I suspect it becomes less effective at certain tasks, much in the same way that a computer will slow down if it's given too many tasks at once!

Perhaps look for a task that'll help you really focus your concentration - maybe meditation, try learning some phrases in a new language, learn to knit or something physical like an exercise you haven't been able to do before... something entirely seperate and new - and not related to your studies - prove to yourself that you can learn that new thing and concentrate on practising it - just for 15 minutes every day... I think it might help to ground your thoughts a bit and you'll find it starts to get easier to concentrate on specific tasks overall.