What is the root your health anxiety

[Anxious_Introvert]

My health anxiety began after the death my brother. I was wondering how everyone else developed their HA?

[ell19]

mine started for such a stupid reason. one day i felt a pain in my back i looked on the internet and it says it could be a lungs cancer. since that day my life completely changed and i never stop worrying about that cancer.

[Sphincterclench]

Im not certain exactly WHAT the trigger was but I clearly remember when it stopped being an annoyance and became a significant impact on my thoughts and behaviors and that was after my last visit to my parents/grandparents

I had hard palpitations that triggered a panic attack that seemed to last for days and I had to keep it together and drive 12 hrs home.

needless to say it was top 5 worst things I have ever had to endure and it has persisted for about 2 1/2 years now.

BUT....

I am on medications now, and about to start CBT so although I have good days and bad, today being not so good, I think i have more good than bad.

[Nzxt27]

Idk what started mine I just remembered googling stuff then j started to get chest pains. And woke up with a panic attack one day and ended up in the ER for chest pains and told I had GAD. After that it's been downhill really. Going from one thing to another and trying to listen to family, friends, and DR that say I'm fine.

[Mojo61]

Menopause started mine off. Apparently it is very common to develop HA during the menopause - who knew?

[Lam123]

I don't think one particular event started my HA, but two things that come to mind, one was when I thought I was having a heart attack, I actually had trapped gas, which mimics a heart attack. The other is, I started taking a medication for Crohn's disease (I have had crohns for over 20 years), and it has a small chance of increasing risk of certain cancers (if normal risk is 1%, my risk is 2%, so not a big jump), that causes major cancer HA. So I pretty much go back and forth with heart and cancer HA, but for the last 2 years, it's mainly cancer HA. Also, becoming a mom, has made me worried I won't see my son grow up.

[Leah88]

I didn't have a particular environmental trigger but I inherited OCD and health Anxiety from my dad. He has been "dying" from a non existent brain tumour since he was 40. He's now almost 70.

[unsure_about_this]

mine media, Internet and my Dad being sent his poop testing kit for bowel cancer 5 years ago

Also getting letters in the post going for this test and that because of my NF, also now I got a letter saying I need my bloods redone

[Drisque]

My HA started when I was little, maybe 6 or 7. My family didn't have much money, and my mother often supplemented doctor visits with the information in a medical book she "borrowed" from the library. Not having the proper training caused her to overreact, which would later resonate with me, and manifest into a full blown anxiety cocktail....that is GAD, HA, OCD and now PTSD, but that's another story entirely. My HA wasn't overbearing when I was younger, like it is now. I have the Google machine and my lackof self-control to thank for that.

[GlassPinata]

Mine also started when I was very young. I believe it was due to:

1. close family members suffering from health anxiety/ possible genetic predisposition

and 2. being a precocious reader. There were medical texts kept in our home, and I read them, and subsequently developed fears about and psychosomatic symptoms of the diseases they described. My family was also partial to medical novels- I recall reading Robin Cook's "Fever" as a child (it was about a little girl just my age who had leukemia), as well as some book called "Children's Hospital", which described all sorts of diseases for me to worry about (for awhile, I was sure I had Cystic Fibrosis).

So, that's where I think my anxiety started. There were never any deaths or serious illnesses in my family, and still haven't been. For a bunch of people obsessed with diseases, we've been remarkably healthy, actually.

[Drisque]

There's a genetic predisposition for HA?.....That's interesting.

[Anxytips]

I have had HA pretty much all my life. Can't remember it being really bad as just recall it going after a couple of weeks and I'd be fine again for a few years.

This latest episode though all started back in August. After having a stupid amount of alcohol when out with my mates. Collapsed at home. Woke next day and felt pain all over me. Had lost half a stone overnight due to vomiting so much. Went to the Dr but never truly had answers over why I was still in pain weeks later. Ended up Googling all my symptoms which were obviously all bad and thus started my spiral in HA. 5 months down the line now

[swajj]

My first experience of HA was after the birth of my last child. He was only a few weeks old and I was holding him and looking at his face and my vision was blurred. That's where it started. I thought I was going blind. Ridiculous I know. After doctor visits, optometrist visits and finally a visit to an eye specialist I accepted I wasn't. Unlike some people with HA I usually accepted the word of an expert. Then I got a really bad headache, so bad that I thought it had to be a brain tumour. It took me weeks to get past that. Next I started getting muscle aches and twitches and believed I had ALS. It was then that I started seeing a psychiatrist. Within a few months I overcame my HA. It was over 10 years before it returned.

I can't remember exactly how it started. I think it may have been when I developed high blood pressure. I am a school teacher and I had a particularly difficult class one year. I had a really bad headache that lasted for days. Another teacher asked me if I had had my blood pressure checked. I hadn't and I worried about it all day. By the time I got to the doctor that afternoon I was in a serious panic and my blood pressure was sky high. I was immediately put on blood pressure meds, a very low dose. By the next day my blood pressure had returned to normal so the doctor told me to stop taking them. He put the headaches down to the stress of having a difficult class and the high blood pressure down to a spike which was brought on by the other teacher's suggestion that I might have high blood pressure. I should add that this particular teacher had had a stroke and was on blood pressure meds. After I went off the meds I constantly worried about my blood pressure. Within a week I ended up in Emergency with my blood pressure sky high again. They monitored it overnight and within a few hors it returned to normal. My doctor decided I should go on meds because even though my high blood pressure was due to anxiety about blood pressure constant spikes are detrimental to your health. I was fine after that for months.

Then I had an episode of dark urine. I looked up the causes of dark urine on the internet and it was all downhill from there. I can't remember what came next. Many of the usual illnesses the HA sufferers believe they have. Pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, bladder cancer, bowel cancer, ALS again, going blind again, a brain tumour again, skin cancer...many different other cancers and ectopic bests that lasted for many months. After many tests and specialist visits and counselling I am well and coming off blood pressure meds. It has taken me about 3 years this time to overcome HA. I hope this is the end of it.

[swgrl09]

The short story:

My mom had HA all her life. I took on tendencies.

When I was 22, my mom got a rare cancer and died a month later out of nowhere. HA shot up sky high after that. This was 6 years ago.

I am doing ok, it flares up here and there, but for the first 3-4 years after her death my HA was a disaster.

[swajj]

swgrl, with all that you experience it is understandable that you developed HA. My mum did from heart failure. It was only then that I ever started worrying about my heart health and I think it contributed top my ectopic beats. Regarding your own mum's HA tendencies, I have always tried to hide my HA from my children. I have always worried that they too might develop tendencies.

[GlassPinata]

These are sad stories. :(
But also, how weird to worry and obsess about illness all your life, and then die suddenly or even instantly.
I wonder if that's been the case for many HA sufferers.
I wonder if we'd waste our lives worrying, if we knew that when death finally came, it would be so swift.

[swajj]

Good points glasspinata. If I'm honest I think I have had a fear of going blind ever since I was a little girl. When I told my psychiatrist I didn't know how I would cope if I ever did, he said something about using the time left before you went blind to see everything you could possibly see. It made perfect sense. I hate thinking about the amount of time I have wasted on non-existent illnesses.

[swgrl09]

Glasspinata, when my mom was in the hospital she said just that. Cancer was her worst fear and when it actually came true, she said "There was no use worrying all that time. It didn't change anything." And it was a cancer we never heard of or could have done anything about.

[NoraB]

I had HA as a child, not that I realised it at the time and then when my hormones kicked in I was relatively OK (HA wise) for about 20 years. Then I had an early menopause and my Mum died suddenly and the first night after her death I woke up with chest pain. It took two years to turn into the anxiety disorder I have now.

Then my friend died of cancer last September. She was my age and I saw her decline over two years and the HA really kicked again then.

Also, I've done myself NO favours by Googling my symptoms. I would recommend that people stay away from Dr Google if at all possible but if you really can't help yourself, at least put in your symptom followed by ANXIETY.

[Allochka]

Sad stories indeed...
I've never had HA before. Then in 2011 I got pregnant after years of infertility and miscarried.
Right after that I began having crazy ideas about cancers, MS... My doc explained me that most probably HA was masking my grief for lost child, and I agree with her. I have chosen to cry over my health in order not to admit to myself I was crying over my lost pregnancy.
It was all ups and downs since then.
Previous poster whose mom died of cancer is right - there is no need to worry. In these years I've diagnosed my husband with several cancers, all wrong. When he did get cancer, it was one I've never worried and thought about.... He is fine now, and I gained precious knowledge that cancer doesn't equal to death sentence

[Hancock]

I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that anxiety and panic could cause all of the things I was feeling after my first ever panic attack at 17. That level of anxiety was completely foreign to me. Ever since then I've had bouts of hypochondria even though I can ignore symptoms for the most part. I've been through the ringer with brain tumors, acoustic neuromas, MS, cancer, lupus, schizophrenia, ALS, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, etc.

The past two years or so it's been at it's worst and I had to get on medication due to the death of my nana (she was like a second mother to me). She had stage four pancreatic cancer and we were all with her the entire year she battled her illness until she took her last breath. Watching her die really messed me up, it was a surreal experience. I internalized it like I do most everything else and it eventually came back to bite me.

[Wilburis]

For me I think it was my brother's suicide.
x

[StephA]

My HA started when I was diagnosed with breast cancer four years ago. I've also had C Diff three times after my mastectomy and during chemo. My bowels are still messed up from it. I've always had IBS-D but C Diff has worsened it. Ugh!

[sporque]

Got glandular fever 7 years ago that took over a year to get better. Ever since haven't felt the same and always wondering if they missed something more sinister. It's awful.