Piecing things together that don't necessarily make an illness.

[Leah88]

My husband pointed out to me that my brain looks for ways to piece symptoms together to make my worst fears come true. For eg. My first ever post on here was about telemerase diseases ( where you age a bit quicker and usually die in middle age from cancer or hrt disease instead of in old age). Anyway a man booked into my hospital today who had one of these shortening of telemere diseases and was only diagnosed at 36. Now I'm back in the lowest of anxiety points where I was about a year ago. When I asked about his symptoms my brain only heard " seborrhic keratosis " and "early grey hairs" both of which I have in my 20's BUT also he listed other symptoms I did not have like an irreg heart beat and blood clots . But now I'm convinced again that I have adult progeria because I share a few symptoms and I seem to think I'm like house and have made an early discovery by piecing together symptoms. Do you think you can have many symptoms of an illness but not actually have the disease?... like say a genetic variant? I think my health anxiety has reached a level of delusional proportions. I Cant seem to tap into a rational way of thinking. I'm really scared.

[Dave1]

Hi Leah,
I can relate to what you say in so many ways! I 'cleverly' add symptoms together like that. I expect every combination of random symptoms can be Googled to become a serious disease. And my anxious thoughts seem to always out-trump my rational thoughts even though I can recognise that my rational thoughts are actually superior. And I hear some words that support my thinking and don't hear the words which don't. And also I sometimes have that horrible rising anxiety that you expressed in your text by changing 'two' to 'a few' and then to 'many'.

[Allochka]

I am quilty of that too! Part of the problem is lack of knowledge. We are not doctors, so we are not qualified to diagnose. But our couple of hours of Googling tell us we know everything and can connect all the dots better than doctors. Real docs know how many additional things should be taken into consideration. We don't know it, that is why diagnosis seems so easy and obvious. Plus the tendency to catastrophise...

[Chris 614]

Add me to the list. I worry that if I forget to tell the doctor about "symptoms" I am having then he will not get the full picture and his diagnosis will be wrong. This just happened recently. I had a legitimate health issue and went to the doctor...but I didn't mention my eyelids have been twitching for the past couple of months...way before this real health issue...and if I had told him he would have said...Oh, well that makes a huge difference! Because that was the missing link and it means the difference between a simple health issue and the rare, incurable, deadly disease!