sleepymusician
06-02-17, 21:37
I joined this website around half a year ago when I was really unwell and, due to a teacher of mine passing away extremely suddenly (as in, she went home from school thinking she had the flu and died the same day), I developed severe health anxiety.
I have had GAD and SAD for a number of years now, but I had never been concerned about my health like I was in this period - I was up at 2am, searching the NHS website and WebMD for symptoms, researching cancers and diseases... It went on for at least a month, this obsessive behavior.
I went to the doctor during the second week of being ill, I think, after I experienced bloody diarrhea. I had had a huge nosebleed that morning which involved blood clots and all that nasty stuff, and I texted my mum who told me to contact the doctor immediately. So I did. And I explained about all the stuff that I was worried I might have, but the doctor denied it all, and just asked for urine and stool samples, along with a blood test (and an ultrasound scan for coeliac disease which never went ahead... lol)
I sent off the samples, and after a while, the symptoms stopped (but due to my anxiety I was still suffering immensely), and it was only three or four weeks after I had sent off the samples that I received a letter explaining that I had suffered from food poisoning - A food poisoning that is the most common of its kind in the UK, but for some reason no one knows about? It's called campylobacter food poisoning, and one of its key symptoms is causing bloody diarrhea. It's most often caught from eating poultry that hasn't been cooked well enough.
It took a while after that for my health anxiety to calm down, but I just wanted to let everyone know that if you experience blood in your stool suddenly, it's not the end of the world. Go to the doctor, talk things through - the chances are that you're completely okay.
I hope this is helpful to some of you - Nothing that I found on the internet said anything about food poisoning, so I hope this will help some anxious minds out there.
Take care, everyone! :)
I have had GAD and SAD for a number of years now, but I had never been concerned about my health like I was in this period - I was up at 2am, searching the NHS website and WebMD for symptoms, researching cancers and diseases... It went on for at least a month, this obsessive behavior.
I went to the doctor during the second week of being ill, I think, after I experienced bloody diarrhea. I had had a huge nosebleed that morning which involved blood clots and all that nasty stuff, and I texted my mum who told me to contact the doctor immediately. So I did. And I explained about all the stuff that I was worried I might have, but the doctor denied it all, and just asked for urine and stool samples, along with a blood test (and an ultrasound scan for coeliac disease which never went ahead... lol)
I sent off the samples, and after a while, the symptoms stopped (but due to my anxiety I was still suffering immensely), and it was only three or four weeks after I had sent off the samples that I received a letter explaining that I had suffered from food poisoning - A food poisoning that is the most common of its kind in the UK, but for some reason no one knows about? It's called campylobacter food poisoning, and one of its key symptoms is causing bloody diarrhea. It's most often caught from eating poultry that hasn't been cooked well enough.
It took a while after that for my health anxiety to calm down, but I just wanted to let everyone know that if you experience blood in your stool suddenly, it's not the end of the world. Go to the doctor, talk things through - the chances are that you're completely okay.
I hope this is helpful to some of you - Nothing that I found on the internet said anything about food poisoning, so I hope this will help some anxious minds out there.
Take care, everyone! :)