Why does this always happen?

[beasty340]

Every time I start to feel better about myself and my health... a new symptom(s) will appear. These past three months have been very hard with my HA. I had just gone to the doctor to get over a leukemia fear that had been plaguing my mind for weeks and low and behold I did not have leukemia. I talked to my doctor about getting to see a psychiatrist and starting CBT/counseling. Everything started to seem great for the day, and then the next day I start getting a bloated feeling in the left side of my abdomen and a little bit of pain. Added to this, I got a horrible headache that went away with some Tylenol, but I have been very dizzy ever since the headache occurred. The dizziness feels like a brain fog/unsteady feeling that I just can't seem to shake off no matter how much sleep or rest I get.

What I don't understand is why every time I start to feel better, my body always comes up with a new way to mess with me? I know that I am most likely very hypersensitive at the moment but I cannot catch a break with this stuff. Any suggestions?

[O_O]

God, I know. I can really relate. I honestly sometimes think that I'm cursed or that something malevolent is messing with me (even though I haven't been diagnosed with anything bad yet).

As soon as I start to tell myself that maybe, maybe this is all in my head and maybe I can start to recover, something else will happen. It just seems too unlucky to be a coincidence sometimes.

[NervUs]

Oh my God, tell me about it.

Since March (and this is an arbitrary cut off point, since I had stuff happening before then), I have had a basal cell skin cancer, a soft tissue lump misdiagnosed, growth in the lump, suspicion of sarcoma which turned out negative for cancer, the development of persistent months long cough resistant to medication, xray, spirometry, and a diagnosis of adult onset asthma....The asthma diagnosis came just last month, I have seen some improvement in symptoms but not 100%. I was starting to deal with OK, this is asthma (instead of the cancer I fear), then bam....9 days ago, I get chest pains with deep breaths, which is called pleurisy. Well, pleurisy relates to cancer in some cases, can be viral, can be other causes. In viral cases, it's supposed to go away in a few days, but I still have it and it is pissing me off. Everytime I feel a tug in my chest, my thought is CANCER. My doctor was not concerned about it, but the physical reminder just makes it so hard to move on. THen, as a hypochondriac, I also have to put myself through the whole is this pain real or imagined debate, and it is so tiring!!!!

I wish I had an easy answer, but I think the truth is we just have to put the kabosh on the negative ideation and transfer our thoughts to other things, before we begin ruminating and let ourselves know that we need to give ourselves time for the thing to go away on its own. It's very hard and so so exhausting.

[swajj]

Because even though you accept you don’t have whatever illness you have been worrying about your anxiety is still telling you there is “something” terribly wrong. I found it helped to remind myself of all the illnesses I believed I had and which turned out to be nothing. You know that one illness isn’t being replaced by another. It is just that your anxiety about having an illness is being replaced by your anxiety about having a different illness.