pray4me
15-03-17, 17:52
Hello All,
After reading this forum for more than a year, I finally decided to join. This is my first post. I am typically a very private person, and I am only posting because I have nowhere else to turn to. I have had health anxiety since 2002, mainly related to neurological diseases. I have been able to snap out of it before and have even gone years without the anxiety. But in late 2014 it cam back and has gradually been building ever since.
It started with someone commenting on how skinny I looked and that I should get myself checked out. I think they were implying I had cancer. My mother had been recently diagnosed with a chronic form of blood cancer so this was enough to trigger a whole year's worth of lymph node obsession and anxiety. While I was in the midst of this anxiety, I experienced what I believe my first optic migraine. I had my eyes checked by 2 opticians and one ophthalmologist, and they said they could see no sign of eye disease, except that my retinas were thinning due to my myopia.
This set me off down a rabbit hole of obsession with my vision, especially as I have been afraid of MS in the past. I was regularly browsing this forum to look for vision disturbances, hoping to find stories of people with vision disturbances from anxiety. I came across a poster who had vision disturbances for 3 years, which were diagnosed as migraine, but turned out be MS. I read her story multiple times in a bid to convince myself my problems were different. Then somewhere along the way I learned about after images and the visual snow forum (I found the link on a thread here). I made the HUGE mistake of going over there. I found people with all kinds of vision disturbances. A few members on there were diagnosed with MS, but what freaked me out most was the story of a woman who had vision disturbances so bad she gave up her job and one by one lost all her hobbies. They never found a cause - she was told she had a neurodegenerative disorder of unknown origin. At this time I had none of the symptoms that members on this site had. But over a few months, I developed them all!!
Then, and I don't know why I did this, I started digging into the BFS forum which I used to visit back when I had twitches. A long-time member on there had been just diagnosed with that dreadful 3-letter disease. Digging through some of his old posts I found he too had some vision disturbances!!
Now I am haunted by the stories of all these individuals. Over winter break I tried to used CBT techniques to rationalize why my situation was different. I realized that they all had one prominent symptom, which I did not have - they could see flicker in some lights when others did not. I wrote down on my notepad how I did not have this problem. Well what do you know, less than two weeks later, I am noticing flicker in fluorescent lights that my husband does not see.
I am sorry for dragging on for so long, but now I feel doomed to their fate. I willl lose the career I have worked so hard to build and I will also lose all the joys in my life. I don't know why I am posting on here. Maybe to vent my anger, sadness, and frustration. May be to find some words of empathy. I am really lonely in this struggle and suffering terribly at the moment. Thanks for reading.
After reading this forum for more than a year, I finally decided to join. This is my first post. I am typically a very private person, and I am only posting because I have nowhere else to turn to. I have had health anxiety since 2002, mainly related to neurological diseases. I have been able to snap out of it before and have even gone years without the anxiety. But in late 2014 it cam back and has gradually been building ever since.
It started with someone commenting on how skinny I looked and that I should get myself checked out. I think they were implying I had cancer. My mother had been recently diagnosed with a chronic form of blood cancer so this was enough to trigger a whole year's worth of lymph node obsession and anxiety. While I was in the midst of this anxiety, I experienced what I believe my first optic migraine. I had my eyes checked by 2 opticians and one ophthalmologist, and they said they could see no sign of eye disease, except that my retinas were thinning due to my myopia.
This set me off down a rabbit hole of obsession with my vision, especially as I have been afraid of MS in the past. I was regularly browsing this forum to look for vision disturbances, hoping to find stories of people with vision disturbances from anxiety. I came across a poster who had vision disturbances for 3 years, which were diagnosed as migraine, but turned out be MS. I read her story multiple times in a bid to convince myself my problems were different. Then somewhere along the way I learned about after images and the visual snow forum (I found the link on a thread here). I made the HUGE mistake of going over there. I found people with all kinds of vision disturbances. A few members on there were diagnosed with MS, but what freaked me out most was the story of a woman who had vision disturbances so bad she gave up her job and one by one lost all her hobbies. They never found a cause - she was told she had a neurodegenerative disorder of unknown origin. At this time I had none of the symptoms that members on this site had. But over a few months, I developed them all!!
Then, and I don't know why I did this, I started digging into the BFS forum which I used to visit back when I had twitches. A long-time member on there had been just diagnosed with that dreadful 3-letter disease. Digging through some of his old posts I found he too had some vision disturbances!!
Now I am haunted by the stories of all these individuals. Over winter break I tried to used CBT techniques to rationalize why my situation was different. I realized that they all had one prominent symptom, which I did not have - they could see flicker in some lights when others did not. I wrote down on my notepad how I did not have this problem. Well what do you know, less than two weeks later, I am noticing flicker in fluorescent lights that my husband does not see.
I am sorry for dragging on for so long, but now I feel doomed to their fate. I willl lose the career I have worked so hard to build and I will also lose all the joys in my life. I don't know why I am posting on here. Maybe to vent my anger, sadness, and frustration. May be to find some words of empathy. I am really lonely in this struggle and suffering terribly at the moment. Thanks for reading.