Do you remember the moment your health anxiety started?

[Tui911]

I was talking to a friend the other day who also suffers from HA and we were discussing why we think we both suffer from HA. When did it start? It turned out that we both have close family members who died suddenly and unexpectedly, and we think this triggered our HA. I also think I'm genetically predisposed and everyone on my mother's side suffers from HA to a degree.

What about you?

[NancyW]

I remember worrying about things as far back as kindergarten but I think the HA started when I was 10 and my mom had to have thyroid surgery.

[Bittersweet05]

Mine too started 7 years ago when my father passed away unexpectedly.

[pb]

After starting secondary school and not coping ,
Also being blamed for making my mother ill.
Believed I had a brain tumour for 5 years and was too scared to tell anyone.
Also never having support from family when worried about symptoms.

[Lauz]

I can remember worrying as far back as being 5 or 6, I remember worrying about having to get a needle when I was in grade 6 when I was only in grade 1 or 2. Similar I think I am predisposed to this as anxiety is on mums side of the family, surprisingly my mum doesn’t suffer.

However the panic attacks / full anxiety didn’t start until 2009 when I had 2 family members pass away suddenly and unexpectedly + I bought a house + got engaged + hectic work life (you know just the major life stresses) I got better over the course of a year and was anxiety / panic attack free for nearly 10 years for it to rear its ugly head just before Christmas just gone :(

On the road to recovery again, bloody hard work and sucks bad.

[Limeslime]

Mine really took off on Xmas night 2017 when I found a rash on my boob, googled it, and read about inflammatory breast cancer.
Before that, I’d never shown signs of HA.

But I’d seen some scary things in my nursing career...and the NHS does not offer emotional support/councilling to its nurses.

A family member died an agonising, slow death from cancer in 2017. A friend fought bowel cancer in 2017. A colleague I’d worked with was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died 6 weeks later, also in 2017. And a friends wife died from cervical cancer in 2017 too.


So yeah, could be 2017s awful events that caused mine!

[Panicattacka]

In 1998, at the age of 26, when I was suddenly diagnosed with Hep. B. Fortunately it was the acute version, and after 3 weeks in hospital I was cured, but it gave me some kind of PTSD.
Before then, I never used to worry at all about illness.

[leebop]

Mine started with a horrible AIDS commercial when I was 10. I had a rash at the time and had my first panic attack. I should sue the network for the 37 years of health anxiety since.

[LF87]

Yeah similar to me, started after my mum had a stroke. Most peoples seem to be after a significant life event :(

[RadioGaGa]

I was a bit anxious as a child/teenager, but it went "full blown" in March of 2012, when I had a pressure/headache feeling behind my eyes. I can remember this "very" well.

I was sitting in the back garden of my mum's old house, on a very "summery" evening for March, when I googled "headache brain tumour". I somehow landed upon the NHS Choices page for "benign brain tumours". I read the section that said "outlook is excellent". I didn't panic and felt relief, thinking "even if it is a brain tumour, I'll be OK". But then, still in the garden, I sat and thought "but I've heard people die from brain tumours". So I then typed in "death brain tumour" and read a word that became imprinted on my mind for the next seven years:

Glioblastoma Multiforme. Median survival: 3 months without treatment, 12-14 months with treatment.

It started a battle with health anxiety, that only stopped in early 2019. Seven years of my life I spent worrying about that illness. And I mean​ seven years. It was relentless.

My obsessive Googling led to me joining this forum, only a couple of weeks after my HA "really" kicked off, in April 2012 (as can be seen in the banner above this post). As a result, I've been a regular on here ever since.

I do consider myself "in remission" from HA now. I still have a wobbly every now and again, but life has finally gotten back into a more normal routine.

Hope this helps

[Kiko22]

Same. It all started when my grandpa died of a very aggressive form of lung cancer that devoured him in months. He was like the only member of my family who understood me completely. He was so strong and whatching him die consumed by that horrible disease shocked me to the core. My HA started righ after his funeral.

[Pamplemousse]

Yep - aged about nine or ten, when play-fighting with my cousin and he said "careful, if you break your neck you'll die".

Then I developed a fear of Black Widow spiders and would search my bed every night for them, followed by the outbreak of Lassa Fever in Africa.

Also anxiety developed from not fully understanding an incident in Malta in the 1970s when the-then premier Dom Mintoff wanted all the British troops out of Malta; I thought he wanted all the British out of Britain and got very upset.

And I've been stuffed by all that ever since. I imagine that I will die with all these issues, I believe it is so much part of my psyche that I cannot ever be 'cured'. Which in turn leads me to think "what a wasted life".:weep:

[glassgirlw]

There’s differing opinions on when mine started. The few therapists I’ve been to seem to think it started when I was in my grandpas hospital room and watched him pass away from an aneurysm following pneumonia. I was around 10 I think.

I don’t agree. It was definitely a traumatic thing to witness especially for someone so young. But I don’t remember having anxiety after that, it was more sadness/depression. My first true panic attack didn’t hit until I was about 18. I was a heavy, heavy drug user. Nasty drugs. Mainly methamphetamine. And I remember I’d been up for about 2-3 days, ended up coming down and crashing for about 15 hours straight. I woke up with racing, pounding heart, chest pain, the whole 9 yards. Went to the ER and they ran all sorts of tests, determined I was fine and it was a panic attack. That was the last time I touched drugs. The subsequent withdrawals was a whole different fight, and left me as a pharmaphobe. That’s stuck with me to today (I’m 40). But the panic attacks went away until about 6-7 years ago when I had a vertigo attack (diagnosed at ER with BPPV). That too went away, but my HA has been going strong ever since. Most of mine is tied to heart (chest sensations and Heart rates), but that’s been better lately. Now whenever I get sick (cold, flu, etc) it seems to send me into a spiral and I’m back to fighting my way out.

I miss the days when I didn’t worry over every little twinge!!