Tips for living with uncertainty…

[Limeslime]

I need tips please.

(My story is maybe irrelevant to my question, but incase anyone is curious….I’ve been monitored by the hospital for almost a year for some breast issues, and each time I go in for my review, they want to check me again in a few more months to keep an eye on things. It’s causing me to obsess and so I keep finding new symptoms (classic HA, I know) and now I’m obsessing about my underarm lymph nodes.)


Does anyone have any tips for how to be ok with the uncertainty of it all? My mental health has been in my boots for months cos of this, and I really want to come back to life. I have no motivation to clean the house, I’m overeating, refusing sex, not looking after myself etc etc.
My next review appointment is late April.

[Spider64]

How are you now? I could’ve written your post ��

[Limeslime]

How are you now? I could’ve written your post ��

Hi Spider, I’m so sorry for the late reply, I hadn’t noticed your message.
I’m okish. Increasing my medication helped. Also I was finally discharged from the breast clinic last week after being monitored for a year. However, I wasn’t given any scans or anything before being discharged, just a brief, manual check over by the consultant. So naturally, once the euphoria of being discharged had worn off, I’m now back to panicing. I’m still afraid/terrified of my underarms…convinced every muscle and tendon is a swollen lymph node and checking obsessively.
I’m not as bad as I was back in January, but I still feel like I’m in a pretty bad place.
How are you?

[ErinKC]

On thing that helps me a lot with the unknown is to think logically about what I can and cannot actually control.

When it comes to health stuff, I can control my own actions around my wellbeing (diet, exercise, sleep, etc...) and I can control getting regular check ups and preventative care (going to the dentist, getting my annual physical, mammograms, etc...), I can control some aspect of my exposure to disease (wash hands when I come home, avoid super crowded places during flu season). What I can't control is whether or not I actually get sick with something small like a virus or something big like cancer. I can mitigate the risk in reasonable ways, like I mentioned, but I cannot stop it from happening if it's going to happen. So, instead of focusing my energies on worrying about the unknown, I focus them on action items. And, once the action item is checked off, I move on. So, I get a mammogram, it's normal, I move on.

It's the same as everything else in our lives - everything that hasn't happened yet is unknown. I could walk outside and get impaled by a blowing tree branch, or get on the road and get hit by a drunk driver, or something totally simple - I could slip at the grocery store or the shower and hit my head, or I could choke on something. We're faced with unless possibilities of danger and death everyday (I promise this is actually headed to a positive point!) and so what we do is take reasonable steps to mitigate risk. We wear shoes to avoid slipping, we wear a seatbelt and drive carefully to avoid accidents, we look at our surroundings before heading out, we chew slowly when we eat. Every day is a series of choices and actions designed to keep us safe, all while we blow ahead into the wild unknown. People with anxiety just latch onto one of these things an amplify that thing above everything else. For us, it's our health. But, whether or not a person is going to get cancer is really not so different from whether or not someone is going to get hit by a bus today. We can't control it - we can just look both ways and then step out into the road!