mollyfin
03-08-11, 07:45
Hi all. I've had health anxiety and/or hypochondria (I'm really not sure which to call it; I think health anxiety is more accurate but it's not so important) since I was a small child. I vividly remember worrying that my heart was beating so slowly that it was just going to stop and I was going to die, and rectifying this by running up and down the hallway like a darn fool to make sure it kept going. (You know, the sad thing is, they said I was an unusually intelligent child...I'm pretty sure if I'd ever mentioned this they would have retracted that statement! But I digress.) Couldn't have been older than four.
So decades passed and this just kept getting worse. I suppose I can partially blame the internet for having so much terrifying information available! But this particular episode is taking the friggin' cake. Just a week ago I was given a more or less clean bill of health after spending six weeks fretting about ovarian cancer (in my defense, my cancer markers were through the roof and I had a grapefruit-sized growth on my ovary...). Surgery has shown that it's "just" endometriosis - which is of course serious in its own right but not generally life-threatening. It's only been a week after all of that - heck, I'm still in pain from the laparoscopy! - and I'm already starting with new panics. I've been running a low grade fever since around the time the growth was discovered. I figured it was somehow stress related, or because my doctors all suspected endometriosis, which can cause a constant low fever, it would be caused by that, but I'm already freaking out that I have lymphoma or some other cancer that causes a constant low fever.
I'm just so fed up. I feel like this is never going to end, I'm never going to get a break from it. Why can't I just accept that I'm okay? Surely the myriad blood tests to check my health pre-surgery would have shown if something serious was going on. I've had all my lymph nodes groped by a couple of doctors pre-surgery and no one commented. I know logically that I'm probably fine. But knowing that never helps. Edit: I'm having trouble getting this to format properly...apologies for the text wall; I'm trying to figure it out...
So decades passed and this just kept getting worse. I suppose I can partially blame the internet for having so much terrifying information available! But this particular episode is taking the friggin' cake. Just a week ago I was given a more or less clean bill of health after spending six weeks fretting about ovarian cancer (in my defense, my cancer markers were through the roof and I had a grapefruit-sized growth on my ovary...). Surgery has shown that it's "just" endometriosis - which is of course serious in its own right but not generally life-threatening. It's only been a week after all of that - heck, I'm still in pain from the laparoscopy! - and I'm already starting with new panics. I've been running a low grade fever since around the time the growth was discovered. I figured it was somehow stress related, or because my doctors all suspected endometriosis, which can cause a constant low fever, it would be caused by that, but I'm already freaking out that I have lymphoma or some other cancer that causes a constant low fever.
I'm just so fed up. I feel like this is never going to end, I'm never going to get a break from it. Why can't I just accept that I'm okay? Surely the myriad blood tests to check my health pre-surgery would have shown if something serious was going on. I've had all my lymph nodes groped by a couple of doctors pre-surgery and no one commented. I know logically that I'm probably fine. But knowing that never helps. Edit: I'm having trouble getting this to format properly...apologies for the text wall; I'm trying to figure it out...