Hi, I've just joined. I'm 45 and, although I've always been an anxious person who always imagines the worst, my anxiety has spiralled out of control in the last 6 months or so.
It may be connected to the fact that my elderly parents have both taken a turn for the worse recently and I'm having to confront the fact that they may die soon (I've been their full-time carer for the last 7 years, so they're a huge part of my life) or it may be the fact that I've recently been diagnosed with thyroid disease and either the disease or the drugs I'm on are upping my anxiety levels.
Basically, I've become terrified of everything - I keep imagining I or my parents have symptoms of diseases, I'm terrified of making mistakes with my mum's drugs, I'm frightened of catching a cold or the norovirus and passing it onto my mum or my dad or all the really vulnerable people in my dad's nursing home, I've become petrified of using household or garden chemicals and paranoid I've ingested them/inhaled them/got them in my eyes when I do use them, even though I have no symptoms, I keep checking the temperature of the fridge and freezer and overcooking food as I'm terrified I'm going to accidentally give my mum food poisoning and I keep throwing out food for fear that there might be something wrong with it. I have other random obsessions, like fear I'm going to switch the oven or the washing machine on with the cat inside (this despite the fact that my cat has never tried to get into either appliance!) and (most randomly of all) fear that something terrible will happen if I finish a sudoku puzzle on a 9.
I'm spending ridiculous amounts of time researching the things I'm worried about on the internet (I know I should stop myself as it rarely helps and often just makes me even more worried, but it's hard to break the habit) and I'm really annoying my friends and family by ringing up all the time asking for reassurance (again, logically I know that this is not helping, but I can't seem to stop myself). Plus I'm spending so much time worrying, that I'm just not getting on with things - the house is filthy apart from certain key areas, like the food prep areas, which I clean far more times than is necessary, because I'm frightened of contaminating food with germs.
I'm spending far too much time in bed/reading/doing puzzles, because that's about the only time when I stop worrying - the minute I try to do anything practical, I worry I'm doing something dangerous.
Usually I'm only worried about one thing at a time - in the heat of the moment, whatever's on my mind seems unbelievably frightening and important and everything I was worrying about the previous day now seems trivial, but that doesn't mind that worries that later seem trivial won't recur on another day and seem equally terrifying then.
I've been to see my GP, who was sympathetic, but not too much help - she pointed out that CBT probably wouldn't be practical for me at the moment, as the worry of leaving my mum/having to work out sitting arrangements while I attend the sessions would just be adding something else for me to freak out about.
She prescribed me sertraline, but said it was my call whether to take it or not. I'm reluctant - I'm frightened of the side effects, it might not help and even if it does, it could take months to become effective and I'd rather get my thyroid hormone levels sorted out first, to make sure it's not that that's causing it. Plus, to be brutally honest, I don't want to have to give up alcohol as at the moment it's one of the few things that help (I'm not using it to excess, but on a bad day, just a glass or two can help calm me down). But if I can't get this under control, I suppose I'm going to have to, as I can't bear to carry on like this.
Sorry for long egocentric post.
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