Hello! First and foremost I have been lurking on this forum for a long long time and reading through the threads that correlate with my own fears/symptoms has helped me immensely to calm myself down. So I have decided to share my story, my journey through various health anxiety related issues and hopefully someone will find it helpful and can calm themselves down while reading this.
I am 30 years old, a PhD in Nuclear Physics. Up until a year ago I have never had any health issues. My lifestyle was moderately unhealthy - sleepless nights while working on the dissertation, nearly a constant stress, eating an unhealthy diet, smoking, being slightly overweight, dabbling with recreational drugs occasionally. However, I have never had any health worries. And after an extremely stressful period in my life, just before handing in the dissertation I have started to experience some symptoms that has eventually turned me in to a complete hypochondriac.
It has all started with mild pinching chest pains. I have had feeling that before, but being in a tired and stressed state, for whatever reason, I have decided to google the symptoms. A thing that pops up in the very first page when you google chest pains is either a heart attack or heart failure. Now, as I remember it I didn't get worried right away, but for the first time in my life I have thought - "oh, this can actually be serious" - and for me it was that. While talking to my therapist long while after this first incident I have realized that this was the very moment that I have realized that I am not immortal. And for a young person, who has never worried much about any on his health, this realization was just gut-wrenching. One way or another, I have thought that I need to visit the GP's office to check on my general health as the last time I have been there was five years ago. So I went in, he did and ECG and right away said that there is something abnormal there and I need to visit cardiologist ASAP. And this was really when my health anxiety started. I though "hell, this can really be super serious - I might die and leave my beautiful wife alone". This thought has stayed with me for almost a year. The hours and the days waiting for the cardiologist appointment were horrible.
And this is were my next thought comes in. We are a tech-savvy generation. Looking for answers on web is almost a mechanical action. Your car broke down? Google it! Looking for an exquisite recipe for the dinner? Google it! Have something wrong with your body? Google it! And as a mere act of googling and looking for answers is very natural, so is the curiosity, even a morbid curiosity that follows after that. See, when I have got news that I might have something wrong with my heart, I have went down the rabbit whole of googling the life expectancy of someone with a heart failure, looking for newest treatment options and so on - although I have not yet been diagnosed with anything. Later followed the death fantasies - my wife crying at my grave, all the moment we could have experienced together but won't and so on. I have always thought of myself as a rational, logical person - and for the first time in my life I have been experiencing thoughts that are completely irrational, emotional, far-fetched, but it seemed that I can do nothing to stop it. Anyways, the longer I have read about heart problems the more I have became my own symptoms - I felt out of breath, it has looked to be that my ankles and legs swell all the time - the classic signs of heart failure (later we are going to find out, that my legs swell because I am overweight and when I walk for a long time this just sort of happens). Fast forward - cardiologist appointment. As I was driving there I have gone through every possible worst scenario in my head. And what do you think? After all the tests cardiologist said that my GP knows nothing what he's talking about, my ECG in completely normal, my heart is strong, the only thing I have is a mildly elevated blood pressure that needs to be corrected with medication.
But this, my friends, is only the begging. After a brief relief I have still thought that something is wrong with me. My chest pains haven't stopped. At this point I was well versed in an art of self-diagnosing through the internet, so I instantly thought - well if it isn't heart failure it must be lung cancer. Which took me down another rabbit hole. I have started reading all about various cancers, while simultaneously visiting doctors to cross them out of the list. Chest CT was clear, then we had an endoscopy of stomach, which was also clear, the a neurological exam, brain MRI ...
My symptoms have started to shift. I have no longer experienced chest pains, but I felt dizzy, my vision was blurred, so right away - the diagnosis had to be MS. After visits to TWO different neurologists I was completely cleared of that (because one, for me, was no longer enough).
Throughout all this time my blood levels were a bit elevated (WBC's and Platelets) - so obviously I have started to worry about blood cancer - either a myeloma or lymphoma. AND I HAVE FOUND AN ENLARGED LYMPHNODE BEHIND MY EAR. Looking back at it I am totally sure that I have actually prodded the area some much that I made the lymph node swell. After visiting the best hematologist in the country and being cleared for all the possible blood disorders I have still continued my journey through the health anxiety.
Next was bowel cancer, as my grandmother had that. I have seen some blood in my stool and I was absolutely sure that I do have it. I had most horrible test of colonoscopy to cross it out. I went as far as constantly checking my own stool color to make sure that it is just right kind of brown. Once I have even had a very pale stool which has sent my anxiety spinning over the moon as I was sure that I have cancer of pancreas.
I can't even count the amount of illnesses and disorders I have self-diagnosed myself with. By this time this has started to take the toll on my relationships and work. My wife at the begging was obviously afraid as much as I have been - as I would present her with a new symptom, new diagnosis. Later she just became more and more angry and distant. Imagine that - your most beloved person in the world comes at you with a different terminal diagnosis every day - emotionally that is almost unbearable. I have started to spend more and more time in bed, thinking about my horrible fate, I didn't want to get up. I have closed myself from my friends as even if we would go out, I would run to the toilet and close myself to check whether my lymphnode has not expanded or to do another self-made test that I came up with just to calm myself down.
But I have never did. And after living in this fear I have finally realized that I need help. I need to see a psychologist, because I can no longer control it and I almost feel that someone else is driving this body for me.
So my therapy started and gradually I became better. I have stopped googling and even if I felt a new symptom or pain I wouldn't dwell on this and everything was getting better up until...
I have started to develop muscle twitches. All over the body, random jolts of electricity. Sometimes they were random and sometimes I could just see my muscles twitching over and over again. As it has continued for a while of course, I got back to my ways and googled what do the constant muscle twitches mean. And of course... It was ALS. And that by far was the deepest hole I fell into. I have spent countless amount of time reading the ALS forums, trying to understand whether I do or don't have it. I have forgot all the work we had did with the therapist and I just went deeper and deeper... I have looked at my tongue and it looked as if it was twitching - a classical symptom of bulbar ALS. After reading about it I have felt that it is somehow harder to swallow and that my speech is a bit slurred, like I can't pronounce some words clearly. And it seemed that this got progressively worse with time and I have once again fallen into my old ways. I have invented all sorts of strength tests, I would run up and down the stairs constantly, I would do all sorts of tongue twisters just to see whether I can speak clearly, I would constantly check myself for twitches, I would read ALSforums over and over again, trying to find any sort of constellation there, while simultaneously thinking about how my life is about to end, it has seemed to me that I have became more clumsy, that I find it hard to eat with a fork, that my feet touches the ground sometimes and so on. But this time I have conjured all my brain power and said to myself that I will just wait it out.
I am much better now. As I am writing this I can still feel my muscles twitch, but at this point I think that they have always been there.
So after whole of this story, I would just like to share some insights into what health anxiety is for me and how to try and deal with it.
1. Never did my therapist said that I have to stop investigating my health if I really feel something. However, the only symptoms that need to be investigated are the ones that persist. Like we have developed a thing where I only go to a doctor if I feel that something is happening consistently for two weeks. Because every visit to a doctor will spin the HA rolling again. Not so much the visit as the waiting - so in my case I just stopped going to doctors altogether because after about seeing a 50 of them I have realized that if something was really wrong somewhat would have spotted it.
2. You will become your own symptoms. The more you read about the illnesses and disorders, the more severe your symptoms will start to become. Like ALS and twitching. At this point I am totally sure that I have been twitching long before I knew about ALS. Only after reading about ALS I have started to notice every single twitch that happens in my body. But catch this, if you can trace the direct connection between what you have read and how you feel - it is probably HA, rather than a deadly illness. Like I had my muscle twitches and after reading that ALS can cause difficulty swallowing I became so aware of swallowing that it seemed that it has became more and more difficult for me to do so.
3. If you are a long term HA sufferer by now you are a walking encyclopedia of symptoms, you know that persistent coughing means lung cancer, muscle twitches mean als and so on an so forth. But every single time you have to ask yourself this: have I felt this before? I can now remember thousand times in my life when I have experienced muscle twitches in my life, probably not as hard and visible as they have been lately, but it has happened before. I have coughed violently for some days before and nothing has happened. I am still here. Thing is that these bodily sensations can be absolutely normal.
4. If you are like me, you have also developed a lot of security measures to calm yourself down. Running up and down the stairs to check for muscle strength, constantly checking for the swollen lymph nodes and so on. Thing is that although these little security actions give you a temporal relief, they will not calm you don't in a long run, but set your anxiety further. There is no test that you can do that will confirm or clear you off the diagnosis as you don't have a medical degree, so with this one, you just have to stop.
5. It is very easy to say - stop GOOGLING. But as I have said before I truly believe that googling is actually ingrained into our behavior. What I have done and what worked for me is that every single time I want to google the survival rate for esophagus cancer I google something different. Like currently my thing is whenever I feel a HA urge I google a particular animal and read about it for a while. Through the time when I read about something else I calm down and push the urge to google the medical stuff further away.
6. Everyone is different, but for me, I truly feel that my body only relaxed only when I really endure the urge to read about illnesses, to google, even to think about it. It is not pleasant, but enduring without during the action to reassure yourself, living in the constant state of not really knowing what's up is actually a biggest relief for me. Try not to know.
7. I constantly work with my therapist with a same thing - how to feel happy. Being bed-ridden with fears of death and images of your life flashing between your eyes while you have been diagnosed with anything is the worst way to actually be. Of course, it is possible to develop a terminal illness in a lifetime, it can happen, for some of us - it will happen, but it is all a matter of perspective. What really happens to a lot of us suffering for HA is that we let our imagination to completely take over our day to day lives. It is by far the hardest thing, but you have to do things that make you happy and you really have to be present. Set tasks for yourself - like if you are hang outing with your friends you will spend these two hours just being with your friends, you will not use your phone to google your illness, you will not do any little tests and you will try as hard as you can not to think about it. And then you will see that your body will really relax.
8. Whenever I hit a really serious urge, the thing that really helps me is a... doing sit-ups. For whatever reason the body seems to relax really quickly if you do ten sit-ups.
So yeah, I hope that someone find some good advice in this super long thread.
TLDR: If you know that you suffer from HA, the main thing is to try and endure the urge to do something.
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Originally Posted by epistore
