I've been pretty good for the past couple of months, keeping my anxiety in check and braving even a severe sinus infection that took me out of commission for two weeks without so much as a panic attack.
Today however, I've been feeling a little bit under the weather with rather non-specific symptoms that came on a couple of hours after drinking a milkshake and have yet to dissipate. While I know I have a slight sensitivity to milk (whenever my body feels like it), these symptoms are far more pronounced than ever before. I'm having stomach discomfort, nausea and coughing but not to the point of vomiting. While I don't have any cold sweat, dizziness, chest pain, numbness or breathlessness, I'm fearing the silent heart attacks that I have read about online that only feature the most benign of symptoms. The fact that I've become lax with my diet and have become addicted to salt-and-sugar-laden junk food recently really hasn't helped my mental state and has been filling me with regret. Even if this is nothing, it's a good enough scare to remind me to stick to my diet and exercise regiment until I've hit my ideal weight (10kg to go!).
I really don't want to give into the anxiety and rush to the ER for something as non-specific as this, but man am I starting to spiral. How on Earth do you guys know when something is serious or not? What are some or the ways you can catch yourself when you know you're starting to spiral? It's times like these that make me think back to how unhealthy and overweight I was as a teen and all the irreversible damage I might have done. The irony is, I just went for my 6-monthly echo checkup yesterday that's monitoring a leaky valve but won't get the results for a couple of weeks. Would they have picked up anything during the scan like scarring, blockage or irregular flow even if they weren't specifically looking for it?