Hi everyone ,
I'm Emma and I'm 22 years old and I'm struggling since I was about 16 with bouts of health anxiety. From what I remembered I always was somewhat an anxious child. My story with health anxiety started when I was about 16 years old , I just had mono and it took me several months to recover and because of all that I was a month home recovering. Because of all the time I had I started to fixate on a high pitched noise in my head, so after a few months with these complaints I went to a ear, nose and throat doctor and he found no sign of hearing loss so he didn't know what its cause was . Basically he said that I had to learn to life with it and search distraction.
I must admit that I was really scared at the time because I heard stories of people who commited suicide because of the symptoms. And like we all know anxiety isn't very helpful to accept things like tinnitus. I was sure it would be impossible to achieve anything in life with these complaints. Some years went by and so did the anxiety for tinnitus and I learnt to live with the ringing noise to the point I don't even hear it anymore. So in hindsight that was my first real health anxiety.
Around the time I graduated from high school so about 18 years I began to have the first symptoms of pure "o" ocd but ofcourse I didn't know that at the time. I thought I would achieve nothing in life and than I had to search for reassurance either from my family of friends or the internet. Up until this point nobody noticed I was suffering from something like OCD and even now there are only 3 of 4 people who know. I went through phases that I thought I was a horrible person , I would do bad things to small children. You can imagine why you don't mention these things to everyone. Around my 20th birthday I went for the first time to a youth psychiatrist and she diagnosed me with pure O. Since then I had the occasional health anxiety but something that really triggered me was PGAD and now I have these symtoms (not constantly) .
When the first signs of PGAD arrived (because I saw something about it on tv) I knew it would be once again related with sexual obsessions and OCD .Even though I know about these OCD obsessions I still struggle with a tingling feeling around the area of my vagina, labia and clitoris and sometimes if feels so real. I'm convinced I could have the disease. It's still the same like with tinnitus and other several anxiety fears in the beginning your brain tries to prove you right you have something that will completely shake your life upside down. Since several weeks/months I'm anxious once again if it could be possible I have PGAD. I also thought this several times since 2018 or so but it always went away once my stress faded. But now I'm like constantly panicking over the disease and I'm afraid it will never go away like always I'm very anxious now. Two doctors confirmed that everything is normal "down there" . Is it normal that I'm still afraid ? Does anyone recognizes themselves in my story?
Sorry for my English, it isn't my first language but has anyone any trics or tips to break this pattern of panick and to once again feel normal again? This is the first time I ever posted anything on a forum like this.
Thank you for reading,
Emma
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