Hello. I hope you won't mind a newbie boring you with his personal story. Some of you might be able to relate.
Health anxiety probably began, for me, along with all other sorts of anxiety, back when I was a timid and fearful little boy. I was an acutely sensitive child - the kind that is wary of other children, doesn't like to ride rollercoasters at the theme park, and spends a lot of time alone - and I had a very powerful imagination that often used to explore vivid "worst case scenarios."
The first time I remember it being health related was over BSE/CJD or "Mad Cow Disease" which was the big public panic when I was a kid. I must only have been 8 or 9 when I was trying to test my motor function and memory, full of a terrible kind of dread that one of those burgers I'd eaten in the last decade would be the one to reduce me to a pitiable, spasming wreck. That's the first time I can remember experiencing the distinctive, cyclical thought-patterns of HA that are now familiar to me - the feeling that the worst case scenario is, somehow, inevitable, that if you're able to visualise it happening so vividly, then it must be true, and that if you dismiss this or that symptom as "nothing", Fate - or some malevolent force like it - is waiting to punish you for your blasé attitude. You MUST worry, or else you'll be punished for your confidence, but the fact that you're worrying means you must sense the truth - you instinctively know your fate, no matter what any doctor says!
So go the mad inner-workings of the paranoid mind.
I had a reprieve from Health related anxiety through my teens - but it came back with a bang a couple of years ago, when I was 23. I was working in a job I detested, which involved sitting at a computer all day doing mind-numbing data entry - which meant I had eight hours a day in which to sit and notice every minute change in my body and to think about the implications of it. I'd been drinking a lot one weekend, and eating take away pizza, and I was self-conscious about the unhealthiness of that - subliminally I expected to be "punished" (that word again - is it just me who suspects there's a vindictive force governing my life? Is it a Catholic thing, or a HA thing?) for my recklessness, and as I travelled to work the next Monday I felt sure there was a tightness and a pain in the left side of my chest.
"That's okay", I told myself, "At least there are no pins and needles" - but then, no sooner had I thought that than....actually, could I not feel some gentle tingling in the fingers of my left hand? I got into work and typed those symptoms into Google. I was quickly able to determine that I'd suffered a massive myocardial infarction and should phone an ambulance for myself immediately. After reading that, perhaps unsurprisingly, I started to go "pale, sweaty, faint and generally unwell" like the heart attack victim I so clearly was.
Not being quite mad enough to believe that catastrophic diagnosis, I did, however, seriously start to suspect I had some latent heart condition that needed surgical treatment. Those five Domino's pizzas over the last two years had obviously built up sufficient cholesterol to totally clog my 23 year old arteries and a triple heart bypass was probably the order of the day - my imagination went to work, and I could feel the cold fear of lying on the hospital bed, in a surgical gown, being wheeled in to theatre - the frustrated face of an anaesthetist trying to find my elusive veins the last thing I would ever see.
Here's where it gets really funny: I went to Tesco on my lunch break and bought Aspirin and dark chocolate because I heard they thinned the blood and reduced the risk of heart attack! Sadly, they didn't really do the trick and when I felt a fluttering in my chest later in the afternoon that was the final straw - I had to go to the walk in centre.
The next three or four weeks were a kind of protracted saga of rolling health crises, during which time I had a hospital ECG, a 24 hour heart monitor and blood taken, while my symptoms "progressed" to regular palpitations, sore, tender ribs on the left side and then the right, very sensitive arm pits, aching glands in the neck and tremors in the left eye lid. Naturally, during this period I had a potentially fatal cardiac arrythmia, bone cancer, lymphoma and multiple sclerosis. In my opinion. In my doctor's opinion I had...anxiety.
Since then I've bounced between intermittent mini-crises with gaps of a few healthy months. I read about Charley Boorman's testicular cancer recently, and sure enough, shortly after, I started to get a dull ache in my right testicle. The thing is...the ache really WAS there. I wasn't imagining it. But there was no lump, so I remained mildly concerned rather than panicked, and after an anxious fortnight it faded and went - probably some mild infection.
Recently I read on a forum a post from a man who was diagnosed with lymphoma at 32, having had pain in his abdomen from an enlarged spleen. It got me reading up again and thinking about Lymphoma. The two Ls, Lymphoma and Leukaemia, must be my biggest fears. Something about the way they strike the young as well as the old, the way they can give such apparently trivial and vague symptoms, masquerading, almost, as a flu or a general tiredness until it's too late. I am genuinely terrified of such a diagnosis - of everything that being a cancer patient would entail, the feeling of loneliness and isolation from the carefree, "healthy" world outside, the dreaded chemotherapy, the constant knowledge that something is inside you, and progressing, the needles, the blood taken, the gloomy disinfected hospital corridors of looming death....the very word "lymphoma" nauseates me somehow, makes me sick with terror.
And surely, for someone with Health Anxiety, cancer of any kind must be the worst torture of all - because from then on, once you've had that diagnosis, you live in the shadow of it forever, don't you? Even if you're in remission...every subtle change in the body, every tiny pain or lumpy feature and you're thinking "It's back isn't it? It's back and it's moved to..."
*shudder*
Anyway, I've been on high Lymphoma Alert, if you like, for the past week since reading that guy's story on the forum. And this morning, while getting dressed, I checked my neck and felt two pea-sized swellings half way between the ear and the shoulder. I was in my GP's office by 9am. He confirmed it was my lymph nodes I could feel () but said there didn't appear to be any "swelling" that he would consider abdnormal, said it was quite normal to be able to feel nodes in the neck - and even showed me one of his own, quite visible as a little peanut shape under the skin behind his ear - but sent me for a blood test to "put my mind at ease."
As always, my thoughts have followed a familiar pattern: initially, I'm comforted by what the doctor says. Then, I start to ask myself, "What if he didn't check thoroughly enough? What if it's just the very early stages, so it seems almost indistinguishable from normal size? He's told me the blood test results will be back tomorrow, so does that show he secretly thinks it's an urgent problem?" - and so sneakily, through the back door, anxiety creeps and creeps back in.
I'm less stressed than I was first thing this morning, but I don't dare be "calm" - because calm confidence, as I said, is what life will punish me for. Similarly, on a plane, if I'm not gripping the arm rests for dear life from landing to take off - if I have the temerity to loosen up and "enjoy" the flight - I'll anger the gods! So I await the results of my bloods with due trepidation. And even if they come back all clear, I imagine checking these nodes on my neck will be a regular compulsion for the next few weeks. They may well have been there, just like that, for years. My whole life perhaps. But I've noticed them now and that's it.
I can see the funny side of my Health Anxiety - I can see how ridiculous many aspects of it are, especially in retrospect, when symptoms have come to nothing. But really, when you're in the midst of it, it's not funny. It's DRAINING. It plunges you into a strange parallel-dimension of dark, death-filled imaginings....where you start to look at other people and feel jealous of their carefree, unworried existence. Just the other day I was watching some burly builders swaggering down the street stuffing bacon butties in their mouths and I thought "I bet they've never had a crippling fear that they've got lymphoma....oh, to be like them."
I marvel at people who somehow manage to just LIVE in this world, without analysing and fretting over every minute of it. People who find a swelling somewhere or have an unexplained pain and just say, "Ah, it'll sort itself out." People like that AMAZE me.
But I don't think I can ever be like that. I think fundamental aspects of my personality like sensitivity, intuition, powerful imagination, acute self-awareness - all of which have plenty of good applications, making me a generally compassionate, understanding and gentle person - also lead to me being intensely fearful and powerfully aware of worst case scenarios. I soak up information like a sponge. When I hear about Delta Goodrem discoring a lump on her neck, I start to see myself in a story like that....my life becomes a story with an already-written tragic script, and words I say to other people become poignant, ironic words looking back from the vantage point of my funeral.
That's why I'll never joke about cancer with friends. I have visions of being that person who joked about having cancer and then turned out to really have it, or that person who dismissed his symptoms as "just feeling run down" and ended up collapsing, having an enormous tumor discovered, and being given weeks to live.
Incidentally, I should say that I blame some of my HA on my dad who's one of those people who ALWAYS has a story about some fella he knew whose nose bled for a few weeks, he turned out to have a brain tumor and was dead two weeks later, or a fella who went on holiday to Croatia, had a stroke and is now in a wheelchair at 52, etc., etc.
Anyway, this has been a mammoth post, but I just wanted to share the bizarre, sometimes comical, but always traumatic, workings of a HA addled mind. I was lurking for a while and saw a lot of people talking about things I recognised, which was really comforting, so wanted to try and give the same effect.
I'm off to go and make sure my lymph nodes haven't grown.
Peace, love and good health.
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I can remember being a small child and laying in bed for hours worried about God punishing me for whatever Sister said I did wrong that day. 
