what triggered your health anxiety?

[happycamper]

Oh, the big 'C' in my family, despite the fact my parents are still alive, the last 5 years they've had malignant melanoma, breast cancer and bowel cancer and it totally freaked me out.

My mum needing emotional support 110% of the time, of course it's totally to be expected but I was giving it to her and not receiving any myself, so my coping ability went down the snake and I'm now trying to climb back up the ladder again! Hey ho. X

[bronte]

mine started with the death of my dad at 54 with lung cancer that was 20yrs ago and it was made worse by the death of my beautiful mum from cancer at 68 yrs my mum was my rock and feel so vunerable to every cancer since we lost her 2 yrs ago x

[ladyj]

Mine started when my hubby had a heart attack i had been low for some time as my mum has passed i thought i was coping but may be not then when hubby was in hospital i had my first panic attack it scared the hell outta me i thought i was gonna die alone ,then just as we were trying to pull ourselfs together the shock of my only brother being found dead in his bed alone and not knowing why tipped me over the edge and now every day i have heart attack on my mind iit does not help that i am having acid reflux 24/7 having tests meds and have to have a ct scan on my heart waiting for appointment i can not shift this feeling that hubby survived his heart attack but i wont have had ecgs blood tests scans for gall stones test for gluten intolerence ect ect next test for me is ct scan and no doubt endescope yippppeeee not x

[Humly]

All the scaremongering in the media 20 years or so ago about HIV and AIDS set me off and I had a panic and thought that maybe I had it. Of course I didnt and there was no reason to think that I did but since then I slowly began to develop health anxiety and have worried about many different things over the years, mainly cancer.

[Sam201010]

I think mine started after my first panic attack, all my childhood memories came flooding back to me, mainly of finding my beloved Grandma dead from a brain aneurysm as a ten year old. Can't stop thinking about when it's going to happen to me even though she was a heavy smoker and had stupidly high blood pressure.

Ever since thinking about it, I can't get the thought of this and heart related problems out of my head, which in turn feeds my everlasting chest pains I guess!

[Primula]

Mine started about 20 years ago same as Humly. I had never worried about my health too much, but then the HIV scaremongering came along, and I had a panic about it, and spent 2 miserable years convinced I had it when there was no reason to believe I was at risk. That seemed to start the whole thing off, and it's waxed and waned over the years, and changed form worrying about HIV to worrying about cancer. Especially now I'm approaching 50. At least I could convince myself that it's rare to die of cancer when you're young, but now I'm getting older I keep thinking that there is more chance of it happening. I think it's probably best not to read health scare stories, as they just ignite the panic. At the moment I'm using a "so what" attitude to my worries and it does seem to be helping. I'm not cured but taking more interest in my daily life. Starting another round of CBT soon, so will see how that goes.

Good luck everyone
Primula x

[Ducky85]

Mine was from being around too much knowlege... it is a lot of the time a bad thing...

I am a nurse, i deal with acutely sick people everyday and death, it's my job, i chose it, i deal with it. I can pin pinpoint the exact moment anxiety became an issue....
A visitor confronted me about an issue i wasn't even involved with, having a man stood 2 inches from my face screaming abuse at me about an issue i had no dealings in was a very frightening experience... i tried to carry on my duties but i could feel something bubbling inside and 2 mins later.. my very first panic attack. I became hyper-aware of my heartbeat, and it has become the all consuming thought... what is my heart doing now????
Working in medicine i know about anatomy, physiology and medications.... but it's surprising how even that doesn't help, only seems to make things worse. Sometimes i wish i could just be ignorant to all of it. But it is constantly there, everyday i deal with health problems, i do have a few of my own too which are not helping in the mix... i had half my thyroid removed at 19yo and have recently been told the bit i have left is starting to fail... i would be given thyroxine.. this speeds up the heart... oh fabulous, as if it isn't going mad enough already!! I also have PCOS, so naturally i have hormonal imbalance .. i have even found a pattern where my palps/ectopics get worse at different times in the cycle. Since my first episode i have had 3 further panic attacks, ectopics every day and racing heart all the time. I have had loads of ecgs... at one point was in the back of an ambulance and the paramedic said he found something... "might be nothing"... and wouldn't tell me what.... thanks mate that made my anxiety worse. I have since had a 5 day event recorder and the results were sinus tachy with frequent ectopics... great!! although a cardiologist wants to see me.... this made me worry, why would he want to see me if there was nothing dangerous in the report.... still, i shall go mad thinking about it, as have another month to wait to see him. So, that's my happy story.

Ducky xx

[Rach J]

I had my first experience on the day of my best friend's funeral. He died of cystic fibrosis when he was just 24 and it really made me think about death and mortality and all that. I couldn't get my head around someone dying so young and just thought that it could happen to anyone at any age. I became absolutely terrifed of death.

Anyway, when I was home after the funeral, I felt what appeared to be an electric shock across my chest and down my left arm and my heart instantly started racing. I felt like a couldn't breathe and my heart just kept getting faster and faster, so much so that I thought it was going to stop. My parents phoned the doctor and he suggested they take me in to A&E. I had all the tests under the sun performed on me, ECG, X-Ray, blood tests, you name it. I was hooked up to a heart monitor all night. All the tests came back normal and the docs put it down to anxiety.

[dodo]

I thought I'd add to this as I'm frustrated at the moment. I think mine stems back to having my gallstones missed and becomming ill with it and ending up in hospital.

The thing that frustrates me though is that I just had anxious thoughts and that was all that troubled me. Until that is my friend started getting anxious and started having ectopic beats. She mentioed it to me and got some tests done on her heart.

I think I suddenly thought well what if there's something wrong with my heart, perhaps I should ask for tests, and it all went downhill from there tbh.

It makes me so frustrated that I hadn't even noticed any of these sensations until I decided that I needed to be tested too just to be on the safe side. Now I can't get rid of the damn things.

[Kells xx]

I think what kicked off my main health anxiety was my mum getting breast cancer when i was about 22..

.. it was very aggressive and had started to spread. it was stage 3 and she was so lucky they found it when they did.

Anyway... 7 years later and she is still with us xx hasnt helped my mental state though !

x