So yesterday afternoon I get a call that my father had gone to the ER due to numbness/tingling in the fingers of his left hand. He is diabetic, somewhat obese, has moderate heart disease and high blood pressure, so of course I was very concerned. However, after I got to the hospital to see what was going on, they were already releasing him after just a couple of hours, which included an ekg and a brain ct scan. They just called it a regular parasthesia and told him if it spread up his arm to come back or if his fingers turned blue.
Since then, my dad has been at home, but he is very frightened. He keeps saying he is feeling worse but can only say it's the fingers that are feeling stronger tingling when I ask him how/what is worse. I'm sensing a lot of the same things that I see with my own health anxiety and others here:. constant symptom checking, self-diagnosis, catastrophizing, Googling, feeling symptoms like jelly legs, fatigue, lightheadedness, not sleeping, etc. He asked me if I felt swelling in his shoulder or a bump behind his ear (I could feel neither, felt the same on both sides) He fears that he can't walk even or something will happen. However he appears to be breathing fine, does not have a fever or anything, and talks clearly. It feels like he's just buried in that rabbit hole of HA but am I just seeing my own bias in it? I told him that the doctors would not let him go if there was a risk. However unlike me he has real health risk factors so I am unsure if chalking it up to anxiety is reasonable. I tried to show him the CBT4panic website and while he started to recognize some of the things it said as what he was feeling, he said it was just making him panic even more so he stopped. (He's also not good with computers so that might have contributed).
To my knowledge, he's always been a pretty anxious and nervous guy and I believe he has depression at times too, but I've never seen it manifest as health anxiety in him before. Although for 30 years until just recently, he simply avoided doctors altogether...so maybe that's like an opposite extreme of HA.
I've told him that he should definitely go back to the ER if any of those things the doctor mentioned happened, but if it's just tingling in his fingers that he should just wait and tell his regular doctor on Tuesday when he's already scheduled for a diabetes checkup. I think it's possible the tingling could be peripheral neuropathy from his diabetes, although he's done a great job keeping his sugar level in check since being diagnosed with diabetes several months ago.
I guess my question for the forum is should I even play the anxiety angle to him? Or to be safe should I recommend more medical support since he has serious risk factors? He lives with my mom and two younger siblings although mom is of no support to him because they basically hate each other, my brother is slightly mentally handicapped and my sister has strong social anxiety. So it's like I'm the most level-headed of the group but I don't live there (just 10 minutes away though). I stayed with him this afternoon but left for him to try and take a nap.
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