Health Anxiety

I didn’t get home until midnight last night, fell into bed and cried myself to sleep. Shame and fear. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this in a group post, and it’s really vulnerable for me to open up about like this, but I suffer from severe health anxiety. If you have it, you know well what that means. For those unfamiliar, it’s basically like living with the constant worry that every little pain or illness that happens to you is because you’re dying. Random pain in your arm, it’s a heart attack. Bump on your skin, it’s cancer. Lymph nodes swollen, it’s lymphoma. Like…it’s exhausting. I had health anxiety as a child because I went through several scares with my health around puberty, that’s a loooong story. After my mom passed and I stopped caring about life, it improved. But then after having my daughter and the pandemic, it became worse than ever.

My anxiety has been heightened ever since my mysterious chest pain started a couple of months ago, but I handled it well. Until I got Covid. And then all that anxiety started strangling me again. I’m hindsight, discontinuing my depression/anxiety meds while taking the antivirals was probably a bad idea, but my stomach was so poor while taking them that I pretty much didn’t take anything else while I was on them. Anyway, last night I had the chest pain pretty badly, and then my lower jaw started feeling like it was being torn off. I decided to go to the ER, of course worried it was cardiac related. After several hours and many tests, everything came back fine, and I was left with that familiar shame of having overreacted to pain. And even though I know I’m ok, I’ve been in a constant state of panic since I woke up today because that pain isn’t going away. Health anxiety is a living nightmare. If you deal with this too, I’m so sorry. I’m hoping being back on my regular med schedule will help calm me down. One of my fears is that even after I have improved my health, I will always live with pain and health anxiety. Dr. Resi, can we get a group therapy for this? I won’t let this defeat or slow me down.

I woke up so late today that I didn’t get to the gym but I’m going to do a seated circuit at home and another Jeff upper body burn. We are currently at the vet getting Mawa’s (hopefully final) check up. I’m not confident leaving her alone with my other dog while we go on vacation next month, so I have to start looking for someone or somewhere to leave her. She’s walking well, but she slips on our floors still and I’m worried about her hurting herself while we aren’t there. She has made nearly a full recovery, though. What a tough and wonderful little girl!

I hope you’re all having a great week. We keep trucking. We keep trying. We keep choosing better. I’m cheering for you and thank you for cheering for me!