Health anxiety back again….

[Fenerbahce]

Health Anxiety

Here I am again….. it’s a never ending battle.. trigger warning…

37M with Health anxiety for over 15 years.

I’ve had numerous self diagnosed medical diseases that I’ve dwindled on for months on in and until some professional intervention (scans etc) the symptoms were there everyday.

My new one (and I need some help on this one) has been a mid back pain that comes around after 2pm ish and makes me bloat, alongside stomach pains and a full feeling after eating… this started Feb this year..

When this symptom started I already was going through another episode that lingered for 2 months.. so the doctor prescribed me medication.. and funnily enough 4 weeks into the meds I was symptom free. And I continued to be symptom free until early June (which is when I tapered off Lexapro)

From early June until the first week of August this continued and then it finally disappeared.

On the 15th of August, I went into my GP and he ordered blood work and everything came back normal besides my Ferritin which was just under the normal, and when I told him what I went through, he suggested that I see a GI doctor.

So I went to see a GI doctor, and he suggested that we should do an endoscopy and colonoscopy( I had both done 3-4 years ago and was clean)… this is where it went downhill.

He started saying we should do this because if it is Cancer, we would want to catch it early. I freaked out, I then asked him the likelihood (considering that I’m pain free now, and that the pain was gone when I was on medication) he brushed it off…

Until yesterday my stomach pains were non existent and it is back in full force.

Please talk some sense into me… I am literally freaking out.

[Maisy Nina]

I totally get it. I have Crohn's Disease, diagnosed 16 years ago and then had a hemi-colectomy (removal of the scarred and diseased part of the GI) 15 years ago. Ever since I have been on medication, for the first few years I was on long-term doses of steroids (think bloated face ++) and other immunosuppressants. I now have to also have 8 weekly Infliximab infusions at local hospital (takes 2-3hours) as the oral medication was not doing enough to stop the disease being active. I had the most horrendously painful recovery after this surgery and I was also told I had a greater risk of bowel cancer because of the disease. I also had cervical spine surgery in 2015 to remove a disc and replace it with a prosthetic one and titanium plate and screws to hold it in place and I remember being in the anaesthetic room with two anaesthetists attending to my IV etc and looking up at the light above me and wondering if this was the last time I would ever have any thoughts at all. After a routine scan of my  cervical spine to check progress I got the report back and it stated that I had metastatic bone disease (bad). It took a day or so and then my anxiety shot through the roof and I didn't sleep for more than an hour a night for the next week or so until someone gave me something to temporarily calm me down. I then left my work in the middle of the day to go back to the hospital to see if (hopefully) the radiologist had made a mistake in his reporting because I had suddenly developed such insane anxiety about dying... after a little wait I had someone take me into a room and assure me that the Dr remembered my scan and it was a transcription error. I felt temporarily relieved, but this wrong report set off the longest bout of crippling anxiety in my life (6 years, still to this day - although detoxing from alcohol and a benzo anxiety med that I was abusing to take away the anxiety - the last 2 weeks have been better). For so long after reading the diagnosis, even though it turned out to be false, I was so mistrusting of any physician, even my neurosurgeon, telling me it was not bone cancer and I wasn't going to die, the fear stayed with me and really messed me up!

I totally get the freaking out, it is scary and increases the anxiety to sometimes uncontrollable levels (for which I abused alcohol etc for at least some peace). I don't know if I have helped, but I have complete empathy for you and I hope you are able to feel at ease.

Take good care of yourself!