Sorry in advance for the long post but it’s crucial to completely explaining the whole story. I’ve had health anxiety on and off for the passed ten years. I have OCD tendencies that are really triggered when I have a health scare or I’m experiencing a lot of anxiety over something. Otherwise my OCD is pretty much narrowed down to checking the door lock a few times before bed to make sure that it is indeed locked. So all of the problems I’m facing lately are a combination of OCD and anxiety, with the OCD being exaggerated by my anxiety and worries. About ten years ago, after a night of hanging out with friends and having a few beers, I woke up and used the restroom and had a loose bowel movement and noticed what looked like a small red blood clot in my stool. This lead me to months of googling and reading about possibilities that lead me to several self diagnoses that had a major impact of my anxiety and quality of life. Eventually I was convinced I had cancer and was going to die. This occupied my thoughts day in and day out and I dreaded this new reality. I started living in fear every day and could hardly focus on anything else. On my days off from work I remember laying in my bed worried sick and not wanting to get out and talk much to anyone. I worried myself sick and pretty much gave myself the symptoms of the disease I feared. I was afraid I had colorectal cancer. I started having diarrhea and thin stools. I presented to my GP with all these symptoms and he referred me to another doctor to have a colonoscopy done. The colonoscopy came out perfectly fine and that eased my worries significantly for a short time. I guess I was so stuck on constantly worrying there were things wrong with me that shortly after letting go of the idea of colorectal cancer I started fearing I had bladder cancer due to frequent urination. I fell in the habit of thinking ever small symptom was a sign of a serious medical condition. I became extremely fed up with this train of thought one night and went outside and proclaimed with a loud angry voice that I wasn’t living like that anymore and I was letting it go and wasn’t going to allow this constant worry and anxiety to take over my life. That was pretty much the end of that first incidence of health anxiety and I was pretty successful at moving it on and letting it all go. It was also until recently one of the scariest experiences of my life and some of the worst and traumatic health anxiety I had ever had. Throughout the years leading up to recently, I worried about small ailments such as a lymph node in my neck or a bump on the back of my tongue that led me to many nights of laying in bed reading about the possibilities but none of that ever lead to the intensity of the first traumatic experience I suffered with my first bout of health anxiety. I carried on with life as normal with these other ailments, even though they caused me a great deal of worry. 

Well, fast forward to life in 2020. I was laid off and then later fired from my job due to COVID 19. The circumstances were horrible but I was enjoying my break from the work life nonetheless. Carrying on with life as usual, worrying every now and then about the lymph node in my neck that I’ve yet to have checked out and the bump on the back of my tongue that I could feel every time I swallow. Again, these minor ailments didn’t cause me any distress, but they were of concern. I carried on enjoying my free time fishing and camping and visiting with friends and family as usual without these minor worries impacting my life. Well in may of 2020, I was driving home late one night when I felt a slight tingle sensation on my left ear. I started getting concerned and it worries me. I started paying attention to it and started wondering if a string from my cap was touching my ear and could not find a cause. The sensation was coming from my ear itself. I think felt the same sensation go across the top of my head, which apparently was probably just chills from the AC blowing and I starting panicking. Next thing you know the sensation is across my whole chest and I’m freaking out thinking I might be having a stroke. It’s like everything at that point went into slow motion as I was panicking and I immediately dialed 911 and the dispatcher stayed on the phone with me until I arrived at a local hospital emergency room. In short, I was terrified of what the results might be while waiting but it turned out that they didn’t find anything concerning and said I had experienced anxiety and then sent me on my way. For the most part I felt relieved and carried on life as usual for the next month or so but then started getting into the habit of worrying they may have missed something or that the cause was something that they didn’t check. I was contemplating at that point on that it was anything from a blood clot to a brain tumor and it didn’t help that I was experiencing a random headache on the left side of my head from time to time that felt like I a brief sharp sensation, possibly from a pinched nerve in my neck or something. I remember my friend coming over one night during this time frame and was so stuck in my head with these thoughts that I felt very uneasy and found it hard to concentrate on visiting or much of anything else and felt a sense of relief once he finally left as I was able to carry on with my worry and googling about the matter. I guess you could say that was one of the hardest nights during my worries over it because I woke up the next day feeling a lot better and not so uneasy and just carried on with life as normal. Within the next month I ended up going visit my brother out of state for a week and even though these worries stayed with me I otherwise enjoyed the vacation. 

After we returned home from vacation I still had the worries of the occasional headache feeling in my head and the soreness I had been experiencing on the top of my left arm, as well as a sharp pain I’d get in my left thumb. A couple days went by and one night I bought me all kinds of food from sonic because I was hungry and just a small amount of eating after I got my food I lost my appetite and wasn’t hungry anymore. For whatever reason I didn’t feel too good. I proceeding to bring a friend that was visiting with me back to his house then went home and resumed googling about the worries I had been having. It was getting late so eventually I just went to sleep. I woke up the next morning with my heart racing and a nervous feeling in my chest and I’m not positive but I do believe it may have been the cause of a bad dream. It had rarely ever happened so I put it off and went about my morning as usual not really worrying about it. I didn’t feel all that great and felt I needed to go to the store and get some drinks and food and while I was shopping I started feeling pretty weak and felt bad like I was coming down with a virus or something and by the time I got to the register to check out I felt so weak like and sick that I just couldn’t wait to get out the store and get home. I figured I just really needed to eat something so I hurried up and fixed me some cereal and milk and 3 bites in I got really nauseated and started to feel really hot. I immediately called my mom to let her know I wasn’t feeling right and she told me to just lay down or something and if I needed to just give her a call and she would come. Within a couple minutes I called back and asked her to come check up on me. I was getting so hot and sweaty and started taking some layers of my clothing off and started panicking because of how I was feeling and believe I then suffered my first panic attack. She checked my blood pressure and a few other things and everything seemed okay and said I probably had a little virus or something. I left with her to go stay at her place because I didn’t want to be alone after that and I remember feeling very unsteady and wobbly walking to the car after having that episode. This certainly scared the hell out of me so I spent the next week being afraid of what might have caused this and read about all kinds of scary possibilities and would randomly have small anxiety attacks, my heart would start to race just talking about it, and sometimes I would get lost in my train of thought and would experience minor brain block or thought block. I would start to talk about my worries and concerns and my heart would start racing and sometimes it would take me a few seconds to gather my thoughts and words. After about 6 days I managed to get passed it all and convinced myself that my worries were illogical and it probably was some sort of little virus or something and felt better and stopped worrying and regained my appetite. I was good and resumed life as normal for about a week. Now, throughout my 6 days of worry I was also experiencing light headiness so after about a week of feeling better and letting go of all my concerns and getting over it I was picking up sticks outside in the hot sun and not long after coming back into the house I got really light headed and this lead me to freaking out again thinking whatever problem I was facing prior had returned and that I indeed may have had some serious illness. I continued to resume life as normal for a few days but then my worries got the best of me a few days later and I started freaking out over feeling nauseous and was in a state of panic driving home all the way back from a friends house because of it. 

I decided to schedule an appointment to see my primary care physician and was so worried he’d want to run tests because of all the symptoms I’m scared of that I made sure to be honest about my fears and anxiety’s hoping that I’d leave with a diagnoses of just anxiety and not have to get tested for other ailments for fear of something drastic, like what I’d been worried about. That’s exactly what happened. He said it sounded like OCD and anxiety and prescribed me 20mg of Prozac and propranolol for anxiety and panic attacks and I went home and took the Prozac and took a nap. A few hours later I woke up with my heart racing and nothing would calm it down. I tried relaxing, jogging, anything I could do to calm myself down figuring this was my anxiety. It didn’t let up. I started with a half pill of propranolol to see if that would help and it didn’t. I didn’t try taking more of it for whatever reason but also noticed that the Prozac was also making things worse. I couldn’t concentrate on anything or watch tv and it made me wake up in a panic and just made my anxiety worse in general. It felt like I was paranoid and couldn’t focus on anything and I didn’t even want to drive by myself or get down at a store. I couldn’t even concentrate on watching other people in the parking lot at the store have fun talking and communicating and it just felt like one big sensory overload. I would get startled easy and sometimes felt like my movements were fast. In short, I felt like I was going crazy and losing my mind. I couldn’t even watch television as it felt my thoughts were going a hundred miles per hour and ended up going outside and praying for god to take that awful feeling away. It felt like my whole body at that point had a current and vibration type feeling going through it and no matter how relaxed I tried to be it wouldn’t let up. I called the doctor after 6 days of this nightmare and explained my symptoms and they said to stop the medication. He stated I should probably not ever be on that type of medicine again and instead tried me on 5mg Zyprexa for anxiety and started me on 25mg Lamictal with a target dose of 200mg assuming I was more in the ballpark of bipolar disorder and figured that may help to stabilize my mood and I guess calm down the OCD. The change after starting these medications was amazing. I immediately felt a lot better wether that was because of the new medication or just because I stopped taking the Prozac. The Zyprexa left me feeling like I was kind of drunk and off balance all the time but I chose not to worry about it too much for a while and resumed life as normal. I still had basic health worries but was functioning and doing things and didn’t feel any feelings of anxiety or like I was losing my mind anymore. Within a month and a half I started to be concerned wether the off balance and drunk feeling I was experiencing was still a problem I had or just the medication. Now that I was on a medication that caused those side effects, I couldn’t be so sure. But it didn’t impact me too badly and I just chose not to worry about it that much. But, because of everything I had gone through I still did not like being alone, driving by myself, doing much physical work for fear of getting really dizzy or something bad happening, as having gotten dizzy in the past by doing physical labor as I mentioned earlier made me think I still had some serious ailment like a heart problem or a brain tumor. So I started not to do much of anything because of these worries and didn’t even like locking the door when I’d go to the restroom in case something might happen to me, because I was always feeling dizzy and weird. Next thing you know I start experiencing a lot of muscle fasciculations in addition to the dizzy feeling and sometimes when bending over and then coming back up I’d feel light headed and it felt like things around me would slow down as if in sudden slow motion. These things continued to scare the hell out of me and even though Zyprexa can cause movement disorders and low blood pressure and dizziness I attributed these side effects and symptoms to being signs of a brain tumor. I also became very concerned that all the muscle twitching would lead to seizures and started becoming afraid and anxious that at any time I may have a seizure. By this point I just started crying because I was scared to death all the time and just wanted to be okay and wanted all this to stop. It was really starting to affect me very badly. I then woke up one morning with minor petechiae on my hands then started freaking out that all this may even be a blood disorder like leukemia. By this point I stressed so much that day that I started feeling very very anxious feelings in my chest that would not let up no matter what I did, even when I wasn’t anxious. I never had intense feelings like this in my life and was damn certain it must be the medication as I was now feeling this very uncomfortable panicky feeling even when I was calm and was relaxed. I started thinking that perhaps this constant panicky feeling in my chest could be due to some hormone imbalance or some type of adrenal gland dysfunction because even when I wasn’t worried and felt calm the intense feelings would not let up. I felt like my chest was bombarded with panicky feelings for no damn reason. And no matter how calm I was that feeling remained. This made doing absolutely anything very uncomfortable for me and I felt far too uncomfortable and anxious and panicky and nervous to be comfortable doing ANYTHING. I couldn’t concentrate on much because all I could think about was how uncomfortable I was feeling. I ended up going to the hospital because of the pre syncope experience when bending down and because of the slow motion sensation I experienced. I also complained about my constant panicky feelings that seemed to be there for no reason. They ran blood work, did a chest scan, and performed a CT scan of my head and everything checked out okay. I then decided to start to taper off the Zyprexa knowing now that it was probably medication side effects that led to my problems and after a few days the panicky feeling let up and so did the drunk light headed feelings and periods of slow motion/ fainting sensations. But after about a week in to my taper, I started feeling a dizziness that was worse and that I attributed to withdrawal. I felt very unsteady and light headed and sometimes felt the need to prop against something when standing. This went on for quite some time then it let up. But then I started experiencing insomnia. The Zyprexa was making me sleep 10 hours a day but when I started coming off of it, I would go to sleep and wake up 4 hours later. And if I tried to go back to sleep my mind would race in my sleep and it felt like I was constantly waking up trying to go back to sleep. As if I was asleep but my mind was wide awake. I couldn’t even get a good nights sleep anymore. And not only that, not only was I waking up after 4 or 5 hours of sleep, when I’d wake up I’d feel these really intense uncomfortable sensations in my chest and felt like it must be some horrible kind of withdrawal symptoms. I was extremely uncomfortable in my own skin and it felt like I had this horrible vibration/tickling feeling in my chest mixed with a very anxious nervous feeling and felt extremely uncomfortable doing absolutely anything at that point. This would usually let up a little while after being awake but then that horrible feeling started lasting throughout the whole day and I dreaded waking up and feeling like that and having to suffer through every day. The only thing I could think about was just going back to sleep. It’s the worse experience I’ve ever felt in my life and I also constantly felt panicky and shaky and had tremors. It was a total nightmare. I ended up going into a phase of depression for about a week and it was so bad I had to force a smile on my face. I couldn’t imagine living every day with these types of feelings and the thought but neither did I or do I want to commit any type of suicide or harm myself. I even started being forgetful when I’d talk about some of my problems with people and would get lost in my train of thought. This happed two or three times. It made me start to question my own sanity and I started to think that I was losing my mind. I started to feel like no one could help me. I even felt like I was having strange thoughts. This could very well be all side effects of the Zyprexa withdrawal but that is what I experienced, and going through that pushed me into an obsession of questioning my own sanity and thinking I had a mental disorder. Everything else I seemed to be worried about was thrown out the window with my visit to the emergency room prior. All I was left with were the constant anxious feelings, the constant internal restlessness that made me not want to do anything or feel comfortable doing anything, depression, and now questioning my own sanity. I pushed my self to do some physical labor at home one weekend removing some old cabinets from our kitchen while still dealing with these very uncomfortable feelings and had to force myself to proceed with the task. As uncomfortable as I was feeling, I found it hard to focus on or do anything whatsoever. But I pushed through it and from that day on I started making it a point to start being more active and getting out of the habit of being afraid to do things from fear of a medical disorder and from just the fear of doing anything while feeling so damn uncomfortable inside. Because of that day that I pushed myself to do take out those cabinets, I noticed that the feelings kind of subsided and my thoughts and mind were distracted and focused on a task. In some way, I felt that this helped me somehow so I continued to start trying to do a little more every single day and try to get back to living a little more normal. I also found that having company and visiting and having a few beers would help too. It distracted me from all my troubles and things that I was feeling. I started to think that maybe all of these troubles were all just anxiety and more anxiety about the feelings anxiety caused me and then even more anxiety about the withdrawal side effects of my medication. I started making it a point to distract my mind and not give in to the compulsive habit of googling the way I was feeling and to just try to put it all behind me and focus on just getting better. I started forcing myself to refrain from reading anything about my anxious feelings and to just try to place my mind on other things. That damn near led to the hardest few days of my life. I’ve spent the passed few months constantly stuck in my head and on my phone with my worries and became so withdrawn from doing other things and just leading a normal life that I didn’t know what to do with myself. Was still feeling anxious yet I was trying to avoid even focusing on it but I couldn’t slow my mind down and it felt like I had racing thoughts. Everything in me just wanted to Google these damn feelings and symptoms and I got so used to being afraid to do normal activities because of the way I felt that it left me with not much to do. I could not focus on reading the news. I could not focus on watching a movie. Everything in me was telling me that it’s not what I wanted and it’s like my mind wouldn’t allow me to concentrate on anything else.  Of course this lead to even more depression because I felt I couldn’t even do other things anymore no matter how bad I wanted to or how bad I wanted to put this all behind me. Slowly I’ve been gaining the ability to focus on other things again and now I know that nothing is physically wrong with me. But for a while I had been questioning my own thoughts and sanity, even thinking I might have experienced psychosis or had some other extreme mental disorder. And all this has left me with a full blown anxiety disorder. After everything I’ve been through, I feel like it was traumatizing. I even contemplate if I now suffer with mild symptoms of PTSD. I am left with a constant anxious feeling sometimes. And sometimes it’s not there. I’ve worried about myself, questioned my own sanity, questioned my own thoughts, and have questioned my ability to get back to a normal way of living. A way of living that I can do things without having all these thoughts in the back of my mind. Just wake up and do things without second guessing anything just like everyone else. Just being in the moment without any worries. And I feel now that the only thing that’s going to help is time. I feel that it’s just going to take time for the anxious feelings to subside,  and for the normal frame of mind to return. I feel like I’ve been through a trauma, because everything I experienced was very traumatizing. And I’m still trying to get used to doing normal things again. I can do them, but now it’s like my body gets anxious when I go to do anything. And I can only relate that to the incredible uncomfortable feelings I’ve felt throughout all of this that made me not want to do anything. It has become a horrible habit. And now I’m trying with everything I have to break free of it. And I feel that after all these worries and traumatizing experiences, my health anxiety has turned into to a full blown generalized anxiety disorder. Being in the company of other people has helped, but then I get the random thoughts that no matter what I do it’s still with me, because it’s an internal problem. Wether I’m alone or in the company of other people, this crippling anxiety is something I’ll have to overcome myself. Being around others makes me feel better and at ease, but I should be able to feel that way alone. Doing tasks with others makes me feel better and at ease, but again I should be able to enjoy doing those alone. I got so used to living in fear and anxiety that it makes getting back to normal life really difficult, and makes it really difficult to learn being comfortable with myself and with being alone in my own thoughts. I don’t want to feel anxious anymore. I don’t want to fall deep into depression again. I don’t want to feel the feeling of not knowing what to do with myself. I don’t want to question my own sanity. These have all become habits and some even obsessions. All because of worry and fear. Fear of being ill, fear that I was losing my mind, fear of feeling depressed again. Fear of never feeling normal again. And fear of the anxiety that seems to arise every time I try to do normal things again. I’m now left with a horrible anxiety that apparently only time is going to fix as I get used to living normal again and as my mind gets used to thinking normal again. For those of your that feel alone in all your struggles, your not. And knowing that I’m not alone has helped me. And if anything, talking to someone going through the same struggles has helped me not to question myself so much, and even question my own sanity. If you are struggling and need a friend, I’m here because so do I. Perhaps we could chat daily and work on getting through this together.