- Date posted
- 1y
I’ve lost my life to Health OCD
18 months ago after a covid infection, I became unwell… weakness, high heart rate, dizziness and felt awful. What followed seemed to be a sequence of awful events that led me down a really obsessive path of health ocd. Quick summary: post covid illness with heart palpitations and lots of hospital trips, pregnancy related heart palpitations, my stepdad getting pneumonia and being hospitalised, my grandma having a stroke, me having to have a brain MRI due to swelling found on an eye exam, an anomalous pregnancy scan with suspected genetic abnormalities with my baby, a blood clot in my lung, a lump in my neck which was looked at by ultrasound, continued heart palpitations after my daughter arrived, unexplained shortness of breath for approx 7 months and still going now, stomach pain that’s been examined by ultrasound, my dad having a heart attack and cardiac arrest and now I’ve got a breast lump and a hard bone lump on my chin which I’m convinced is breast cancer that’s metastasised to my bones as well as experiencing some unpleasant GI symptoms. It feels a lot for 18 months and I genuinely feel cursed, I feel like I’m just waiting for the next awful thing and it feels like it’s a genuine curse on my life and I’m absolutely terrified. I have since become completely and utterly obsessed and preoccupied with my health and illness. I cannot help but feel genuinely as though I’m actually going to die soon and that I must have a serious illness. Sometimes I can see that everything has turned out “okay” and the big scary bits from this last 18 months are over and that I’ve turned out to be okay too. During these moments of “clarity” I guess, I can look back at all the illnesses I’ve been convinced I’ve had and realise that I was only right about 1 (out of about 1000), to name a few I’ve believed I had: Heart failure, a ventricular arrhythmia, leukaemia, colon cancer, non Hodgkin’s lymphoma, bowel cancer, MS, a heart attack, peripartum cardiomyopathy, a brain tumour, a neurological condition, breast cancer, bone cancer, arthritis, atrial fibrillation, a stroke and pulmonary embolism. To name a few. It’s so hard to ground myself in reality when I have actual physical symptoms that make me feel scared. This breast lump is actually being investigated and now I’m utterly utterly convinced that this hard lump on my chin is a sign that the breast lump is breast cancer and it’s spread to my bones. I am losing my grip on reality and feel so distressed. Doctors just think I’m nuts and CBT doesn’t help me. I just feel like I’m not going to be here for my baby daughter and it’s ruining my life.