health concern stories

hi i’m feeling a little discouraged and was just wondering if anyone wanted to share their experiences with pocd like how real it is for them and maybe some recovery stories like what that looks like and what helped you get there and how they are now i just had my therapy appointment and am kinda down bc i have to stick with uncertainty and that really bothers me… but anyone wanna share?

You can laugh at the title if you want, it’s objectively pretty funny. Hi guys, this is my first time on this app and I mostly just wanted to see if anyone out there is in the same boat as me or works in health care and is dealing with this. I haven’t told anyone what’s going on. I’m in my 4th year of medical school and In the past year I’ve developed what I think is pretty bad health OCD. Now health anxiety is a really common thing for medical students to have, I know that. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that the constant lymph node checking, self diagnosing & examining and reassurance seeking could have definitely had crossed the line into compulsions. Both my parents are cancer survivors which is what originally made me want to become a doctor but now every single physical sensation I have sends me into hours or days of rumination that I or someone I love has stage 4 terminal cancer. I spent an entire vacation with my boyfriend having a silent panic attack and convincing myself that he was dying of pancreatic cancer when he just had food poisoning and was fine days later. I had a complete mental breakdown and told myself I had lymphoma for weeks when I realized I could feel some of my own perfectly normal lymph nodes in my neck. My logical brain knows this is completely ridiculous but the emotional brain will not shut the hell up. It seems cruel that I made it this far only to feel like my own damn brain is betraying my ability to think through health situations clearly. I’m determined to get my symptoms under control before I graduate in a year as I don’t want this to affect patient care. Just wanted to get this off my chest and see if anyone else out there in health care is struggling too.

I have had OCD my whole life and was diagnosed by a therapist 2 years ago. Specifically I struggle a lot with health, contamination and pure ocd. I was doing exposures and really felt like I conquered by contamination ocd. With the health ocd I have an intense fear I will have a food or medicine allergy and go into anaphylactic shock. This takes up a lot of my energy day to day. Within the past year, we bought a home, renovated and recently got married. My husband wants to start trying for a baby soon but I am not ready at all because of how much I feel like I have gone backwards with my anxiety and ocd. This spiked a lot with the stress of wedding planning. I’m scared pregnancy will spike my health/contamination ocd even more and I won’t be able to handle it. I always wanted babies but now that it’s getting closer and I know how much ocd I truly have I am so nervous I will cause myself and baby more stress than good. Does anyone have positive stories of TTC/pregnancy/PP and motherhood with ocd?