i’m having a really bad night. my most common obsession is reoccurring and it is fear that i am pregnant even though i am a virgin. i will overanalyze even the smallest symptoms and used to go as far as searching the internet of symptoms for hours, calling the same hotline over and over to say my specific situation to which at one point they requested i not call because it was for people with a real risk, and i have also bought multiple pregnancy tests in the past. others think i’m crazy and now i’ve been diagnosed with OCD i understand why i get like this but cannot seem to see if my zoloft is working. with my other obsessions (i have a mix of pretty much every sub category of OCD) i don’t even know where they trigger from. my heart is racing and i feel like im terrified but have to hide it around others.

My ocd has been at an extreme all time high the past 2 weeks and I am in dire need of some relief. I’m not sleeping right anymore. for context: I live in the south and found a springtail on my sheets about 2 weeks ago. This was like 2 days before our bug guy came and sprayed (it’s a normal maintenance thing here) so it’s a common bug down here and I’ve found them all over different areas of the house before. Finding it in my bed sent me on a bit of a spiral bc I started to doubt if it even was a springtail and that i was wrong and that it was a bed bug, not trusting my brain. It was a bad, sleepless night and carried over continuing feelings. Typical ocd stuff. Well two days later, I’m a nurse and I had a patient that actually had bed bugs. This wasn’t the first day they were here and I did not see any myself but it still freaked me out. There had one 2 founds after visitors came the day before. Of course I wore PPE in the room (coveralls shoe covers and hair net) going in and took everything off before exiting the room. When I came home I stripped in my garage and bagged everything down to my shoes. Threw everything in the wash and did multiple cycles. There were no other steps I could take but I still had a terrible night. Hours of ruminating and going back and forth about tracing my tracks, thinking of new ways I could’ve taken one home with me. Just checking everything. I was already on a spiral from the springtail. Having two such back to back triggering events for me so closely related has made me deteriorate significantly. I was already doing bad with my normal OCD and starting therapy here. I obsess over the thought of having bedbugs constantly and haven’t been able to sleep. I am constantly checking my bed while in it and can’t settle down. My bed is heavy too and I keep hurting myself lifting my mattress to check. But I need to check. I’ve become obsessed. I check everything and go down Reddit rabbit holes looking for new things. And of course, I talk myself into it every time. I can’t take it anymore, it’s bleeding off into other parts of my life like friendship and marriage because I am so high anxiety right now. I need relief so bad. I’ve never felt this unstable to be honest. I feel like even someone without ocd would be really struggling with this topic, nevermind me, with ocd to a point where I just started treatment. These aren’t even my normal intrusive thoughts and compulsive acts. It’s just taken on a life in the last week and I can’t find any sign that it’s going to slow down. when I think rationally I know I did everything right to prevent but I can’t shake it. 💔

I'm roughly 2 months pregnant and I'm struggling so bad with OCD (specifically surrounding psychosis/postpartum psychosis, postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, etc). I'm so discouraged because I was sub-clinical for over a year and this pregnancy and the hormones are undoing all of my progress. And it actually seems so much harder than BEFORE when I was at a low point. It feels like the hormones are ruining my brain and making me lose my mind. I keep looking over my shoulder, getting intrusive images of scary hallucinations that I might start to get, i fear hurting myself or my baby, etc. Psychosis in pregnancy is 1 in 1000. That's not that rare. I feel like I just upped my chances of my biggest fear happening and I have so much regret and fear around that. I'm also a Christian and I'm relying on God so much more now than ever, but I'm afraid of that too because people in psychosis often have religious delusions and I can't tell if I'm slipping into that or if God is really just using this trial to pull me closer to him. I just feel so defeated. I feel like ERP just isn't going to work for me because the hormones are a whole different animal that "normal" people with OCD don't have. Like they're making me immune to ERP or that ERP isn't for people like me and I'm hopeless.

So my ocd has been doing better, in the sense that I am able to resist compulsions, but the thoughts are still there. And I get so upset because some days I’m just constantly stuck in my own head. Like I went out to today with my mom, and for a solid hour I was spiraling. And my OCD has been trying to make it seem like this flare up is different, and that because things aren’t working out the way I want them to be regarding my recovery, that it’s not OCD and I’m just a crazy person. It causes me to just shut down and want to just go home. I get so upset that I want to cry. I get intrusive thoughts that something bad is gonna happen, or that something doesn’t feel right, and so it feels like I do something, anything, to make me feel better about it. I also can’t sleep in my own bed. I’m so afraid that I won’t fall asleep in it, and if I don’t sleep, I will go crazy. My thoughts are just so scary rn, I don’t know what to do. I don’t want anything bad to happen to me :(