family

I still have a cold. I guess all that zinc and vitamin C I ingested did nothing but delay the onset? I felt mildly unwell for a while, but then the last three days have been horrible. Hopefully I'm on my way to recovery now. This is getting really old.

Anyway, I wanted to write about a minor achievement, if achievement is even the right word for it. It feels like it to me. About a month ago, I told my older sister about my phobia.

Technically, this is the second time I've attempted to share this with a family member. When I was 13, I told my mom about it. I gave her the name, explained it as best I could. We had a conversation about it. I don't remember much of the conversation, but I know it lasted for a while, and I remember my mom doing a lot of nodding. My parents are not equipped to deal with mental issues of any kind, so I should have known better. Nothing bad came out of it, but nothing good did either. My mom never mentioned it again. The next day, it was as if the conversation had never happened, and I was not willing to "remind" her. So to be honest, I am not sure if she actually forgot or just didn't want to deal with it. I'm sure she has forgotten by now.

I had a series of failed attempts to communicate with various family members. That wasn't the first or the last. Eventually I gave up and then became uncomfortable at the thought of sharing anything the slightest bit personal with any one of them.

But I decided to mention the phobia to my older sister, and I actually got a legitimate decent response. She was nice about it and said that she knew someone else who had the same phobia, and then she told me one of her own fears.

I know I shouldn't be as surprised as I am. It's like I am always expecting the same family dynamic that existed when I was a child/teenager, but my siblings and I are all adults now. Obviously things would be different and better. Which is awesome. I really like the idea of not having to hide everything about myself.

getting a cold

It's been a rough week. I spent most of it stressing that I might catch a cold, and now, despite all my efforts, I'm pretty sure I have. I've been sucking on those nasty zinc lozenges today, because I'm still clinging to the idea that I can miraculously make it go away or control how long it lasts or something. I know I should just give up, but I hate being sick so much. Having a cold doesn't really make me anxious, because I know it's not going to affect my stomach, but it makes me angry, I guess - that I allowed it to happen, that I let the germs "win." No matter how much I tell myself that's ridiculous and that this is out of my control, I still feel like punching things. I still feel like yelling that it's unfair that it's out of my control.

I haven't been sick at all since September 2009, so honestly, this is probably a good thing. I don't need another irrational "streak" to obsess about.

self-diagnosing

Miranda: I've been trying to diagnose myself on the Internet.
Charlotte: You can do that?
Miranda: Sure. Just type in your symptoms, hit enter, and wait for the word cancer to appear on the screen.
- "Hot Child in the City", Sex and the City 

I seriously love this quote and know from personal experience how true it is. I am always worried about my health (general health as well as stomach-related health) and have spent so much time online looking up any physical symptoms I experience. I've been trying to stop, and I have gotten a lot better. Sometimes I can talk myself out of doing it now. But I think it was just a week or so ago that I was looking up appendicitis and thinking I might have that.

I so strongly advise against ever self-diagnosing online. Especially if you have anxiety problems of any kind. It never helps. Yes, anything you put in will come up as cancer or something equally horrible. Yes, almost every diagnosis will include nausea and vomiting as possible symptoms (just as every single medication will have them listed as possible side effects). Rarely will you put in your symptoms and have "anxiety" come up as a prominent possibility, even though anxiety can cause every possible bodily symptom or combination of symptoms. Seriously. Some websites / books talking about anxiety will tell you it can cause muscle tension, digestive problems, headaches, sweating/shaking. Those are some of the more common anxiety symptoms. But it's nowhere near what's possible. Here is a more comprehensive list. 

You will probably notice that this list also has vomiting on it, so I just want to add that I don't believe emetophobics are wired to have that particular reaction to anxiety. If it is possible to have both emetophobia and a tendency to vomit when anxious, I'm sure you would already know you were one of those people. (Also, you would be my hero for dealing with that.) Most emetophobics feel anxious frequently, often accompanied with nausea, and never get sick from it.

I'm not saying you should ignore all physical symptoms, because sometimes it will actually be something other than anxiety. If you have anxiety, it can be hard to tell when something should be ignored and when it should be checked out. These are my own personal guidelines I use to try to navigate my way through hypochondria:

-- I try really hard to avoid looking up my symptoms online. (Don't do it!)

-- I remind myself that I am an extremely anxious person, especially when it comes to my health / body, and that I have had similar worries many times before. So for me, the odds are definitely in favor of any symptoms being caused and/or magnified by anxiety.

-- I tell myself that when it comes to having a serious medical condition, the symptom won't just exist, it will also be severe. So I may feel a shooting pain in my stomach, but how much is it actually affecting me? Can I walk, can I breathe, etc.? People get random aches and pains all the time. When non-anxious people go to the doctor about them, it's because the aches and pains are impairing their ability to function.

-- If I can still walk/breathe and all that good stuff, I tell myself to wait and see if it goes away. I don't have an exact time frame in mind, but at least one or two days.

-- Usually by the time one or two days has gone by, my symptom is gone. But if it ever wasn't, and I was still really concerned about it, I would talk to someone I trusted about it (my wife, I'm sure) and maybe decide to go to a doctor, who, unlike a search engine, will probably be able to give me an accurate diagnosis instead of an exaggerated worst-case-ever one.

It's impossible to know at all times what's happening inside your body, something that is very frustrating to me, but I'm trying to learn to accept it. I don't want to spend every second of my life being vigilant about it, or get into a habit of going to the doctor over every tiny perceived thing. Better to err on the side of under-reacting and believe that if something was really wrong, I would catch it in time.

a practically non-phobic lunch

I had a fantastic day. I went out to lunch again, and I did not feel "sick" before, during, or after eating. I did have an uncomfortable full feeling at one point, but I didn't get anxious about it, and it went away within five minutes. I also finished my meal when usually I have to take half of it home, because I get "full." (My wife jokes that I have an "at home full" and a "restaurant full" that are wildly different.) And I got dessert and almost managed to finish that too!

I have no idea why this meal went so well, and around the time I was waiting for my dessert, I actually started worrying about my lack of anxiety, thinking about how strange and uncharacteristic it was. But even that didn't lead to anything bad. I just tried to remind myself to be appreciative of it. I know it's weird that I needed to tell myself to enjoy this, but my mind usually starts racing just as much when I have oddly perfect experiences like this. It drives me a little crazy, because I want to know why. I want to know what I did this time that was so right, what led to me having the experience I wish I had every single time. But obviously it's one of those questions I'll never be able to answer. I can only make guesses, and quite possibly it was just luck, just a good-feeling day.

I have pretty bad social anxiety that competes with the emetophobic anxiety, and trying to work around both of them is really annoying. I try to only go to restaurants at off-times when I think there won't be a big crowd, 11am or 2-3pm. But it's really an off-time for me as well, and it leads to me badly planning my earlier meals / snacks so that I show up at the restaurant and am either not hungry or so hungry that I feel "sick." I didn't do that today. I went at a normal time, around 1pm, so I wondered if that had something to do with it.

Also, the decision to go out for lunch was a little spur-of-the-moment. I didn't have days to think about it and figure out exactly what was going to happen. Basically, I'm wondering if all the planning and preparing I'm trying to do to make sure these meals are successful is having the opposite effect. My therapist was saying something similar to me the other day, something along the lines of "if you are putting all this effort into planning events and still feeling sick during them, maybe it would be better to stop planning and just accept whatever happens." It's much easier to go along with that when "whatever happens" is amazing, like it was today. I need to get to the point where I can have a more challenging day and be accepting of that too.

In any case, people without this phobia don't do all this planning, so I'm sure it is something I should try to stop. It's not really getting me anywhere, and it takes so much mental energy.