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I haven't had that much emetophobic anxiety lately. I even went out to dinner recently and ate until I was overly full and didn't feel the slightest bit worried about it. I can't remember the last time that happened. So there's the good news.

But I've been having tons of anxiety about my health in general. I keep noticing little aches and pains and feeling like there is something wrong with me. Plus I feel low-energy. All of this could, of course, be caused by anxiety and anxiety alone. But how can I know for sure? I can't. I can't know anything for sure, and my refusal to accept this is basically the root of all my problems.

My only option really is to start up an anxiety-fighting regimen again to see if that makes me feel any better physically. I think the main area I need to focus on is exercise. But I also bought a CD player for the bedroom so that I can listen to guided meditation CDs in there, away from distractions (naughty cat, TV, noisy air conditioner).

And I'm trying to work up the courage to make a doctor's appointment. This was one of my New Year's resolutions, to get a check-up this summer, and now it's summer, but I've yet to make the appointment. It'd be nice to be officially told there is nothing wrong with me, and then I'll have that as ammunition against all these irrational thoughts.

signs of emetophobia as a child

I haven't ever known someone else with emetophobia in my "real life" (offline). I did have a strange indirect encounter with it several years ago when I happened to hear one of my bosses talking on the phone about her seven year old niece being hospitalized for refusing to eat while sick, because she was terrified of vomiting.

I don't really like telling people about my phobia in detail, and it especially seemed weird to tell my boss, but after hearing that, I couldn't resist emailing her and attaching some websites with more information. She thanked me for the information and said she would pass it on to the girl's mother. We never talked about it after that (which was a relief to me), so I don't know what happened with the girl, but I hope that if she did have the phobia, she got help for it early on. I know from experience that it only gets worse and more ingrained as you get older - you keep developing more and more avoidance behaviors.

I can think of so many obvious red flags from when I was younger that I'm sometimes shocked my family missed them:

• The biggest one, of course, being that whenever someone around me vomited, I would become upset or panicked. When I was very young, this usually bordered on hysteria. I can remember one time in a restaurant where I catapulted over a chair and ran out of the building to escape (and refused to go back in). As I got older, I tried to hide the response more, but I still would usually walk away quickly, avoid looking at the person, and then get extremely upset if I had to be in a confined space with them. I would try not to breathe or would bury my face in something thinking that might protect me from the germs. I would cry or sulk. Sometimes I would get really angry and be hostile to everyone around me.
• There was a time period (not sure how long it lasted) where I decided it was not safe to touch my food at all and would lift my plate or bowl to my mouth and eat like an animal.
• If anyone in the house was sick, I stayed in my room as much as possible. I tried to eat very little. I would sneak "safe food" into my room like individually wrapped packs of crackers. I was afraid to use the bathroom where someone had vomited, which usually meant I would start using my parents' bathroom, because the sick person was almost always one of my sisters.
• I can remember at least a couple freak-outs over me getting a little food stuck in my throat. It wasn't even enough to make me cough, but I still feared it meant I was choking, and that could lead to vomiting. One day my mom explained to me that I wouldn't be able to breathe or talk if I was choking, so then those panics stopped.
• I became extremely opposed to taking vacations with my family, because someone would usually get sick on them. When I vomited last, I was on one of these vacations. I also once had to spend eight hours in a car with my family after one of my sisters had almost vomited that morning.
• I would miss school because of my stomach hurting. From second to fourth grade, this happened rarely, about twice a year. In fifth grade, I had a period of about two weeks where I went home or stayed home every day. Each time I tried to go back, my stomach would hurt again as soon as I got into class, and I would have to leave. Since I was perfectly healthy, people were all over me asking what was "really" wrong, but I didn't know what to tell them, because I had no knowledge of anxiety at that point. In the years after that, I still sometimes went home "sick" because of panicking about something I imagined I felt, but never that many days in a row. I would say it was probably about seven days a year, spread out.

Those are all the signs I see looking back, and I imagine they'd be similar for any child developing this phobia. Not that I'm in a position to give parenting advice, but I would hope that any parent who saw their child exhibiting such irrational and anxious behavior would sit down with them and try to talk to them about it. And then if it does turn out that they fear vomiting, get them some counseling. I'm sure it's much easier to get something like this under control at a young age, maybe even cure it completely.     

dentist anxiety

I had to go to the dentist today to get some filling work done. They gave me a tiny partial filling in one tooth, and they also removed a filling I got when I was a child (one of those old mercury ones) and replaced it with the upgraded version.

I'm surprised at how anxious I was. This procedure was nothing compared to the wisdom teeth extraction, but for some reason I had lower anxiety during that one. Maybe just because I had lower anxiety in general back then.

I wish I was more comfortable talking to people (like dentists, doctors) about my phobia. I always think to myself that maybe I should give some brief explanation before they do whatever they're going to do, but I usually chicken out. They see I'm anxious, but they assume it's because of the pain, so that's what they reassure me about. I don't worry about the pain that much. I worry about all the objects and substances being shoved in my mouth, especially the substances. I worry about my mouth being numb. I also don't like being horizontal while they're doing all this, and I really hate it when they adjust the chair to the point where my head is lower than the rest of my body. It's awful to feel like you're upside down when you're anxious.

There were all these nasty tastes in my mouth after a while, and I could feel myself getting very scared. I was starting to feel "sick" and could feel my heart pounding in my stomach. Sometimes (here being a good example) I'm almost grateful for my social anxiety, because I fear that without it I would be much more likely to escape situations, to sit up right in the middle of my filling and say "okay, I'm done here." But I don't want to embarrass myself, so I search around desperately for things to tell myself to make myself stay, like:

• They do this procedure all the time. They can't possibly expect that whatever they are putting in my mouth would cause nausea/vomiting. If they did, they would have something ready in case of that happening. They would have warned me.
• My heart is pounding. This is clearly anxiety. Don't forget to keep breathing, slowly and calmly.
• Even if I did vomit, it's not as though this is a normal public place, like a mall. It's like a doctor's office. I wouldn't have to feel as humiliated about it here.

If I can visualize my mouth as disconnected from the rest of my body, it's easier. All the numbness and drilling and other stuff is going on there, not anywhere else. I can use my nose for breathing. I don't have to swallow. I just pretend it's not a part of me, or at least not a part that I need for the moment.

The procedure only took about fifteen minutes. When I sat up at the end, I discovered I was really shaky, so walking out to the car felt weird. Also, once I started driving, I started feeling even more "sick" and had to pull into a parking lot and sit for ten minutes to calm down. I had a bottle of water and probably would have felt better if I had rinsed out my mouth, but there's the downside of the social anxiety. I couldn't talk myself into doing that where other people could possibly see me. So I just took sips of the water instead, which helped a lot. Every time I swallowed a little water, the sick feeling went away temporarily, so I started driving again and kept taking sips all the way home. By the time I got there, I was feeling better.

I know I should be proud of myself for getting through it. I won't have to worry about it anymore, and it's nice to know I no longer have mercury in my mouth. But man. Right now I just feel wiped out. Anxiety is exhausting.