accomplishments

I finally did it. I made a doctor's appointment for a check-up. It's at the end of August, and I'm already really worried about it. I can't even put my finger on why exactly, but I guess it's a fear that I'll find out I have some horrible health problem. Or that I have one, but it won't be identified, because I will forget to bring something up or describe something incorrectly. I feel like I should make some long list of all my concerns to take with me, so I don't forget anything. But that would probably be annoying, huh?

I also have been trying to take better care of myself physically - exercising and eating healthy. I wouldn't say I'm doing either enough, but I'm keeping it in mind as a constant goal, and I have been doing better than usual. Last Friday I took the day off work and dedicated the day to relaxation. I didn't speak all day (just thought it'd be nice to have an atmosphere of absolute quiet). I tried to eat all my meals mindfully. I took a long walk around town (it was a gorgeous sunny day) and then did about 45 minutes of yoga. I worked on some writing projects and then later that evening, I listened to my meditation CD. It was the perfect vacation day.

Then over the weekend, I went to see the new Pixar movie Brave. There were of course children in the theater, and as a general rule, I try to stay away from them. They scare me quite a bit, because I see them as being constantly sick. Seriously, it seems like my (almost 2 year old) nephew is sick with something different every single week, sometimes things I have never heard of. But I was able to handle the movie without feeling much extra anxiety. I tensed up slightly every time one of the children walked by me and kind of leaned away from them. That was about it. The movie was incredible, by the way. It was the best kids' movie I've seen in a long time.

After the movie, I went out to eat at a restaurant I've only been to once before. I was really hungry and ate a lot, including dessert. I only had a little anxiety, and it was in the car after leaving, when I realized how full I felt. But it (the anxiety) passed quickly.

I'm so happy with all of this. I feel like I'm doing really well, other than freaking out about the doctor's appointment. It's not for a while, which could either mean I have plenty of time to calm down about it or that I have plenty of time to get more and more anxious. Of course, that's up to me and what I choose to think, so... time for affirmations! 

blah

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.

defeating the health anxiety (again)

Last week I noticed a dull pain/ache in my stomach/abdomen area. My first response to something like that is always to try to ignore it. But it persisted for a couple days, and then I started getting really worried about it. I broke all my rules. I did an online search for my symptoms (not at first - I think I held out for at least two or three days, which admittedly is kind of pitiful). I found websites that made me think it was cancer. One of the websites even had a note advising that it was much more likely it was another smaller problem and that only 5% of cases would be cancer, but of course I kept thinking "I could be part of that 5%!"

I then spent a few more days thinking about all this information and my possible impending death, which made me into a semi-mess crying frequently over minor things. I kept mentioning the pain to my wife, and she kept making efforts to downplay it (since I was making no effort to do so myself), but I kept arguing with her about it.

I've read many articles about people who developed some serious health problem. I don't know why. I don't seek them out, but they seem to be everywhere, trying to scare people into taking better care of themselves or going to the doctor more often. I think the only effect they actually have is making anxious people more anxious. It's like those commercials for aspirin where there is a guy saying something like "I'm in great physical shape and run marathons all the time. Imagine my surprise when I had a heart attack completely out of the blue." You could be next! Buy aspirin!

Anyway, in a lot of these articles they will have a quote from the sick person talking about how they were fortunate enough to catch the problem early because they just "felt like something was wrong" and went to the doctor. No specific symptoms. They make it sound like it is just a vague sensation of something feeling different in your body. I think I even saw one article that said the sick person had dreamed about something being wrong with part of their body, which influenced them to go to the doctor, where they discovered it was true!

Do things like this actually happen, or is it just people being dramatic or trying to look like they have a special sense for detecting illness? I don't know. But, me being who I am, I got the idea in my head that it was of the utmost importance that I notice any changes in my body and take them seriously. SUPER seriously.

Well, that was a mistake. Maybe it is good advice, if you don't have anxiety. But it doesn't work for someone like me, because I am almost constantly noticing things about my body that seem "off" in some way or that I can't recall ever feeling before.

So basically, whether the advice is good or not, I need to let it go. I'm not going to be one of those "special-sense" people (if they even exist) - it's definitely not in the cards for me. All I'm going to end up doing is freaking myself out over and over and over again.

I finally managed to get past the autopilot anxiety and convince myself that worrying about the pain was in no way helpful. Worrying wasn't going to make me go to the doctor. If the pain was still there after a few weeks, I would, but not before then. I would only be making myself miserable until that point.

("I'm learning to let go of worrying. I can replace worrying with constructive action.")

So I forced myself to stop dwelling on it and distracted myself as much as possible. And a day or so after that, no more pain. Which means that not only was it not the 5% cancer, it wasn't even the 95% more benign problem. 100% nothing. Probably indigestion of some sort, made worse by my constant stress and attention to it.

It still shocks me that with all I know, I can go so wrong. Catastrophizing is a bitch.

tricks

I have been doing so well lately. I've been going out to restaurants and eating with little anxiety. I've been going other places without experiencing much anxiety. I've been eating at home even when I don't feel well, forcing myself to stick to a normal eating schedule.

I even decided to terminate therapy, because I feel like I have gotten to the point where I can handle situations on my own. Since then, I've had a few "oh god what have I done" moments of panic, but I just remind myself that I can go back if I ever need to, which brings me back to the realization that I'm doing okay without it. In fact, I think I could have stopped going a while ago, but I guess I had this fear that if I didn't show up on a regular basis and announce that I hadn't had a breakdown that month, I would jinx myself, and it would happen again. Like a fear that I was being too confident and would possibly miss signs that a professional wouldn't.

So far, so good.

I should be pushing myself more than I am, but I'm still happy with the way things are at the moment. I'm trying not to stress about any of it. In a rural area, there aren't exactly tons of ways to push yourself out of the house. I'm planning on going to a movie and lunch this weekend.

Life may not be super exciting, but I did start having an exciting new thought. I'm going to put it in the category of "positive mind tricks." By the time I hit middle school, I had come up with a bunch of thoughts I used to argue myself out of anxiety in public. They were really helpful, but I started thinking in the past couple years that maybe they weren't healthy. I don't care as much right now, because right now I'm more in the mentality of "living my life" than "step-by-step recovering." So I'm still using them. The main ones I have relied on are:

-- If I was home right now, would I still be feeling this way? When I was younger, I pretty much only felt "sick" if I was out in public, so most of the time, this question was all I needed.

-- If I was home right now, would feeling this way be bothering me as much? Kind of the same thing. It helped clue me in to what I was feeling specifically. If it was hunger, envisioning myself at home with the feeling would help me realize it was hunger.

-- Does the thought of leaving right now, immediately, make me feel any better? Why yes, it does. Look at that. Anxiety. Sometimes I would even test this by going outside or to the bathroom for a few minutes, and I would instantly feel much better, giving me the courage to go back.

-- Is anything else making me feel better? Sometimes I would notice that I was feeling "sick" and then something really funny or really scary would happen, shocking me out of it temporarily. Once the shock subsided, the "sick" feeling would come back, but the proof of being able to briefly feel better was still there.

-- How fast did this feeling come on? Usually leading me to the realization that ten, fifteen minutes ago, there hadn't been the slightest sign of anything being wrong. Actual sickness comes on more gradually.

There are probably more I'm not thinking of, but you get the idea.

I don't know where this new one came from. It just popped into my head maybe a couple months ago when I was sitting at home feeling "sick" and starting to get really anxious about it:

You would be damn lucky to only feel this bad right before vomiting.

I love it. I love how it's not a question. I love how it works at home. I love how it has gratitude built into it, something I'm trying to express more of. Though I've only thought about it during moments of anxiety and feeling mildly unwell, I have this idealistic hope that it would be comforting even if I was sick, even if I was about to throw up. Because nausea, even at its peak, is never going to be unbearable pain. At least that's what I gather from non-emetophobics. Unbearable pain by definition is a level of pain that would make you lose consciousness, but people don't lose consciousness because of nausea, even severe nausea.

Again, I know it's idealistic, and my new trick probably wouldn't hold up in the face of actual nausea and illness, but it is helping me quash a lot of budding anxiety attacks.

work tour / low blood sugar

I finally took that company tour for work. It went really well! I was pretty anxious before I left, but it wasn't affecting my stomach, even after I had breakfast. It was more just a shakiness. I sat and did some meditation and deep breathing and just tried to relax as much as possible.

When I actually got to the company, my anxiety was basically gone (other than a social insecurity / awkwardness that is always there). That tends to happen when I get around people, because I become so focused on acting normal in my interactions with them that I don't have the brain space to worry about much else. My tour guides walked me around all through the building, showing me everything involved in the manufacturing process. It was fun and interesting, and even though I don't find business or manufacturing to be that exciting, I got into it a little bit. Maybe just because it was nice to be 1) moving around and 2) interacting with people for a change.

The only problem came after the tour was over, and I went back home. I'm used to feeling MUCH better as soon as I get out of a stressful situation, but I started feeling very ill instead. Mostly it was a bad headache, but then I started feeling like it was affecting my stomach too. Of course, I thought at first that I must have picked up some virus on the tour or touched some part of the manufacturing equipment that was toxic, etc. I kept telling myself that couldn't be the case, because it was so unlikely I'd already be showing symptoms. But I felt so ill that this logic was barely keeping me together. I even took Aleve for my headache, which I hardly ever let myself do.

Nothing terrible happened. After a few hours, I finally started feeling better. I don't know exactly why I felt so bad, but my guess is that it was low blood sugar. I forced myself to eat breakfast before going, but I don't think my breakfast was large enough. Especially considering I was walking around for about three hours, when I am used to sitting down in front of a computer all day. I think my blood sugar crashed, and then, even though I ate again right when I got home, it took a while for things to normalize again.

I really need to work more on eating before I leave the house for long periods of time. I have gotten to the point where I almost always do it, but I still tend to gravitate towards smaller meals or even just little snacks. I worry about feeling overly full when I leave, and in trying to avoid that, I usually end up not even reaching the bare minimum of fullness.