Health conditions that you may or may not be imagining

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Anyone have any persistent health problems that you can’t quite convince yourself are real? A fanciful fever, a sham sore throat, an imagined itch?

I seem to have a tic that moves throughout my body. First it was in my feet, then my hands, stomach and shoulders, and finally now it seems to have settled in my eyes. I clench and unclench the muscles around my eyes persistently, but not quite involuntarily. This is tremendously irritating, but I have no reason to think it’s not under my own control…

ARGH! :mad:

2

I’ve been thinking of opening a thread on this very topic. I suffer from a multitude of these symptoms and would like to get a handle on them.

The first one I found out about was the stiff neck I used to get as a teenager and young adult. Often it would suddenly hurt to turn my head even a little bit. I assumed I had injured myself with improper lifting, and was just very careful to keep from straining my neck muscles until the pain went away. One time it lasted four days. I never kept track of how often it returned. Then one day when browsing in the Merck Manual, I learned that this symptom often has psychological causes. (Actually, it was quite an old edition, and I think it may even have said the cause was hysterical.) Once I learned that, I stopped getting a stiff neck, but…

Then I one day I got this nasty pain in my back. Right about in that spot you can’t reach when it itches. It recurred from time to time, and one of those times it just got worse and worse to the point I could barely move, up until the day of a particulary dreaded social event I had agreed to go to. Then it disappeared and I was good as new. Very suspicious, I thought. Once I figured it out, it stopped coming back, but then…

I got this pain in my foot that came and went. Somethimes it really hurt to walk. I thought it was the new shoes, and I put them away. The pain still came and went. One day it was particularly severe, and I was trying to exercise around it, when I noticed that my attitude was poor. Not a winning frame of mind, I felt. I made a conscious effort to boost my self-confidence. Damned if the foot pain didn’t disappear at once!

The pain still migrates around my body, sometimes in familiar places, sometimes not, but I’m a little quicker to recognize it now wherever it ends up. Often I can make it go away by paying attention to my mental state, but not always.

And if that were the only thing, I’d be happy as a clam. But no–there’s more. I used to wake up with this screaming ear pain. Horribly tender in and around the ear canal and just behind the ear, too–I could barely manage to wash my face. It would gradually go away after I had been up for about an hour. I was going to go in and have it looked at, except I figured it wouldn’t do a lot of good to go in when it wasn’t active, and I never managed to coordinate an appointment. So then one painful morning I got to wondering, could this be a mental thing? It went away right then, and hasn’t been a problem since.

I used to get a sore throat way too often. Got to wondering about the mental component. Rarely a problem now.

So anyway, I’ve developed this great interest in somatoform symptoms. Are there guidelines for recognizing them? How about mental exercises for building resistance?

Sorry, that would be GQ. How about some more stories, then?

3

I have allergies. If you look up allergy symptoms with google you will find that they are the same symptoms of about 1000 other things that can be wrong with you. So every time I get some weird-ass symptom I think it is something other than my allergies.

4

Another I forgot about.

Twice in my memory I’ve had terrible headaches at times I wasn’t in school. One time I can’t recall too clearly, but the other time was over Christmas break one year. Toward the end of the break I began to get awful, throbbing headaches every day around the same time (sort of noonish-early afternoon). Medication did very little to help, and it got to the point where I’d have to lie down and wait it out…doing anything active was unbearable.

But then, when I returned to school, the headaches vanished. I mean, literally, they went away completely as soon as my vacation was over. You hear about stress headaches all the time - but what about these?

5

I’m not sure this qualifies as a health condition, but I have this weird thing with my toes where they get crossed and it really hurts. It happens with my pinky toe and the adjacent toe. One somehow gets pushed under the other, and it gets stuck, and it really really hurts. I can’t manually pull it out, so I have to get up and walk around to snap it back into place. Of course, this only happens when I’m barefoot, fortunately. I don’t know if this is a common thing or if my toes were just badly designed. It seems to favor my right foot, though I’m not sure if it’s never happened on my left foot.