I’m starting to feel more than slightly self-conscious about my doctor visits over the past 8-10 years.
I’ve sought medical attention for six things: cat claw in eye, smashed finger, painful hip joint, sinuses, fatigue, and (last week and this) chest pain.
The eye thing? Yeah, they found a huge gouge. The hip joint? I had increased inflammation in my bloodstream.
Everything else, every single test has come back negative. Everything! Well, my pulse rate with the chest pain was stratospheric, but everything else was normal. Everything!
Am I a hypochondriac? Surely it’s not normal to keep going to the doctor, for different ailments, and keep having them say they can’t find anything wrong.
Of course, is thinking that I’m a hypochondriac a symptom of hypochondria? Help!
The way I see it, for every person like you or me, there are 10 that ignore even blatant physical symptoms to the point where they finally go in to the doctor when they’re about to drop dead - if they make it in at all. As long as you’re not irrationally insisting that there’s something wrong with you when there isn’t, it’s best to err on the side of safety!
I was having mysterious chest pain a couple of months ago and, like you, had a normal EKG and a high heart rate. My doctor suggested a couple of things to try, but said to start with Prilosec. Apparently acid reflux can mimic angina in some cases. I’d never had reflux before, but had gained some weight and been through some stressful stuff.
Worked for me. But of course you should check with your doctor first.
I went to my doctor twice over some pain in the arch of my foot, had a MRI and everything. Basically boiled down to tendonitis, and the pain has gone away over the past year. It flares up if I overdo it or wear weird shoes. I felt stupid for having a very expensive test to diagnose tendonitis, but hey. I’ve also gone in for a non-specific fatigue type thing and felt very stupid and hypochondriacal, but it turned out I’m very probably sensitive to the flu shot.
I would in no way characterize going to the doctor six times over a decade as anything approaching hypochondria. Heck, just going for a yearly physical would have resulted in more office visits than that. One should NEVER ignore chest pain. My grandfather ignored “minor” chest pain for years until he had a really big heart attack, and they found out he had significant damage from all the past incidents.
We-ell, you know. It wasn’t broken. It still hurt a couple of weeks later (actually was numb) and I finally went and had x-rays and they didn’t find anything.
I’m just starting to doubt my ability to tell when I’m actually ill.
It sounds perfectly reasonable to me. I mean, you weren’t imagining anything, were you? Why not ask your doctor next time you go (if you do), especially if that turns out to be something you’re worried about not needing, if he thinks you should have checked it out.
Or you could try phoning him or something, saying “hey, my finger feels broken, should I get it checked or not?”
