Some years ago I had a job which I frankly detested. My employment at this company came after my diabetes diagnosis, which is important because said diagnosis came because my vision had suddenly gotten bad and because losing my sight to diabetes was (then) my greatest fear. Anyway, while working at this shitty but lucrative job, I found my vision deteriorating again. This was most noticeable when I stopped at McDonald’s on the way in to work each day to buy a coffee; I found myself unable to read hte menu behind the counter without squinting, whether I had my glasses on or not.
Eventually I lost that job. Hearing that we were being laid off left me not trepidatious but relieved. The day my group was let go I stopped at the usual McDonald’s for another coffee, and I suddenly found my vision back to normal. I was still nervous about my vision, of course, so I went to the optometrist anyway–the same one who had told me years earlier that I needed to see my GP rather than buy new glasses. She gave me a thorough workup but ultimately found nothing wrong; my current prescription was doing fine. Though she still suggested that I check in with the GP, she said the changes in vision I’d been suffering for a few weeks were probably just in my head. The GP agreed.
But that’s just me. Any of you guys ever suffer a significant psychosomatic ailment?
As I child, I would get flu-like symptoms (high fever, nausea, body aches, etc.) under severe stress. The two incidents that stand out for me most clearly are the day I was supposed to play a part in the class play (I had to stay home), and the day I took my AP exams (I ended up taking them while I was sick).
More recently I had an incident when I had to visit my parents for an event during a period of extreme stress at work. I was supposed to be on vacation, but ended up so sick that I spent the day of the event in bed and wasn’t even able to attend. I have done a lot of work to control my anxiety, but it can still manifest as illness on occasion.
I used to get hives when I was excited. That eventually stopped, but later I developed panic attacks with hyperventilation. It never really stopped but became less of a problem once I learned what it was and that it wouldn’t kill me.
Your eye problems WERE “all in your head”, if you think about it.
Long story made short: One of the situations where it’s OK to quit a job without notice is “Your physical and/or mental health is in immediate jeopardy”. And mine was. I had a dizzy spell at work which landed me in the ER, and I lost about 15 pounds in less than a month. When I found myself absolutely dreading going to work to the point where I could barely leave my house, that’s when I knew I had to quit. It was a very difficult decision, because I liked my co-workers, worked for a facility that had very high employee morale (how often do you walk into a HOSPITAL and everybody’s smiling?) and less than a year earlier, I had moved several hundred miles to an area where I literally knew nobody for this job, and was starting to make friends.
My boss was blindsided by this (although maybe not as much as I thought at the time; he was there when I had the panic attack) and left that job himself a couple months later. :eek: I found this out when I Googled him and saw his Linked In page; he was still with the company but was working at a drastically different job, in another city.
Within a day, my health started to return.
I’ve known plenty of other people whose blood pressure, diabetes, fibromyalgia, etc. improved dramatically when they quit that job, left a bad relationship, stopped participating in something they really didn’t want to, etc.
several years ago my husband (then aged 37) had a heart attack. He was in the hospital for a week and quite disabled for months afterwards. At the time we had three young children, about 8, 5 and 1.
Within a day of his heart attack I began experiencing chest pain, arm pain and shortness of breath. I pretty much assumed they were psychosomatic. There wasn’t time for me be sick, go to doctors’ appointments or diagnostic tests. I assumed if I explained to a doctor my current stressors they wouldn’t take me seriously anyway, so whenever one of the symptoms would occur I would just tell myself it was all in my head and do my best to ignore it.
As my husband improved my symptoms disappeared, over the course of months.
I remember when I was a kid there was some kind of school field trip that I wasn’t looking forward to going on. I was bullied pretty good back in the day and really didn’t want to go. I remember getting a very painful back spasms the night before and was laid up in bed for the next few days thereby missing the field trip. Coincidence??
This whole fucking situation turned out to be psychosomatic.
It took two GPs and a ENT specialist to diagnose that. That thread was posted in August, I didn’t get a final all-clear until the end of the following February.
And… reading through that thread, DSeid nailed it. That was my eventual diagnosis. I hadn’t caught that till now. DSeid, my hat is off to you.
This is very common. Honestly, you should have said something, and your doctor would have prescribed you something. You can’t take care of your family if you can’t take care of yourself.
My blood pressure goes up and my sleep gets screwed up if I’m under stress. But a lot of people have that.
The whole concept of ‘psychosomatic’ (meaning it is just in your head) is kind of misleading. Stress can change your levels of endocrine hormones, disable self repair mechanisms your body uses to maintain/repair itself and disrupt sleep (which is important for rejuvenation). So it isn’t so much all in your head, as much as psychological trauma sincerely screws up your bodies ability to fix and maintain itself.
Stress even screws up your ability to create antibodies when exposed to a vaccine.
Happened on 09/12/2001. The news had been showing the WTC wreckage, and then footage of the plane, and back to the wreckage and back to the plane, on what seemed like a nonstop loop. I was exhausted, having been up all night at church helping people process their grief. I came home to shower, and while I was in the shower, I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t stop seeing those images in my head. I just completely lost it and sobbed aloud, “I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to see it, make it STOP!”
And everything went black. Completely middle of the night with no stars or moon black. Couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.
I managed to get out of the shower and sit on the toilet and sat there taking the deepest slowest breaths I could manage until it passed. It was terrifying.
Right? Gave me a great deal of compassion and insight for people dealing with psychosomatic stuff. Just because “it’s all in your head” doesn’t mean it isn’t real, and doesn’t have real implications for health and safety. I *knew *it was psychosomatic while it was happening…that didn’t make it stop.
It never occurred to me that the vision problems I wrote about in the OP were psychosomatic until the reversed themselves so abruptly. If I’d gone through what YOU did, I’d have had a lethal fear stroke.
Some years ago I developed sciatica all of the sudden. It got worse day by day until I could hardly stand it. Nothing helped. I eventually realized there was an anniversary date of something very emotionally painful for me coming up and thought the sciatica must be connected to that. Didn’t help much though until the date had passed. Then suddenly I was fine again and haven’t had that particular problem since. Once I realize an ailment has a psychological/emotional origin it tends to not recur or is much milder. Of course, then my brain finds a new way to torture me…
This is one reason why young people with intact immune systems get shingles when under stress. There are other things that can happen, but this is the first that immediately comes to mind.
Before I married and had kids, I planned to kill myself if I suffered certain diabetes complications: blindness or amputation. But not now. My babies and my wife give me a reason to put up with anything as long as I have them.
