I’m not really excitable about my health most of the time. I tend to be pretty phlegmatic about aches and pains, etc. But if I see something sprouting on my body that I’ve never seen before, I get worried.
A few years ago, I noticed a lump between my breasts. I had never seen it before, and I waited a few days to see if it would go away. It didn't. I showed it to my husband (then he was my fiancee), and he agreed that it looked odd. So, I went to my internist.
It had been a couple of years since I had seen my internist. He looked at my lump,
After suffering several bouts on middle back pain I went for a fasting IVP and a cytoscopy to see why I kept getting kidney stones.
Everything normal. Apparently I’m just a crazy person who likes spending two hours waiting for the doctor to poke a plastic tube up an area that is normally “Exit Only.”
I’m going to ignore future back pains. I don’t have kidney stones, I’m just insane.
Oh boy. I’m the queen of hypochondria.
I have several examples but I’ll share just this one.
Years ago, my best friend got very sick. She was so sick that she passed out in the waiting room at the doctor’s office and almost had to be admitted to the hospital.
The next day, I began coughing, thought I felt sick and had completely convinced myself that I’d caught what my friend had.
That is, until my mom told me pneumonia wasn’t contagious.
I still haven’t lived that one down.:smack:
I’m not sure if this qualifies as hypochondria or insanity, but a few years ago, I was sitting at my computer when I started to feel just, odd. It seemed mental, then it seemed physical. . . After awhile, I was convinced that I was going to spontaineosly combust.
When my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago, I just knew I had it too. I figured it would be just my luck to get cancer in my newly acquired boobs, (I didn’t buy them, they just popped up on their own).
One Friday last January I started having chest pains. As the day went on they seemed to be getting worse, and then my lower back started hurting. At suppertime I had no appetite, and was having trouble breathing. I finally called 911 and got taken to the emergency room. By the time a doctor saw me the pains had subsided and he decided it was just heartburn; he prescribed Pepcid and told me to see my regular doctor for followup. My regular doctor gave me an EKG just to be on the safe side, which showed no sign of heart trouble.
Part of my concern was the memory of a few years ago when the same thing had happened and when I called my doctor he suggested I go to the emergency room. That time an EKG had showed an “unspecified irregularity” and they ended up keeping me overnight just to be on the safe side.
One evening before bed, my 3 year old son drank a whole cup of water, and then asked for another one, which he had never done before and then drank the whole second cup too.
I tossed and turned all night, convinced than this “excessive thirst” was the first symptom of juvenile onset diabetes, and imagining a life of insulin injections every day, breaking my heart over how he wouldn’t be able to understand why we were hurting him with shots. I dreaded trying to regulate his diet and worried about how he would deal with Halloween.
I swear, I was planning to bring him to the doctor, if not the emergency room, the next morning, expecting to see a blood sugar of 300.
The next morning he was fine. Obviously normal. No excessive thirst, urination, etc. I realized that the doctor might kill herself laughing if I brought him in for drinking 2 glasses of water before bed.
I should add that my younger brother came down with diabetes when he was 13. The first symptom was excessive thirst.
I’ve got a really comprehensive medical dictionary at home (wish I’d never bought the thing now) and there are few fatal diseases I have not been convinced I’ve had at some time. You just pick an ailment, read the “signs and symptoms” section, and uncannily, they seem to match exactly what you have. Don’t buy one.
Perhaps the most embarrassing was when I went to see the doc with a “subarachnoid haemorrhage”. Turned out to be a bad tooth.
This happened a few weeks ago - I broke a rib for the first time ever. Now, a broken rib just isn’t a very comfortable thing to have (although as far as injuries go, it isn’t that bad). So I tried to feel it, to see if I could feel the break. Now it was a bit swollen there, and felt really weird. I pretty much convinced myself that I had not just cracked the rib, but broken it completely free, and it was just floating around in my abdomen.
So for a while, everytime I burped, I was thinking that somehow my rib had puntured both my stomach and my lung, and the two had fused together. So everytime I took a breath, a bit would come back through my stomach. Now this is the most ridiculous thing to ever think. And I knew this. But in the back of my head, I was still thinking, “Well… it could happen.”
A few years ago my legs were covered with really big bruises that I couldn’t explain. My mom got worried and told me that I had better call the doctor because bruising can be a sign of some types of cancer.
By the time I got to the doctor I was already trying to figure out what I’d do when my hair fell out. He took some blood for tests and told me he’d get back to me with the results.
A few days later he called. He told me that he was sorry, but there was nothing he could do for me. I was so shocked, I could barely ask him why. His reply?
My mom had one of these, but it had flowcharts…like you’d start with, say “Fever” and then if you DID have a fever it’d go on to something else like “Bloodshot eyes” and so on and eventually you’d land on a diagnosis. Which was usually Death Plague and not You Just Have A Cold. God, I freaked myself out so many times with that thing.
A few years ago, I started getting weird headaches.
I’d never actually had many headaches before but nothing that wasn’t directly related to caffeine withdrawal, and nothing that didn’t go away in under an hour. Nothing big at all.
But these were big. And they’d last forever, and they’d go away or come back based on how I was holding my head.
My diagnosis: Brain tumor. Inoperable, I was sure… it had already take over, and at various times was eating various parts of my brain. I’d either need chemo or surgery to get it out or some other horrible thing, and I’d probably die.
Doctor’s diagnosis: Sinus infection. Sudafed and some kind of nose spray should take care of it in a day or so.
Some years back I stayed up late to finish Mr. William H. McNeill’s excellent work, Plagues and Peoples. It includes, among other diseases, a bit about cholera and its symptons.
Unbeknownst to me, I had acquired the Pathogen of Doom, commonly called “the flu” by people who weren’t really sick. I woke up in the middle of the night utterly disoriented and so dehydrated that I couldn’t speak. I just sort of flopped about the bed, croaking, “Great. I have cholera. Great.”
Thankfully, I drank several glasses of water and sanity returned. But I did briefly believe that I was going to die and my friends would find my dessicated corpse and then everyone would be sorry. Or something like that.
Did you know that there are fatal deseases that have no symptoms whatsoever? If you woke up feeling fine this morning, it could indicate that you only have days(or even hours!) left!
