health anxiety

I broke down and bought a portable pulse-oximeter at CVS today, after my doctor got a low reading of 93 on Wednesday. I confessed my transgression to Annlee tonight at dinner, and after I checked my pulse-ox later at the movie theater (a healthy 99), she said, “oh, let me try,” and confiscated it and then said, “how about we go to CVS after the movie and return this.”

It was not so much a question as it was a statement.

I pouted and then I pleaded with her to let me test it just one more time, explaining a recent inability to take a full breath and slight wheeze, but she literally wrestled it out of my hands, and go to CVS we did, only to find out they don’t take returns after 10:00 pm. I was then ordered to put it in my trunk and provide photographic proof of return tomorrow afternoon.

Even though I was upset, I appreciate friends like Annlee.

Hypochondria is a funny thing. I don’t mean that literally, cos it’s not really funny at all; it’s certainly not fun in any sense. But here I am, nearly four months after my first panic attack and I’m more concerned now about my health than ever before. I am hyper aware of my body and all its sensations, and everything means something. Of course, in reality, they probably don’t, but the sensations breed fear, which breed a desperate need for information, which leads me to Google, which leads to more fear and then more symptoms. It’s amazing what the mind can do to the body, and all the while, at least most of the time, I am cognizant of what I am doing. A part of my brain says, “no, you will not fill in that search term box,” but I do it anyway, and an hour later, I am in a greater tizzy than I was before, which leads me to make impulsive drug store purchases.

I am my own worst enemy. I am on a merry-go-round, and even though the ride is making me ill, I don’t get off when it stops, I just put in more quarters.

The crux of all this, of course, is why. Partly, I believe, it’s hereditary. Apparently Daddy-O exhibited various hypochondria tendencies, but filtered them through a veil of humor, so who know if or how tortured he was by it all. I know that I am very tortured by it, so I can only imagine what he felt.

But another big factor is that I’m using it as a way to distract myself from really getting to the meat of the issue, my underlying issues, those deeply rooted, that grow through the soil of years and are still attached to how I interact with friends, co-workers, potential male companions, not to mention my career and even God. Deep down, utterly deep down, is this belief that something is wrong with me, or that if I do something wrong, something awful is going to happen.

I use my health anxiety, too, to distract myself from the things of life that I’m unhappy about. Because despite its unpleasantness, it’s a lot easier to fixate on the remote possibility of having a heart attack, or pulmonary embolism, or fatal arrhythmia, or something else, than to think about and work through the fact that I have so much student loan debt, I will probably be dead (of natural causes) long before it’s ever paid off; or the daunting prospect of allowing myself to flourish in my chosen medium (which is writing); or that I’ve basically written off dating since the whole Tony debacle two years ago; or that I’m terribly, achingly lonely most of the time; or that so many of my friends seem to have moved on in life and I feel stuck.

Yes, thank you, I’ll take congestive heart failure worries any day.

And I guess I don’t know why I feel so ill equipped for life. Did I spend my teens and twenties making bad decisions, only to find myself at thirty completely tied in knots? And how do I untangle them? Or do I just have to live with the consequences?

I will say one thing for sure, that this is all getting kind of old, this hypochondria. I want to think about other things. I want to not get behind at work and then stress out as more work comes in. I want to talk about other things to my friends. And not have panic attacks while driving down the freeway. And not have to call my mom at 1:00 am because I think I’m dying. I want to get back to my novel. I want to eat sugar. And drink a cocktail. And sip a cappuccino. I want my life back, basically. Yet I just keep putting in the quarters.

There are options, of course. Medication, for one, which is looking more and more like a not-so-last-case scenario. Nutrition, perhaps—I am seeing that nutritionist on Saturday. Therapy is good but it’s slow as molasses, but I am joining an eight-week personal growth group offered through my church that I hope will be beneficial.

I remember talking to this guy Tino the weekend of my first anxiety attack and I bemoaned my newly-mandated restriction on caffeine, and he warned me to be careful, that if I didn’t get to the bottom of my addiction, that another one would just pop into place. I scoffed at him then, never in a million years thinking that it would be replaced by all this. It’s a hard fact to accept, but I guess that’s the first step in recovery, isn’t it? Admitting that I actually have a problem, and boy do I.

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