Hello, I'm not sure if this is exactly the right place to post this but I didn't want to post it in the OCD section just in case it would be triggering to anyone there or something or maybe too specific. My health anxiety is formally diagnosed as a form of OCD by my therapist and doctors. I do worry about random little things here and there but I get over them pretty quickly. I have a few really bad phobias and fixations on a few specific things though and they drive me absolutely bonkers. Botulism. Tetanus. Brain eating amoeba. Prions. But my biggest baddest fear is rabies. I know I'm not alone, but I feel like my case of rabies anxiety is one of the worst anyone has ever seen. I'm about to hit my 30s and I spent my entire 20s wasting away indoors and I hardly leave my house anymore, especially at night. And I don't even feel safe indoors either because I know bats can get inside unnoticed and bite you in your sleep without you even feeling it. I have a tendency to find little tiny two pronged "bite marks" on my skin and I think it's usually because I'll have a bug bite or eczema flare and I scratch too hard and break the skin in a way that just so happens to look like a tiny little bite. I've had this happen many times, every time I've been paranoid a bat bit me in my sleep and every time I've eventually been able to get over it. But the level of anxiety I have over this is ridiculous. I'm always freaking out if a door or window is left open for even a moment especially at night because if it's not being watched for even a second a bat could fly in. I'm always hugging myself and looking around all paranoid when I do get dragged out of the house after dusk. I have 3 cats and I'm sure they'd make it known if a bat was in the house. But that doesn't matter. My friends make fun of me. My partner gets fed up with me. My doctors get fed up with me. I was banned from an anxiety forum once because I was acting so erratically and I was so delusional and manic at the time that they thought I was trolling. This is very real and it's ruining my life. I wasted my 20s being too scared to live. I hardly sleep because I'm worried I'll get bit in my sleep. I'm always miserable. I'm on meds and I'm in therapy but it's like nothing helps. I think I need to see some sort of specialist for this but they won't refer me. I even went through the series of rabies shots like 5 or 6 years ago when I definitely did NOT need them because I was freaking out about a scratch I found on my hand. It cost me like 700 dollars out of pocket and horrible side effects that made me feel like I was dying. I say all this before I get into my current episode because I just want to make it clear that I KNOW I'm absolutely nuts but I guess I just need to vent? I'm angry at myself. I found an actual dead bat outside last October and I was doing pretty well at the time and didn't even worry about it. I was so proud of myself. Then suddenly yesterday when I was sure this fear was long gone, I found a random little double pinprick scab on one of my fingers. I know this is likely an old small scratch that just looks like that, a spider bite, or just something that could've happened literally anywhere any time if I nicked my skin on something or scratched myself. My OCD does not care. In my mind I was bitten by a rabid bat and my life is over. It doesn't help that I made the mistake of posting a photo on reddit and everyone was begging me to go get the vaccine saying it looks like a bat bite and its better to be safe than sorry etc. This did nothing but make my anxiety worse as my doctors will literally refuse to give me the vaccine because they know about my OCD and anxiety about this topic and think its absolutely ridiculous. I live in a very rural area and don't have a lot of other options medically and I don't wanna go out to the city and spend 700 dollars and feel like garbage again if I don't need to. I should also make it clear I have nightmares about bats all the time. So last night I finally manage to calm myself down and go to sleep and then I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm positive I see a little brown bat flying around. I think I may have been dreaming, having minor sleep paralysis, half asleep or something because I also remember blinking a little and thinking "oh haha okay that's nothing" and going back to sleep. But how could it have been nothing?? It was so obviously something.. I feel like I remember it so clearly. I've been paranoid all day, furious with myself for going back to sleep when there was obviously a rabid bat flying around when I should've been running to the emergency room. Because now the area where the "bite" is is tingly and its too late. I've been ripping my bedroom apart like a madwoman trying to find a bat somewhere. My cats haven't been acting weird and they weren't last night either. I feel insane. I feel like I'm on drugs or something. And I can't talk to anyone I know in real life about this without them snapping at me because they've had enough of my antics. I'm just at the end of my rope here, so angry and annoyed with myself and the world and genuinely just wallowing here in despair because I'm wasting my life freaking out about such a rare virus. If you read all this.. thanks for listening.
