Natka
02-10-14, 14:31
Have struggled with health anxiety for quite a while. I'm 36 and have had fears of heart issues, aneurysms, cancers, motor neuron disease and my current preoccupation is early onset dementia. My word retrieval skills seem to be deteriorating a little as I sometimes grasp for the appropriate word to use mid-sentence.
For example I was explaining to my pregnant girlfriend last night that it is sometimes difficult for people with debilitating health anxiety to accept that they don't have full control of their health outcomes; that some rare and awful disease could affect them; that they (or we) tend to focus in on the remote possibilities or outliers and ruminate on them and obsess over them, attempting to match our symptoms to some case we have read about in Google. Well while explaining all of this I struggled to come up with the phrase "come to terms with...". I knew it was in my memory bank somewhere but I just couldn't retrieve it and then it came to me a few minutes later. These episodes seem to be occurring more and more lately as my mind's search function frantically searches for a word or phrase that I know is there but fails to locate it amongst the dusty and cobwebbed recesses of my memory's vocabulary vault.
It's scary and I am becoming more and more conscious of it. And it's not just word retrieval issues; last night I meant to say the word "present" and caught myself instead saying the word "president". This type of thing is highly unusual for me and again it freaked me out a little. And it's not just complex or elaborate words and phrases that cause me to pause and think. Some words like "treadmill", "bookshelf" and "stapler" didn't come instantly in recent times and I needed a few seconds to process the words. I am also forgetting the names of some famous people, names I used to know (albeit they are not super-famous).
So is the start of a slippery road to some awful degenerative condition such that I won't be able to recognise my girlfriend and baby in a few years? That's currently the question that is stalking my mind and leading me check all my sentences and test my recognition of faces/objects/places etc.
What is in my favour is the fact that I have a history of healthy anxiety and obsessive thinking and many of my prior concerns didn't materialise into anything sinister, on top of that I am highly anxious at the moment and obviously stressing out about things.
I am typing this message while out work and colleagues occasionally come to use the printer which is beside my workstation while I am writing this so I can't add much more at this point except to say that this is incredibly frightening for me and I am considering taking meds.
Only other symptoms I can report are sometimes finding it a little difficult to focus on conversation if someone is rambling on (particularly when my mind is so fixated on this) and every now and then I have to do a double-take on a word to ensure I fully grasp its meaning and the context in which it should be used. All of these issues could be strongly related to my hypersensitive checking of how I use language these days but it's relentlessly concerning. And to be honest my options are pretty miserable; wait it out and see if I slowly regress into some kind of degenerative vegetative state or go through a battery of tests, psychoanalysis and expensive brain-imaging tests to find out if something sinister is really going on upstairs. Both options fill me with dread and I'm in a real difficult situation at the moment with no real idea of how to find a positive mental space so that I can be there for my partner when she needs me most right now.
For example I was explaining to my pregnant girlfriend last night that it is sometimes difficult for people with debilitating health anxiety to accept that they don't have full control of their health outcomes; that some rare and awful disease could affect them; that they (or we) tend to focus in on the remote possibilities or outliers and ruminate on them and obsess over them, attempting to match our symptoms to some case we have read about in Google. Well while explaining all of this I struggled to come up with the phrase "come to terms with...". I knew it was in my memory bank somewhere but I just couldn't retrieve it and then it came to me a few minutes later. These episodes seem to be occurring more and more lately as my mind's search function frantically searches for a word or phrase that I know is there but fails to locate it amongst the dusty and cobwebbed recesses of my memory's vocabulary vault.
It's scary and I am becoming more and more conscious of it. And it's not just word retrieval issues; last night I meant to say the word "present" and caught myself instead saying the word "president". This type of thing is highly unusual for me and again it freaked me out a little. And it's not just complex or elaborate words and phrases that cause me to pause and think. Some words like "treadmill", "bookshelf" and "stapler" didn't come instantly in recent times and I needed a few seconds to process the words. I am also forgetting the names of some famous people, names I used to know (albeit they are not super-famous).
So is the start of a slippery road to some awful degenerative condition such that I won't be able to recognise my girlfriend and baby in a few years? That's currently the question that is stalking my mind and leading me check all my sentences and test my recognition of faces/objects/places etc.
What is in my favour is the fact that I have a history of healthy anxiety and obsessive thinking and many of my prior concerns didn't materialise into anything sinister, on top of that I am highly anxious at the moment and obviously stressing out about things.
I am typing this message while out work and colleagues occasionally come to use the printer which is beside my workstation while I am writing this so I can't add much more at this point except to say that this is incredibly frightening for me and I am considering taking meds.
Only other symptoms I can report are sometimes finding it a little difficult to focus on conversation if someone is rambling on (particularly when my mind is so fixated on this) and every now and then I have to do a double-take on a word to ensure I fully grasp its meaning and the context in which it should be used. All of these issues could be strongly related to my hypersensitive checking of how I use language these days but it's relentlessly concerning. And to be honest my options are pretty miserable; wait it out and see if I slowly regress into some kind of degenerative vegetative state or go through a battery of tests, psychoanalysis and expensive brain-imaging tests to find out if something sinister is really going on upstairs. Both options fill me with dread and I'm in a real difficult situation at the moment with no real idea of how to find a positive mental space so that I can be there for my partner when she needs me most right now.