Help, I’m turning into a hypochondriac!

Recently I cried myself to sleep. I’ve had swollen lymph nodes in my armpits for a while now, which don’t hurt, but are very uncomfortable. Like every time something in my body goes out of balance – and this becomes more and more the case as you get older – I panicked. And asked “Dr. Google” for advice, even though I know it’s not getting any better.

I also overlooked the comment “has harmless causes in most cases”. and only saw “breast metastasis in very rare cases”. Cancer! Especially now, when my life finally has a reasonably quiet course again. I can’t do that to my kids!

My GP was on vacation, of course, and even I thought it was overkill to see the whole thing as an emergency. To be sure, I checked with my gynecologist by phone who said chances are the triggers were the beasts responsible for pretty much everything that goes on in my body: the hormones. That makes perfect sense.

It wasn’t the first time I really started to think that I had a serious illness. I feared a ruptured spleen if a muscle fiber ruptured (the doctor’s secretary on the phone: “Believe me, you wouldn’t be able to stand up straight”), due to numbness in my arm (because I lay on it while sleeping) I had a stroke, and if it really had been a brain tumor every time I thought of a brain tumor when I had a headache and blurred vision, I would have been dead long ago.

The funny thing is, I’ve always been a bit more hesitant about going to the doctor for a little thing, and… I didn’t really do this until I got really hurt. For example, I didn’t have an ear infection treated until it was almost gone, and the pneumonia I once contracted probably wouldn’t have happened if I had gone to the doctor sooner. Basically, my body has functioned all my life. As a child I once tore the ligaments of my foot; the only surgery I ever had was a C-section for my second delivery. The scar is ugly, but healed well. After my cycle I was able to reset the clock and while half the world complained of colds, headaches, and fevers, I was seldom caught. I had German measles and mumps as a child, then only pneumonia and once food poisoning, which was made particularly uncomfortable by the fact that it reported on a four-hour flight while I sat by the window. But that’s all in 47 years of life.

Why do I regularly sow such panic about diseases? To be clear, I don’t suffer from clinical hypochondria, only about one percent of the population does. This common fear of illness affects people’s entire lives and daily lives. For example, I’ve read that people check their blood pressure every hour for fear of having a stroke. Or by someone who doesn’t wear red, for fear he won’t notice any bleeding. Triggers can be heavy losses, but also generally unsafe situations. That’s where therapies begin to rebuild confidence in your own body.

Even though I’m not a “real” hypochondriac, my dog ​​is probably buried here too. For the first time in a while I experience my body as something I have no control over. My weight bounces like a rubber ball, water retention all over my body comes and goes, we don’t even want to start my cycle, and somehow I keep getting something – sometimes a rash, then a wart, then an infected eye, a strain or just a swelling somewhere. And apparently a brain that doesn’t really want to accept that my body isn’t young anymore, and rather get bogged down in something terrible.

Fortunately I have a very pragmatic son, who recently asked me why I wanted to go back to the doctor and rolled his eyes at my attempts to explain and said: “Mom, you’re not sick, you’re old!” Since then, I always say this phrase to myself when I want to understand something again: “I’m not sick – I’m old!” This also regularly ruins my mood, but at least I don’t cry myself to sleep anymore.

And you? Are you more of the “go to the doctor right away” team or the “wait and see, it will pass” team? Do you know such a panic about diseases? How do you deal with it? Share it in the comment column.