I am a hypochondriac. Probably the worst one I know. For those of you who do not understand this term, it is easier explained as "health anxiety."
I know exactly when I became a hypochondriac actually. I was a normal, careless, happy child until one day I passed out while serving in Catholic mass in the fifth grade. I'm not sure what triggered the fear, because I had passed out before that incident and it didn't scare me. However, after that happened I was basically unable to attend mass without feeling like I was going to pass out. I danced all my life and performed in front of people every year but after my fifth grade year I developed this awful case of stage fright, making me think I was going to faint on stage. It started out as a severe irrational fear of fainting, until a month or so later we read, The Hatchet in class.
If anyone has read The Hatchet, you know that in the beginning of the novel, an airline pilot has a heart attack and crashes his plane in some unknown territory, setting up the plot of the story. When we read that chapter aloud in class, we also talked about the symptoms and signs of having a heart attack. Literally every night of my fifth grade year after we read The Hatchet I gave myself heartburn from worrying that I was going to have a heart attack. Then the heartburn made my fear so indescribably horrifying that I couldn't sleep! I'm sure I about drove my mother nuts waking her up at night thinking I was dying. She'd just give me Tums and tell me to relax and eventually the heartburn went away and I'd get over it..until the next night.
In my health class that year, we had to write 2 papers over diseases or disorders, but if I thought about a disease for over a minute, I automatically had it so I bent the rules and wrote my papers over dry skin and chapped lips. I'm not sure how I got away with that.
Another thing I remember is watching something on television about a schizophrenic and then forever being afraid that I would go crazy.
In the sixth grade, we read a book about a blind person and then I was terrified that I was going to lose my sight.
In the seventh grade, a girl in my town became paralyzed from some sort of disorder and then I feared that I would one day wake up and not be able to move.
My sophomore year, a friend of mine told me her dad got in a wreck with another woman who had a seizure while driving on the highway. Aaaaaand guess who was afraid to drive on highways until last year?
The worst part is, I still fear that the same things are going to happen to me! I STILL have fits of fear when I get chest pains or something goes numb. I also have a problem with searching illnesses on webMD, thinking it would make me feel better, but it always makes me feel MORE like I'm dying.
Another thing is that I always know I'm just being anxious, and even if I tell myself "Zoë, you're fine" a million times a minute, I still think I'm dying!
I have to message my sister or best friend usually every time I freak out just to have them tell me, "You're not having a heart attack/stroke" and distract me from my thoughts to get over it.
I'm going to be honest, even typing about these things is giving me anxiety. I know that my sister has this problem and I think my uncle as well, though I'm not sure how severe. I wonder if this is something hereditary and it was bound to happen, or if the whole thing was triggered by fainting one morning because I didn't eat breakfast.
If it's not hereditary, I REALLY regret not eating breakfast.
However, there's nothing I can do now except try to freak out less (which I really have improved a lot since the fifth grade). I hope the other hypochondriacs out there got a laugh out of this because you know you're just as ridiculously obsessed with your health as me and you can't help it.
Here's a clip from the film The Switch with Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston that I found particularly humorous concerning hypochondria.
