This is the fifth post in a series I’m writing about health anxiety and chronic pain, a chapter of my life that I’m now on the other side of. If you missed the previous posts, start here.
Two years ago, I was in the depths of a spiral that I had no name for.
Daily aches and pains moved around from my back to my pelvis to my shoulder. Strange physical sensations became the baseline of my days.
After months of doctor’s appointments with no answers and the frustrating advice to ‘just relax’, it started to feel like something was wrong with my mind. Like “I might be losing it” kind of wrong.
One question I started wrestling with every day was: Is this health anxiety, or am I really sick?
I agonized over this question, unable to decipher whether my mind or my body was the problem. How could I be in so much pain if this was just anxiety? How could it all be in my head if I had physical symptoms?
This part of my story is about reaching a pivotal breaking point. It’s about the dark before the light, where I lost trust in everything, including myself. It’s about the moment everything finally cracked open, and it had nothing to do with a test result, a doctor’s appointment, or endless Googling.
An attempt to relax
A month after the biopsy that started my downward spiral, two months into a frenzied state of fear and pain, I knew I needed to get out of the loop I was stuck in.
I had plenty of confirmation from doctors that I was okay.
An internal ultrasound had ruled out my lymph nodes as the cause of my lingering pelvic pain, something I’d been afraid of ever since my OB-GYN had nonchalantly suggested it.
Another doctor concluded that the culprit was my psoas muscle, and her prescription was simple, albeit frustrating: relax more.
So I was going to do just that. I was going to relax.
Maybe with a little bit of self-care, focusing on my breathing, and letting my mind relax, I could find relief from this pain, or at least avoid another panic attack. I refused to put myself through that disorienting experience again.
But how easily I fell right back into the spiral.
One contradiction was all it took.
When I told my physical therapist about my supposedly tight psoas muscle, she tilted her head in confusion. “From what I can tell, your psoas doesn’t seem tight at all”, she said.
In an instant, the feeling of safety crumbled beneath me. I was back in the same place I’d been in for months, no closer to an answer about my symptoms.
Just when I thought there was one less question to ask, one less thing for my brain to overthink, one mystery finally solved… I was left with even more questions.
If not a tight psoas, what was causing this pain in my pelvis?
Why did my PT not know what was causing it either?
Why were doctors giving me conflicting information?
How could I know who to trust?
Despite all of the TikTok videos in my feed with the divine message to ‘surrender and trust the process’, I couldn’t seem to trust that either.
One thing was certain: I did not trust myself to handle this pain.
The alternative escape route
In a desperate attempt to outrun the spiral that kept following me, I traveled to Texas for Christmas to see my sister.
I was hopeful that a change of scenery would force my body to relax because I clearly wasn’t capable of letting that happen on its own. Maybe getting away from it all could break the circuit on this loop I was stuck in.
And if I felt better after this trip, at least I’d know that this was indeed health anxiety and not an actual illness.
But somehow things only got worse.
When self-care doesn’t help
After a few days in Texas, I experienced the worst lower back pain I’d felt since it first started in 2021, even more painful than the night of the panic attacks.
As I sat eating dinner at a restaurant with my sister, it felt as if sandpaper was grating along the nerve endings of my lower back. The pain was screaming so loudly for my attention that the pizza I was eating barely registered on my taste buds.
I couldn’t understand why my back was flaring up so aggressively. I was on vacation and had a plate of delicious food in front of me. What was wrong with me?
Later that night, as I took an Epsom salt bath in a futile attempt to ease my back pain, I read the fine print on the bath salt package. The label warned that people with diabetes shouldn’t use it. My stomach clenched at the thought of having diabetes, but I figured I’d save that for a Google search later.
The bath did absolutely nothing for my pain.
A few hours after going to bed, I awoke to intense tingling throughout my hands and feet, up into my calves. My body felt like it was on fire.
What if this was the end?
What if I was really dying this time?
How could this be anxiety if my entire body was tingling?
I put my phone face down on the nightstand, wishing I could throw it out the window so that I wouldn’t be tempted to Google what this tingling could mean.
But I couldn’t escape my thoughts.
I searched for the meaning of tingling sensations throughout the body. Google said it could be leukemia… or diabetes.
Thus began another long scrolling session, going deeper and deeper into the throes of Reddit, reading horror stories from people who were diagnosed with life-threatening diseases after feeling tingling sensations in their bodies.
My body felt like it was shutting down as the tingling intensified, my temperature oscillating between fiery hot and ice cold.
The very thing I’d wanted to escape was happening again, this time in my sister’s guest room: another panic attack.
At this point, I still didn’t recognize that my Googling was connected to the panic attacks. I just thought I was dying (again, but for real this time).
Maybe this doctor will help
The next morning, it felt like I was slipping into a fog. I slumped into my sister’s couch in despair, my body numb and heavy. I wanted this all to go away: the restless thoughts, the overwhelming fear, and especially this new tingling sensation vibrating through my limbs.
After dueling back and forth in my mind, trying to convince myself I could handle the unknown sensations in my body, I swallowed the lump in my throat and asked my sister if she would take me to an urgent care clinic.
“What exactly is urgent care going to do for you?”
My sister asked the question with frustration in her voice. I sensed that she thought I was being dramatic, that I needed to get over it, and that I was putting her in a bad mood too.
What I hoped was that urgent care would find out why I felt miserable, or at least tell me exactly what was causing these symptoms.
I didn’t want to ruin Christmas with my negative vibes.
An hour later, my sister reluctantly dropped me off at an urgent care clinic and went on her way to Target. When I entered the clinic doors, my nose was assaulted with what smelled like a bathroom that had backed up in the waiting room.
I contemplated turning around, wondering if this was all a big mistake, but I couldn’t face calling my sister to say, “You know what, never mind”. I’d created enough problems by this point.
When it was finally my turn to see the doctor, she said tingling was a vague symptom, but that I did look pretty pale and unwell (little did she know that’s my natural skin tone). She offered to do bloodwork anyway, to check for anemia or a vitamin deficiency.
A few days later, after waiting what felt like a lifetime as I tried to hold things together, I got a call that my bloodwork was fine. Once again, no doctor could find anything wrong with me.
As strange as it sounds, I almost wanted an abnormal result. At least then I’d know this wasn’t all in my head and maybe I wouldn’t have felt like I’d ruined Christmas for nothing.
I can see that I’d been desperate for a change of scenery to help me feel better, to finally help me determine if this was all in my head or not, or to at least give me a hint of something that felt like my normal self again.
But a change of location wasn’t going to change my behavior or help me heal the things I needed to work through, not while I was STILL relying on the same coping mechanisms that had gotten me nowhere before.
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The battle between mind and body
After traveling back home with zero answers for why my body was tingling all over or why my pelvis was aching daily, I was at my wit’s end.
I’d been told so many times that I was okay, but my body was telling me that something was wrong. And new sensations were showing up every day.
I woke up nauseous every single morning and could only stomach a tiny granola bar for breakfast. My hands and feet tingled as if my circulation was slowly being cut off. Sharp, stabbing stomach cramps woke me up repeatedly at 2 a.m.
I poked my body for lumps, pinched my skin to check that my circulation returned in decent time, and fought the urge to weigh myself multiple times a day, convinced that any weight loss meant I was sick.
I began taking showers in the dark to escape overanalyzing every inch of my skin. Though I craved the relief of hot water on my back, I couldn’t bear to keep the lights on in case I saw a new lump or flare-up.
I couldn’t wrap my head around how I went from a routine health check-up to fearfully showering in the dark.
And even though my body was telling me something was wrong, my mind was telling me to be grateful, and that I needed to get over myself and move on.
Why couldn’t I snap out of this like a “normal person”?
After all, I had a roof over my head and my basic needs were met. People had it so much worse than me, so it felt audacious to ask for anything more.
(I’ll share more about how I had a distorted idea of what a “normal person” was in a future post.)
But as much as I tried to lean into that gratitude, there was still an intrusive, condescending voice in the back of my head whispering things like, “You may not have cervical cancer, but you still have HPV. Who would want to be with you now?”
No matter how hard I tried to reframe my thoughts or find a positive angle, none of it would stick because, deep down, my body didn’t believe a word of it.
The dark night of the soul
Life began to feel like I was stuck in the staircase scene in the movie Labyrinth, where I could see what I was trying to reach, but the stairs kept switching directions each time I took a step.
I call this time of my life a dark night of the soul because I had some of the darkest thoughts I’d ever had in my life. I had all of these horrible thoughts with nowhere for them to go, and no one else knew I was having them.
Trying to figure out if I was sick or if this was health anxiety was a question that kept getting more and more indecipherable to answer. I spent so much time going back and forth trying to decide whether or not I should make another doctor’s appointment that I felt physically sick to my stomach from the mental gymnastics.
The more I wrestled with this question, the more I lost trust in my own feelings, experience, and inner knowing.
Looking back, what I needed during this time was for someone to tell me the pain I felt in my body was real. I wanted a doctor to look at me and say, “Yes, it makes perfect sense that you’re feeling this way.”
But because that validation never came, I started invalidating my own experience instead. I started thinking it MUST all be in my head. That’s an isolating conclusion to come to… because what does that mean about me and my mental health?
It was a terrifying place to be, mentally, physically, and emotionally.
A necessary breaking point
Part of me was convinced there was something detrimentally wrong with my body, but another part could see how my brain was catastrophizing and making things worse.
I knew I needed help in some way, but I wasn’t sure how. It wasn’t until my mom brought up how unsettling my behavior was that something cracked.
While I recounted the tale of yet another doctor’s appointment over breakfast, my mom looked at me with concern and said,
“I think you might want to talk to a therapist about this.”
I nodded my head, swallowing the lump in my throat as I fought back the urge to cry. Apparently I wasn’t holding things together as well as I’d thought.
Moments later in the bathroom, everything came undone. I sobbed with my back against the wall, hugging my knees tightly as I rocked back and forth, realizing I wasn’t the only one whose life this was affecting.
The tight thread of my perfectionistic ‘I can do this’ side of me was finally unraveling. This eldest daughter with a fixer mentality, who wanted to do everything right and on her own, needed support. I couldn’t self-care my way out of this.
And as the tears streamed down my face in the bathroom, a voice whispered in my ear: “Take your mom’s advice.”
So I listened.
If you recognize yourself in this story and are in the thick of your own struggle, you don’t have to do this alone. A resource like GrowTherapy can be helpful for finding a therapist (this is not sponsored, just my genuine recommendation).
I finally admitted that I needed help
After uncrumpling my body from the bathroom floor, I made the call to my healthcare provider to schedule a therapy appointment.
I needed someone to tell me I wasn’t crazy. I needed the current version of Catherine, the one who’s writing this now, the one who’s made it to the other side, to tell me that there was a reason this was all happening.
Perhaps the only way forward was to get down to the roots of where this all started. It was time to unearth what I’d been burying under the facade of a girl who acted like she had it all together. I needed to turn my desperation inward so genuine healing could begin.
The answer to the question I’d been wrestling with (“Is this health anxiety or am I really sick?”) wasn’t going to reveal itself if I kept forcing answers, relying on doctors, and overthinking myself to exhaustion. The answer had to come another way.
Everything finally started to make sense when I met my amazing therapist who helped me look at my situation with clear eyes and a compassionate mindset (but it took some serious effort and an intuition check before I could find her).
In the next post, I’ll share how I finally started making progress to escape the health anxiety and pain cycle I’d become deeply entrenched in.
Disclaimer: This post documents my personal journey with health anxiety and chronic pain and should not be taken as medical advice.
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I’d love to hear from you
Have you ever found yourself going back and forth on the same question, unable to uncover the answer you were seeking? Whether it relates to health or not, leave a comment with a simple ‘yes’ or a single line if you know what I mean.