I have spent the better part of my life convinced I was sick or dying. Literally. I wouldn’t call it hypochondria because there’s a certain zaniness to that label. Maybe it’s just the way the media portrays it. The thing is, hypochondriacs often fixate on normal human functions as potential illnesses and perseverate on them. I literally felt sick. The medical establishment continually disagreed.
It started in my late teens. I shook. A lot. My hands looked like I had mainlined espresso. I was consistently told by my doctors that I was fine and in good health. Eat a more balanced diet and less sugar. Thing is, I was never into bad or sweet foods. Blood tests all clear. Relocate from west to east and I started getting strange dizzy spells. Intermittent and without predictability or pattern. New doctors, same story. I was fine. For posterity, I added headaches in my mid-twenties. Bizarre vice grips squeezed my head until I cried. Jaw pain was right around the corner and crashed my honeymoon; my dentists said my teeth were without wear, so I was likely just clinching my jaw all day. I should relax, the wedding was over.
I rang in my thirties with horrible gastrointestinal issues. Weeks would pass and I would be unable to keep anything down. Off to get a GI workup. Colonoscopies are fun in graduate school. All clear. Floaters in my vision and cramps collided to make me feel like a voodoo doll in the hands of some really pissed off witch. As I checked off physical maladies like I was a human bingo card, I had the chance to meet with ENTs, ophthalmologists, allergists, orthopedics, cardiologists, neurologists, and more. With each new physical symptom came a new doctor to tell me I was fine.
Arriving at pregnancy in my late thirties, I felt like I was 70 but was nonetheless excited for a baby. Then, enter high-risk pregnancy doctors. Blood pressure issues, kidney issues, migraine headaches, and more. CT scans, blood draws on the daily, and racing heart beat. Eyelid twitches convinced me to see a neurologist even though WebMD said these were typically stress related.
Oddly enough, when I was hospitalized at month 5 for preeclampsia, where I stayed for the duration of my pregnancy, all of my symptoms stopped like a switch was flipped off. I chalked it up to being pregnant and all of the hormones juicing through my veins. I would later realize that I had taken several trips to the hospital where the bad people couldn’t hurt me. The sounds, smells, and sights all triggered deep memories of feeling safe.
Baby 1 comes and then baby 2, in quick succession. Like any other mom, we have no time for our own illnesses or self care so I just persisted. Feeling horrid. Parenting is fun when your body is waging war on you. But I plowed forward, sippy cups and goldfish crackers in hand, handling life like a boss. Aside from my mental health, I kept routine med checks and completely ignored the physical shit show I was living. This was it. I was a mom now and my kids came first.
After Dr. Davis mentioned PTSD, I started reading up. Come to find out, I wasn’t a hypochondriac. I was having a psychosomatic response to all of the trauma I had shoved deep down inside me for decades. Real things were happening inside me and they weren’t idiopathic. In retrospect I can see clear patterns. Two weeks of vomiting immediately followed calls from home. I had a migraine for a week, ending up in the ER, and can now connect it to getting scared in the shower. Impending in-person visits to my home state felt like I was falling to a trifecta of autoimmune diseases. Full body war. With myself.
Looking back, I can see it all so clearly. There are very clear sequences of events. Something to instigate a memory from my past, I’d ignore it, and my brain would tell me to screw off. My body was sending me signals, very real signals, that something was wrong. Not one of the doctors that I saw connected the dots, and neither did any psychiatrist, therapist, psychologist, clinical pharmacist, or neuropsychopharmacologist. Each would read the list of meds I was taking, all brain modulating, and nobody even came close to connecting the dots.
So, I lived an existence spanning over three decades feeling like Bob in What about Bob?, and thinking I was crazy. Come to find out, the knee bone really is connected to the head bone and it all works together to either harmonize your life or wreak havoc. My advice to you: make sure you’re paying equal attention to the clouds in your head when you go see doctors about the real stuff in your body. Trust me.
