Man I’m telling you. I hate having anxiety so much. I have severe clinical health anxiety and I am always terrified that I have some kind of cancer. Sometimes I go weeks without anxiety episodes and other times it’s a year or more by when it happens it’s really really bad. Just recently I’ve got myself convinced that I have esophageal cancer.
Obviously there’s a couple of explanations to why I could be feeling this way but my brain says cancer all the way.
Two weeks ago today I woke up with this major burping episode? I am a 39-year-old female and it was like this all day long belching and it was really painful in my esophagus under my right ribs. Later that night I realized that the pain it was associated with me swallowing. So I did a couple tests on myself to see if it hurt when I swallow food, liquid, saliva, or if I dry swallowed. It didn’t matter what I did it hurt the same for each one. So I looked up like gallstones liver issues etc. but none of those with her when I’m swallowing. So eventually I saw esophageal cancer as a cause of pain when swallowing.
That’s when the real nosedive started. I started googling I couldn’t get out of my own brain and then of course my anxiety exacerbated everything.
When I get into these anxious episodes I don’t really function. I take care of my kids basic needs like food and cleanliness etc. but I don’t do anything for myself and I can’t concentrate on my work from home job I don’t take the kids anywhere fun we don’t go on walks I just sit and Google.
I constantly tried to tell myself that it’s just acid reflux or some kind of either minor problem or something like that. Then I got to thinking about what my habits had been prior to this burping episode and I realized that I had been taking a low-dose aspirin every night before bed because I was convinced that the coronavirus shot was going to give me a blood clot. So I self prescribed low-dose aspirin like a freaking idiot and I did not take it properly. I was taking it with a tiny sip of water right before bed. Apparently not taking it with enough water and then lying down after of the two worst things that you can do when you take an aspirin.
So fast forward and I had lots of days of crying and lots of days of worry and I do have an endoscopy on Thursday and my doctor is almost positive that it caused either gastritis or esophagitis or ulcers or something like that. But I still have this huge fear that I’ve been able to get control over my anxiety for the last few days gain a little weight back because I had dropped like 7 pounds because I couldn’t make myself eat but that they’re going to go in with that endoscopic scope and actually find cancer.
Another thing I keep trying to tell myself is that esophageal cancer itself is very rare. There’s only about 20,000 cases in the United States per year and over 16,000 of them are men. But it didn’t stop me from finding women my age who had esophageal cancer. So of course I feel like it might be me that needs to fill that next year’s statistic.
I’m so nervous for this procedure on Thursday. Does anyone else get this anxious and worked up? Anyone my age in their 30s or 40s that have been 100% convinced that they had cancer and ended up OK?