Cancer

[Oliveira42970]

Hope everyone is well why can’t I get cancer out of my mind every little thing and I think I have it just was at doctors last week he listen to my chest said it sounds clear so why won’t this do I have cancer in my lungs go away it’s horrible I sit and listen to me breathing I had a cold a couple of weeks ago and suffer from allergies sometime I cough now I’m scared I’m also a smoker which I know I need to quit some one please try to make me make sense thanks

[Jeff1943]

Doctors have a sixth sense for these things, Oliviera, if he/she listened to your chest and said everything is fine you can be sure you don't have lung cancer. But if you feel you need more reassurance go back and ask for a simple chest x-ray but when that says all's well you must accept that decision. As I've said before, don't spend your time trying to cure yourself of an illness you don't have, instead spend your time curing yourself of the illness you do have - anxiety disorder.

Somehow, sometime, you may have been under a lot of pressure: stress, worry, over work or disappointment. As a result your nervous system became over sensitised and it starts playing tricks on us. One of the things anxiety does is to magnify our fears ten fold. A tummy upset is seen as bowel cancer, a few headaches become a brain tumour and a slight tremor becomes Parkinsons or MS.

In your case your over sensitised nerves have magnified the normal desirenot to contract cancer into an over riding obsession that you must have cancer. It's just what your nerves and brain decided to do as a reaction to your anxiety, it could equally well have been an exaggerated fear of spiders!

The way to recover is to simply accept this strange exaggerated thought that you have cancer for the time being, stop stressing about it, stop frightening yourself half to death. Because the fear you produce only helps to keep your nerves highly sensitive in which state they continue to play tricks on you. Accept the thoughts of cancer calmly and with a minimum of reactive fear and your nerves will lose their over sensitivity and return to normal and your obsession with cancer will pass.

I hope this helps you make some sense of what you're going through - and gives you some sense of direction towards how you can recover and free yourself from your obsession with cancer.