My intro into battling with health anxiety

[nik88]

I am new here and wanted to give a brief introduction.

I am a 24 year old female and have suffered with anxiety my whole life.  I never really considered it "anxiety", it was just a way of living.    I can remember being 8 years old, and for whatever reason every night I was scared of dying in my sleep.  I would obsess over it.  I was afraid to go to sleep, afraid I wouldn't wake up.  After sometime I "grew out of" that particular issue.  I do remember being scared of other things as a child like swallowing my tongue or that my body would forget to breathe.  Somewhere around my middle-school years these fears subsided and I stopped fearing for my health altogether.

For whatever reason, during middle school and high school I was anxiety-free, in a sense.  I always have had a certain level of anxiety/stress though, it kind of just keeps me functioning.  I lived a (semi) normal life.  I graduated with a nursing degree from a great university, have an awesome job, am engaged and have three children.

Anyway, fast forward to the present.  My youngest child is nine months old now.  The weeks in leading up to having him I was majorly stressed.  I was eight months pregnant, we had just purchased a new home.  We moved and bought a new car within three weeks....and I had just started a new job 4-5 months prior.  I was also freaking out because this was going to be my third c-section and for whatever reason, I was convinced I would bleed out and die on the table (I read that each subsequent c-section presents higher risk, and I took that fact and ran with it I guess).  Night before the c-section I was a wreck.  Couldn't sleep, heart pounding.  Day of c-section nearly had a breakdown.  Nervous wreck.  Everything went beautifully.  I relaxed and thanked God, life seemed perfect.

That night, after the c-section, I'm trying to sleep in the hospital.  But I can't, because everytime I try to sleep some part of my body twitches and I wake up.  This goes on for two hours.  What the hell?  I call in a nurse and explain what's going on.  She looks at me like I'm crazy and tells me to "just relax".  Yeah, ok.  So I try that and literally go until 6 a.m. with this awful twitching.  I fear that I will never sleep again.  In the morning, I tell the doctor about what happened.  He tells me that he hasn't heard of something like that, but maybe it's just my hormones.  The next couple weeks, the twitching is in full force.  I become more or less an insomniac.  This causes me to have a nervous breakdown.  I start twitching during the day.  My hands and feet begin to tingle on and off.  I get brain shocks, dizzy at times, eye floaters develop in my right eye (which I've never had any eye floaters before this).  I begin to worry that my heart rate is too low (my resting HR is in the mid 50s) and that I'm not breathing properly.  I seriously feel like I'm going crazy.  I didn't want to get out of bed (even though I didn't sleep) to care for my kids, because I felt so awful and depressed.  I did end up going back to work six weeks postpartum and struggled through every day at work for months.  Bad thing about being in the healthcare profession...I would check my BP, HR, oxygen levels CONSTANTLY, obsessively.  And it threw me into even more of an anxious state.

Long(er) story short, things have calmed down since then.  The twitching comes and goes but altogether has calmed down.  The insomnia has ceased the past couple months.  I've thought I've had heart failure, parasites, a brain tumor, ALS, SFI, cancer, and a multitude of other things I can't even think of off the top of my head.  Although things have gotten better, I still have symptoms that come and go and I still question whether they can all really be related to anxiety...because I still don't really buy that.  I still feel at baseline depressed but I learn to smile through it and put on a happy face for my family.  But I feel that I've been robbed of these past nine months of my life, my time with my youngest child...and I don't want to live the rest of my life this way. 

Anyway, that intro was a lot longer than I had intended but that's me 

[camel]

Hello there, welcome to the site

Glad you found us. I know you will find plenty of information and support here.
Lots of people going through similar things here.

There is plenty to do around the forum as well as a great chat room (once you have 3 posts, and is for 18's and over only)

If you have any questions feel free to ask.

I look forward to seeing you around the site :-)