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hey everyone! i’m pretty sure i’ve had anxiety my whole life - i was always a very nervous and anxious kid, worrying about things that most kids don’t even think about - as well as OCD. but it really only became a hindrance on my daily life about nine years ago now. my sister fell down the stairs and had a traumatic brain injury and ended up being in the hospital in a medically induced coma for four days. after that, i could barely function, so i started going to therapy and they diagnosed me with GAD and OCD. i am currently on 15mg of Paroxetine and it helps a lot. a majority of my anxiety is health related, probably because i spent a good amount of the first 10 years of my life in and out of the hospital for surgeries. i have convinced myself of having a myriad of different things - diabetes, breast cancer, an un-ruptured aneurysm, colon cancer, just to name a few. it feels silly looking back and typing all of this out, but one of my biggest fears is getting sick and dying. i figured being able to write things out and have somewhere to vent and talk to others who are going through similar things would be good for me.

I'm lost. I had gotten on medication and things were fine but over the past few days they've gone down hill. I was watching a movie with my wife and a woman mentioned she had hpv, the women then said, "Well yeah we've all had hpv." I I immediately went to google and found that it can cause warts and multiple types of cancers. Since then I've questioned my wife about her history knowing shes only had one other sexual experience which was her rapist when she was 11 years old, I cant imagine how I made her feel asking if her rapist had given ger hpv. I felt terrible. But I kept going convinced I had gotten it from a girl I briefly kissed, or a stranger who had kissed my wife. If my mind wasn't on HPV, it was on the fact that i may have sleep apena because a friend of mine made a post about her daughter who has down syndrome that had a sleep study and found she had sleep apena. I know if I hear another disease itll start all over. Now I'm left wondering is this my life? Am I just going to spend my life worrying, driving myself crazy and waiting to die? please someone help me.

I don't know if anyone really knows about the subject but I'm terrfied of getting head and throat cancer from HPV. A couple months ago i was here with fear of als. It crippled me, i was in bed for weeks. My mom finally took me to the hospital, i was prescribed ablifiy and hydralazine. I had to stop abilify due to losing insurance. Now im here. 4 years ago some woman pushed my wife against a wall and gave her an open mouth kiss. There was no sexual activity whatsoever. Just a kiss that lasted seconds. Idk that person so I have no way of knowing if they have hpv. My wife isn't concerned but I AM. Since oral cancer can be spread through oral sex and I have no way of knowing if this woman had oral sex with someone who had hpv and spread it to my wife and in turn to me. I am terrfied of getting head and throat cancer and as of know there is no sure way to test for hpv inside mouth. I am scared and right back to where I was. Can anyone help me ? Please. I have only ever had one sexual partner as has my wife.

Hi all, I'm new here but have struggled with anxiety for 10 years or so (since high school). Just looking for some support! My anxiety has waxed and waned over the years. I'm cutrently 12 weeks postpartum and my anxiety has really been kicked into overdrive since about 5 weeks postpartum. I cannot stop thinking that something terrible is going to happen to me and that I am going to leave my little girl all alone. Something catastrophic. Like my husband will come home from work and find me passed out or dead on the floor and our little girl will have been crying there for hours. I keep feeling weird sensations in my stomach. Sometimes it's a like a tightening or a muscle twitching sensation (the sensation seems to move around- sometimes in upper abdomen, other times lower). Other times it feels like all the blood is draining out of my stomach and my blood pressure is going down and I'm going to pass out. I've checked my blood pressure though, even when I'm standing and it is basically fine. I also feel really dizzy and off balance a lot of the day, which is a sensation I've had in the past and has come and go over the years. Ive never had an MRI for it, not sure if I should. I'm currently working with a naturopath and have had a ton of labs done and am getting all my hormones looked at. I get so anxious about these sensations though. I feel shaky a lot and am high alert throughout the day. I feel like I'm constantly scanning my body. I feel like health anxiety has taken over my life and it's hard for me to care for my little girl. I just want to be normal and to enjoy her! I have started seeing a counselor who will be starting alpha-stim with me next week. I'm also going to try the whole 30 diet as my midwife suggested this could help. I do have a prescription for Zoloft but I'm holding off as long as I can as I am breast-feeding. I'm thinking about trying medical hypnosis as well. Anyone have experience with these kinds of sensations or postpartum health anxiety? Should I go to the hospital and demand an MRI of my head and an ultrasound of my abdomen? In the past week I've convince myself I have worms, pancreatitis, pancreatic cancer, and aortic aneurysm, and a brain tumor. I feel like a crazy person.

Hi! I'm Seb! 22 y/o who has a has a whole slew of anxiety - although the thing that has been unfortunately reared its ugly head is my fear of ALS. Just a little bit of background, I'm not new to hypochondria, I've had it for about 3-4 years now and when it sprang up I visited other sites, such as the now closed AnxietyZone to try and get help, which I did, and meeting people who had the same fears and worries that I did helped me a great deal and in fact was the push that I needed to get my fears under control for about a year and a half. Sadly though, I've found myself falling back into some old fears, and I have been struggling with trying to deal with it alone. This all started about a week ago - when I started to experience a whole slew of twitching across my ribs, mainly one spot in particular just underneath my arm. Now I've been twitching for years and while I've never actually seen a doctor about it - I've been fairly sure that I have BFS as nothing has ever really come of any of the twitching and they tend to bounce from place to place with hotspots every so often (I've even had a hotspot on my tongue for a few weeks!) I was content to ignore it when I got a nasty cramp across the left side of my neck and shoulder in the wee hours of the morning, which .. I tried not to think to much about - until my brain oh so helpfully reminded me that while rare, A** can manifest starting across the shoulder and back. So for the past few days it seems like my left shoulder is tense and I can feel the muscles and every little twinge or twitch so much more acutely that it has driven me bonkers. I've done everything that I can to try to not feed my fears and worries, such as keeping myself preoccupied and not looking to Mr.Google for answers (which sadly doesn't help so much when you've already read the information in the past). The only thing I haven't done is actually gone to a doctor about this, which unfortunately I cannot do. It is frustrating because I know looking at it from a purely logical standpoint - that the chances of it being what I fear as so astronomically low that I probably have a better shot at winning the lottery, and I repeat this to myself, but I struggle to chase the fear away and I'm very angry at myself to find that I've fallen so far back, when I'd made so much progress with my anxiety (at least with my hypochondria.) Any and all advice would be appreciated, thank you for your time.