Status
Not open for further replies.

JBreic

New member
Joined
Feb 3, 2018
Messages
1
Reason
Other
Country
US
State
MD
City
Westminster
Hey everyone. So a few years ago I was convinced I had ALS, and one of the only things that calmed me down was coming to forums like this and reading about other people's experiences. Although intellectually I knew it was most likely my anxiety causing the symptoms, it's hard not to panic when you look up the symptoms of ALS and feel like your body is doing exactly what they describe. I always told myself that if I ended up being okay I would come back to one of the forums I used to read and share my experience in an attempt to help someone feel better the way others did back when I was worried. It ended up taking me four years to come back because I was so traumatized by the experience, but tonight seems like a good night to share my story.

I've dealt with anxiety and depression my entire life, and it's always at its worst in the winter. It was a cold, snowy January day and I became convinced that the bump near my grown was some form of cancer cancer, and that the brown spot on my lip was skin cancer (Ron Howard voice: it wasn't). This shot my anxiety through the roof and I started twitching. When I looked up twitching, ALS showed up and I started reading the symptoms. The next thing I knew my left arm felt weak/it was in constant pain. At this point I'm in complete panic mode. I'm telling my family that I think I have ALS and scheduling appointments with doctors. About a week into this ordeal I was watching an episode of True Detective and a particularly tense scene trigged my anxiety (I was already feeling anxious, so why I thought it was a good idea to watch True Detective is unclear). At this point, I started to feel like I couldn't move my tongue/couldn't swallow. I was now convinced I had ALS.

I went to the doctor and they gave me basically no information. They said it could be a million different things. At this point it was really starting to impact my life. I was in my last semester of college. I should have been having fun and enjoying it but instead I was worrying I was dying. I was too anxious to go out. People in my life thought I was going crazy. It lasted for months. I walked across the stage at graduation thinking about my symptoms. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't fully enjoy a moment I had worked so hard for. Every time I would think about a symptom it would appear.

Finally I found some message boards like this one where people were talking about their experiences. I still wasn't convinced, but it made me feel better knowing how many people thought they had this terrible disease but were really just suffering from anxiety. By the summer I was pretty confident that I didn't have it. My OCD was still out of control and every day I would tell myself over and over "it's been ____ months since you started twitching." The further away from the start date I got the better I felt. It all seems so ridiculous in retrospect, but it was very real at the time.

My heart goes out to all of the people who truly are suffering from this terrible disease. It's been four years, and now I barely twitch, but guess what? Since I've started writing this post, I've twitched several times. Just the thought of that period causes the symptoms to reappear. I hope that someone reading this can find some comfort in these words. You are okay, I promise. I know it doesn't seem like it, but this will end and you'll get on with your life. There are sunny days ahead.
 
Thank you so much for this post! I think it could be a sticky so people finding their way here with health anxiety can read that they're most likely okay from someone who's been through the same thing.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top