3rd March 2025
5 years on. I should be over this, right?
The passage of time was meant to make it easier, but I’m really not sure that it has.
I’ve alluded to my struggles with health anxiety in previous posts, but I am finding it harder than ever right now.
It is “the cancer legacy”.
I have dealt with many patients with health anxiety over the years and always understood that it was, at heart, “irrational”. I like to think I have always approached my patients with health anxiety with compassion, but I never fully understood it. Goodness me, I do now…
And it is crippling.
So what do you do, or how do you manage it, when that anxiety comes from a completely rational place?
As clinicians, we know that the last thing you want to do with a patient suffering with health anxiety is investigate…it fuels the anxiety, and often doesn’t alleviate the problem because it doesn’t provide an answer.
But that is exactly what I am asking for…further investigation.
A doctor, with health anxiety stemming from a missed cancer diagnosis, and negative experiences of healthcare in the process… it is a toxic cocktail.
You can throw every statistic at me to tell me that the odds are very much in my favour… 5 years out …very unlikely to have any further issue.
I will come right back at you and say “ah yes… but the odds of what happened to me were so remote – bowel cancer at 39, missed on scope and missed on scan – how do I possibly run with the concept that all is going to be ok?” How do I suddenly flip my statistical experience on its head? My anxiety is not irrational.
For the last few months, I have been living with an awful sense of impending doom. I have an unshakeable sense that there is “more” to come, and soon.
The storm clouds are gathering…it certainly feels that way…”impending doom”.
In previous posts I have mentioned that cancer changes you – I certainly procrastinate far less than I used to.
I can tell you something…
Nothing motivates you more than a sense of impending doom.
Home improvements have been expedited. I try and get everything done as soon as it appears, so that there is less that will need doing for when the sh*t hits the fan. There is a sense of urgency about every task.
In the whole delay to diagnosis, the one thing I had to go on was that I didn’t feel “right”. It anchored me then, sustained me, and I was proved correct.
And I just… don’t… feel… “right”.
For the best part of a year now I have had right sided lower abdominal pain and other symptoms that make me understandably worried. I’ve had a CT scan and it was normal. But as my consultant has said last month, “I guess that really doesn’t give you much reassurance does it?”
Correct.
The fact of the matter is I just don’t trust “normal” results. I find it equally hard to trust health professionals. I just can’t – not after what happened.
“You need to trust someone”, my consultant said.
Easier said than done.
So I do what I know to protect myself…
I remain ready…ultra ready.
I am prepared… very prepared…
With the current sense of impending doom, I am literally clutching “my box” – the box of emotional readiness for round 2. I spend so much of every day talking myself down, trying to provide rational explanations for the symptoms that I am experiencing. This in itself is exhausting.
The current state of affairs as I see it is a lose – lose situation:
I am right, and there is something wrong, or…
I am, to put it crudely, a fruitloop.
Neither exactly great outcomes.
And just to make it entirely clear, I have never thought of my patients so negatively, but as we all know, I don’t view myself as a patient, and I certainly don’t treat myself with the same compassion as I treat my patients.
I am terrified that my internal sense is wrong, because if I can’t trust my instincts, when I can’t trust results, or the system, where does that leave me? I do need to trust in something. Not being able to trust in myself and my assessments of my health when it was previously the only thing I had, is so distressing.
I’m not full of doom and gloom.
Certainly not.
I’m living life as full as I can (another bonus to that sense of impending doom). I’m trying so hard to be 100% present for my family and in life… but I just can’t blot it out, “doom” is lingering there, just over my shoulder.
100% presence requires 150% energy.
I’m living life to the full…but running on fumes…
But the odd thing is, I’m not scared about “more” – whatever that might be. I’ve been ready with my “box” for the last 5 years.
So if I’m not scared, why can’t I just crank down the volume on the intensity? I just want to be able to stand down on the “readiness”.
I’ll say it again…
Something that sounds so perverse…
That perhaps I think only people who have had cancer will understand…
Good news is simply … good news for now. But it is still uncertain.
I think many of us feel “it” will return. We don’t want it to – bad news is rubbish, but it is “certain”, there is something definitive in it.
A clear scan with continuing symptoms hasn’t helped me.
I’ve started seeing my psychotherapist again to try and work my way through this.
Going back to the binary outcomes mentioned before, maybe it’s not that I fear being a “fruitloop”. The other alternative to me being right, is that I am “wrong”.
Maybe that is what is so hard to accept as a possible outcome.
My therapist asked me why I thought it was so important to be “right“.
I think having spent the best part of four years tied up in legal proceedings with the Trust, needing to be “validated” after what happened, being “wrong” is something I just can’t entertain as a possibility.
This is a whole issue in itself which needs unpicking. I’m hoping therapy will help.
So with my zero energy levels, I am doing everything possible to distract myself by doing what I know best. I’m keeping busy…very busy… but it’s not really helping right now.
Photo credits:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-10/storm-clouds-roll-in-over-hampton-beach2c-victoria
https://www.sallybosleysbadgeshop.com
https://www.boizelle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Empty-Gas-Tank.jpg
