Begging doctors for tests, I worried that I was missing something and heading for an early death. Would understanding the roots of my health anxiety lead me to a cure?
Throughout my adolescence and into my mid-20s, I spent a lot of time trying to understand my body. I was unwell, that much was certain. The question of exactly what was wrong with me was one to which I applied myself studiously. I had theories, of course. Looking back, these tended to change quite frequently, and yet the fear was always the same: in short, that I was dying, that I had some dreadful and no doubt painful disease that, for all my worrying, I had carelessly allowed to reach the point at which it had become incurable.
This started at university, when I developed a headache that didn’t go away. The pain wasn’t severe, but it was constant – accompanied by a strange feeling of belatedness that told me it had already been going on for some time. How long, exactly, I couldn’t say – weeks, definitely. Maybe it had been years.
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