On Fear of Dying

[finch]

(cut for discussion of physical illness, please don't read if that will upset you)

My brain tumor diagnosis came completely out of the blue. The MRI was for my vertigo symptoms, purely a precaution, and on the wrong side to boot. Relatively quickly (within two weeks) I got a diagnosis of benign and a recommendation for brain surgery, and I immediately started worrying about all the ways surgery could kill me. (I had a panic attack at the hospital the morning of my surgery, but I think that's understandable.) Once I woke up afterward, I figured I was in the clear.

It wasn't until months after, when I was explaining to a coworker how the brain tumor was totally asymptomatic, that it occurred to me that it might have killed me without my ever having a symptom. It was in my brainstem, after all. Could have displaced the wrong thing and stopped my heart or my lungs before it ever gave me a seizure or a headache. (And hell, I'm prone to headaches as it is.)

I've had issues with panic attacks and health anxiety since I was a teen. (Whoever decided that panic attacks should present JUST LIKE HEART ATTACKS anyway?) For the longest time, my health scares were minor, and I was able to tell myself that it was probably nothing, and I should keep an eye on it, and it would go away. And it did, for the most part.

But now there's this obsessive thought that I get stuck with, that this wrong thing is still there, still in my brain, growing back. (And that's actually true; chances of recurrence are incredibly good.) And a few cells could come loose. Or it could happen to grow in a slightly different direction this time. And it could kill me at any time.

This is worse than virtually anything else I've dealt with before as far as health anxiety goes. It's a real thing, so I can't break the loop that way. It's slow growing, so there's no definite end or treatment in sight, unlike the wait for surgery. I've been trying to work on Buddhist meditations on mortality and that's helped a little, but not much.


Short version: Any advice for dealing with an obsessive fear of something that's real and possible and you can't do anything to mitigate? None of my coping mechanisms really cover it.

Thanks.

Comments

[untonuggan]

Okay, this is hard to explain via the internet (and it's so much better when trained professionals explain it). But here goes an explanation of how I deal with a lot of things.

There are a lot of things that I can worry about that are actually pretty shitty that might happen (or are even likely to). That's why the anxiety is so gripping - because I can't prove that it won't happen. There's some form of logic there, even though the average person might go, "That's ridiculous, why are you worried about that?"

I've heard anxiety referred to as a diva. Big attention getting drama-queen. And "she" wants to get your attention any way she can, so she'll put on all these different costumes (read: anxiety narratives about how I'm going to die) to get me to obsess over her. But even though they might happen - they're not real.

Part of this is a bit of the mindfulness meditation-style thinking of: "I know I'm having this anxiety and I'm going to name it as anxiety - 'just' anxiety. And it sucks right now but it will eventually go away."

Because just naming it as anxiety is like, okay, great, but I still feel like shit.

Second coping mechanism: the anxiety is going to make me feel like shit before it goes away. There's sort of an anxiety bell curve where all of this adrenaline and stuff gets released, and then eventually it reaches anxiety climax and other body chemicals I don't know the names of help clear away all the adrenaline to get you out of fight/flight land. Part of my dealing with anxiety is waiting for the anxiety to peak and go away on its own. (Sounds masochistic, huh?)

I've also heard it described that people with anxiety disorders don't have confidence that they can get through anxiety (because it is so terrible). So a lot of time we'll do things to try to mitigate the anxiety that end up avoiding the anxiety peak, and then our bodies' natural responses to decreasing it. Things like: having sex, watching an entire season of Star Trek in one day, self-injuring, drinking/doing drugs, reading wikipedia for hours, overeating, undereating, etc.

The trick (for me, not necessarily for everyone) is to endure the horrible, awful feelings of anxiety until they go away. And to tell myself over and over that it's "just" the anxiety diva, and that it will go away. I might do the occasional thing to calm down (listening to a song, meditating, petting my dog), but mainly I just try to get through it. It's awful - the feeling of the anxiety in my body is the worst, like someone is pouring caffeine into my bloodstream. But it does go away. I've managed to get through a panic attack with no medication (I was very proud).

This technique may not be for everyone, but I will say that I haven't been on anti-anxiety meds for a year and I haven't been depressed since December. I've had bouts of anxiety that really annoy me because I keep thinking "Oh yeah, I'm done with this, I don't need to worry about anxiety anymore" and then it'll bite me in the arse again. But overall I've had less anxiety, and it's been less terrible when it does happen.

Does that make sense at all?

[finch]

Yeah, that does make sense. The way you describe it reminds me of how I finally learned to deal with the vertigo, so I think I can take it and apply it to myself. Thanks. :)