Extreme anxiety about your own health (hypochondria) is a common symptom of grief and can affect anyone. In fact, since starting my grief blog over five years ago following the sudden death of my eldest child, my post regarding my battle with health anxiety is always in the top three list. It’s also a popular search term that people use to find my blog.
My life with health anxiety started as soon as I conceived my first child in 2000. I would pour over pregnancy manuals and magazines. Realising how fragile a pregnancy was and how hard it was to get to the end with a healthy baby, I focused on the things that could go wrong—so much so that I often felt ill. I made it through without problems, despite me worrying about them.
The early maternal anxiety paled into insignificance when my daughter was born. Now I was solely tasked with feeding and raising this tiny, vulnerable human. (My husband was a fantastic support, too, but I’m talking here about my view.) I was expected to nourish her, protect her from obvious harm, and second-guess when she cried or got ill how serious it was. Being a mother means being on permanent alert to danger. I sometimes woke from nightmares about something happening to me, or worse my daughter being hurt or killed… I never got past that point in my dream because I’d wake up in sheer panic.
Related: Getting Anxiety In Check
Yet, in time, I calmed and felt more confident in my abilities and instincts. I went on to have two more children. I had PTSD following the birth of my second child which added to my stress, but I’d sussed this parenting thing, and over time the anxiety, while ever present, was low and manageable.
Then our precious first born, the one who’d taught me how to be a mother, who made us a family, died suddenly, tragically, taken by a catastrophic brain haemorrhage at just age 12. Any shred of certainty left that day, as I cried out in terror about how I couldn’t save my baby girl.
When your stability is destroyed, it’s understandable that your mind will be traumatised. Fears around death begin to take over every waking moment.
As I slowly adjusted to the life of grief, I noticed an extreme relentless anxiety that plagued my every waking hour and haunted my sleep. I obsessed about my own health, feeling my heart flutter in my chest, noticing every lump or mark on my skin, dizzy spells and blurred vision. Oh, now I had symptoms!
Related: PTSD and Coping
And once you start getting anxious, it breeds more anxiety. It takes a strong mind and professional support to overcome the feelings and get the rational mind working again…
But, in grief, there’s no reserve for strength, all you can do is submit.
There is no pill.
There is no one who can tell you that you’ll be ok and the chances of “such and such” happening is “low”… I know all about chance! My daughter’s haemorrhage was one in a million. Chance came into my home and ripped my heart out!
Having another baby a year after the death of my daughter was a huge blessing and distraction, but it didn’t help my anxiety which now included all those maternal new mother worries as well as my grief. It took a long while for me to finally submit to the offer of medication; however, I only felt more comfortable about it because it wasn’t for grief, it was for postnatal anxiety. And it helped.
I went on to have another baby and was on medication the entire pregnancy and after, which only created more anxiety. I battled with guilt for potentially harming my precious second rainbow baby. My anxiety was so severe after my fifth child’s birth that I had numerous hospital tests. My heart was simply not coping. In the painfully long end, they couldn’t find a medical reason for my symptoms and signed it off as a “pregnancy-related reaction”. Not one medical specialist linked my physical symptoms to my emotional trauma. The cardiologist even told me to come off my antidepressants because I “didn’t look depressed”. Thankfully I ignored his “advice”. I’m sure he’s very good at healing sick hearts, but not broken hearts.
I stopped taking the pills six months ago, and it was a very long process to get off them; if I tried too fast my mind and body panicked. I felt ready though and have felt, in the main, ok. I have shorter periods of panic when I stop and think about how any one of my children or us could die at any moment. The other night I couldn’t sleep because, in the heat of the summer, I was stressing about my children getting chest and throat infections this coming winter, anticipating the hyped news headlines about deadly viruses and overstretched health services. I felt overwhelmed at the thought of having to be strong, clear-headed, and calm. Then to my shame, I wondered why I had my children because my life feels like one long anxiety attack.
Related: Parenting After Loss — Handling Fear and Anxiety
Most of the time I try to remind myself that the worry is always worse than the illness. Why? Because it destroys us inside; it steals our joy and takes up so much of our precious time. Hard times will come and so will those times that, to others, might not seem so hard, but to me will be just as stressful. I will deal with them because I have to. But I don’t want anxiety to rob me or my family of joy.
“Can anyone of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” Matthew 6:27
Image credit: @yeahitschill https://www.instagram.com/yeahitschill/
Photo by Niklas Hamann on Unsplash
Kelly, I can relate to this.
From the time my oldest daughter was 8 months old, she was diagnosed with epilepsy. Cat scans were done and would always come back normal -yet her seizures would be severe.
She was much like any child, ( I can’t help breaking, “was”), smart, playful, and absolutely carefree.
Her seizures would come and go, and there would be long periods of time, she would not have any. So, when they would hit, sometimes it would be a simple, ‘cutting teeth’ to a full on virus. They were sporadic and random. With no hope of getting to the source, and praying she grew out of them.
Sometimes she could be outside playing, getting overheated, and sometimes not. Many-a-nights, in the hospital I would fall on my face.
She lived until she was nine. The last period of her life, she may of had 3 seizures within the last four years.
May 6th of 2018 would be the last seizure she would ever go into. I find myself asking God why? What did I do to deserve something like this and then I simply come to, we have absolute no control over our lives -or our families.
We can not turn one hair grey or white, we do not prolong our lives, and we can not even save a life, when it comes down to it.
I homeschooled. It was like I always knew this would happen. Like God had been setting me up for this, ever since she was born. So I kept her close. Too close.
I didn’t realize this until her viewing. When many would come up to me telling me, they had wished they would of gotten the chance to know her. I kept her to myself, in fear of ever losing her…
Anxiety, I feel is something I am coping with now. Any little thing and my chest knots up, as though I lose my breath.
I love the Lord, with all my heart, soul, and mind. Ever since this has taken place within our lives, I can not help to want to be with them both.
I have three other little ones, and a wonderful husband, but I still find myself wanting to be with her. Some of us here, and some of us there…
Thanks so much for your post. I have had a miscarriage, but after getting to hold, know, and love a child -after a maternal bond has been made, and then they are taken away… I truly would not wish this upon my worst enemy. Truly.
I sympathize with moms who can not conceive and have had to hold a stillborn. My heart breaks for them also. I know it is hard. We all have our own 6 word novel. Mine would be, “third-grade, your rose, I’m sorry.”
All I can say is, I will do the only thing that is within my control. That is, ‘try’ to love without the worry of loss -as we have no control over anything. Follow God, piss off satan, and try my hardest ‘without suicide’, to get back to her…
Anyways, thanks for sharing -I can relate, deeply.
Tamara Grace-
Oh wow Tamara, absolutely with you on all that! Just holding on, hoping, praying, waiting, while trying not to go crazy. I’m so sorry you have experienced such loss, and spent so long on this knife-edge of anxiety. A mother carries it all, but God carries us. Much love thank you so much for helping me feel a bit more normal too, in my ‘abnormality’ xxx