“I think I’m Going Blind!” – and Other Anxieties

Floaters!

It started a few weeks ago. I was noticing floaters in my eyes.

If you’ve had floaters before, you know what I mean. The squiggly lines, specks, and cobwebs happily floated across my vision as I went through my daily life. If I looked at a computer screen, they would all show up and drift to the right. If I moved my eyes this way or that, they would move too… sometimes to the right, sometimes up, sometimes down, across my field of vision.

Then there was “The Blob.” The Blob bothered me more than the other floaters. It was bigger, slower-moving, and caused blurry vision in whatever part of my eye it happened to be in. If it was in front of the clock, for example, the whole clock would look blurry.

I started to worry that it wasn’t just floaters. Maybe it was cataracts.

I began researching all possible eye problems. Was it macular degeneration? I found a home test that I could take to see if it was. I don’t think it was that, but then, who knows if I had not taken the test correctly?

Maybe I was going blind.

Should I worry?

Now, I’ve had floaters before. I’m very near-sighted. I’ve been getting them for a few years. I’ve made trips to the ophthalmologist twice in the past to get floaters checked.

Actually, the floaters that were bothering me may have been there for a long time. But I’d had other things going on and didn’t pay much attention to them. But once I started to notice them… they were all I could think about. I obsessed over them. I woke up in the morning thinking about them. I thought about them all day long.

What if I was going blind???

I wasn’t completely without reasons to worry. One of my relatives had a retinal detachment years ago. It was an emergency that required immediate surgery. One of the symptoms is a multitude of floaters.

Finally, I did the only thing I could do to stop worrying: I went to the ophthalmologist.

I was very nervous. My heart rate felt like it was about 200. What if he tells me that my eyes are in such bad condition that I’m not even allowed to drive home today?

Guess what? The ophthalmologist examined my eyes, and you know what? I have floaters. My eyes are healthy. I need to learn to ignore them.

Ignore Them

You see, floaters never really go away. You learn to ignore them. Your brain learns to work around them. Sometimes they settle at the bottom of your eyes or in a place where you just don’t see them anymore. But they don’t ever really go away.

So you have to learn not to let them bother you.

Which can’t be done if you are obsessively worrying about them. For them to stop being so bothersome, you have to learn to forget about them.

This is certainly not the first time that my anxiety has caused physical problems made worse by my inability to stop thinking about them and leave them alone.

What Else Can I Worry About?

Recently I decided to start worrying (again) about an enlarged lymph node in my neck. It’s been there for at least two and a half years. I don’t actually know how long it’s been there, I only know that one day in the summer of 2021, I noticed it was there. It could have been there for ages.

I got an ultrasound on my neck, and they saw no reason to worry. Sometimes, they say, a lymph node swells up due to an infection and then doesn’t ever go back to its normal size.

So I stopped worrying.

Then this past fall, I found out that someone I know has cancer. The only symptom was a lump in his neck. I decided to start worrying about my swollen lymph node again.

I didn’t just worry about it. I started poking it, prodding it, making sure it was moving around (which is a good sign) and that it wasn’t getting bigger.

I didn’t just poke and prod that one lymph node. I started poking and prodding all over my neck. Regularly. For a couple of months.

And then, the unthinkable happened: I discovered two more swollen lymph nodes!

Now I was really freaking out. And, of course, I had to poke and prod those newly swollen lymph nodes even more.

A Self-Inflicted Problem

Then I suddenly thought to do an internet search to see if it’s possible to cause your own lymph nodes to swell by poking and prodding them all the time. The answer (according to many testimonies I found on the internet) was yes, if you are constantly irritating your lymph nodes, you can make them swell up.

I had to stop!! I just had to stop!

I tried. I set a goal. I was going to try not to touch it for so many days. I was going to try to leave it alone.

And I did my best. I failed. I still touched them. But I touched them a whole lot less. And I was gentler when I did touch them (I think!).

Then, mercifully, I became preoccupied with something else (I don’t remember what). And a coupe of weeks later… those two new swollen lymph nodes were back to normal.

The original swollen lymph node is still there, and probably always will be.

Yes, you can really drive yourself crazy and make things much worse by worrying.

Dr. Google… Helping while Making You Crazy

Dr. Google can be very helpful sometimes, but it can also make you completely crazy.

So, what to do? The problem is that bad things do happen sometimes. If we didn’t know people who really did have a retinal detachment, or cancer, or other serious problems, we wouldn’t worry. But sometimes people do get bad news. To make matters worse, sometimes it’s important to catch the problem early so that it doesn’t get worse. So, you can’t just ignore every symptom all the time.

When it comes to “health anxiety,” there isn’t any point in obsessing and worrying endlessly. You’re only wasting time.

I’m not a doctor. I can’t tell you what to do. But I can tell you that in my experience, making a plan seems to work best.

Having a Plan

For example, telling myself that I was going to leave my swollen lymph nodes alone for a certain amount of time before worrying about them again, really did help. I still had trouble leaving them alone, but I touched them much less frequently. Eventually, I got busy worrying about other things. I didn’t decide to ignore the lymph nodes indefinitely, which would have been unwise. But knowing that the problem may have been self-inflicted and might go away on its own, I made a plan to back off for a certain amount of time and then check back later.

Encouragement

I enjoy listening to other people’s stories. It is so encouraging to know that even when the diagnosis and the prognosis were not what they hoped for, life did not come to an end. There was still hope, there was still joy, and there was still purpose in living. Sometimes we have to make adjustments, but that doesn’t mean that the “new normal” will be worse than the “old normal.”

Here is a short blog post by someone with multiple sclerosis. The title of this post is “An Abundant Life.” She did not stop living when the news wasn’t good!

https://altheadamgaard.substack.com/p/keep-it-moving-194

Your Turn… Any Ideas?

So, what do you do? When you feel anxious or begin obsessing over something you’re worried about, what do you do? Do you have any particular strategies that help you to calm down and move forward peacefully?

Let us know in the comments!