Newbie mourning a missed opportunity (long-ish)
Hi, all. I've fought emetophobia for about 30 years (since I was about 8 or 9) and it's caused various degrees of distress. It's ebbed and flowed as I've gotten older; it pretty much ruined my fourth and fifth-grade years, but since then it's been more episodic than chronic. I've actually had good luck with avoiding illness; on average I've come down with digestive ailments about once every nine years. I take a lot of precautions, some of them seemingly ridiculous, but they have worked. By trade I'm a college teacher, and between dormitory living (with a lot of communal toilet spaces) and the usual casualness in hygiene habits, there's a lot of illness that goes around; most of the time I'm able to avoid it. I've also been able to avoid one or two instances when my husband came down with it (including once when we lived in a house with a single bathroom). I don't know if it's good hygiene or good luck or both.
Anyway, what's driven me here to finally talk about it began at the end of March. One Saturday morning my husband started showing the symptoms of whatever's been making the rounds, stayed in bed a long time that morning, felt like crap all day, made the mad dash to the toilet that afternoon where he v* once; he seemed to feel better, but slept the rest of the day. By midday Sunday he was up and around; he nibbled on something that afternoon and got better from there. I got nervous, of course, but managed to be matter-of-fact about it. I don't think I took as many precautions as I could have, and that led to what happened next day - chances are I caught it during that immediate period after.
So the next day I started to feel n* when I was getting ready for work, had several episodes of n* but no other symptoms except a fluttery stomach, but managed to calm myself down and get through a long day at work. I thought it was just nerves, but the next morning I had sudden onset of d* after a normal toilet visit (and a full breakfast), and the bloating started, accompanied by weird feeling in my esophagus. Kept burping, and couldn't really make it stop. Didn't v* but had the feeling if I moved too much or too fast, I would. Had incredibly bad headache, felt like I'd been run over; worst fatigue I'd had in a long time. Had no interest in anything, which for me is unusual. Spent most of the day wanting to move as little as I could, and sleeping as much as I could. Got a little anxious because you wonder how long it's going to last. When my husband came home he talked with me for a while and that calmed me down, made me feel better. Between that and knowing when his major symptoms had hit and subsided, I watched the clock and kept telling myself I was that much closer to being better. The next day I woke up feeling some better, could finally move without feeling sick by midday, and was feeling hungry. My appetite didn't come back until that night, and then I knew I was getting better. The next day I felt better than I'd felt in ages, and later that day gave the house the best cleaning it'd had in ages, did the laundry, Lysol-ed the daylights out of everything.
So things have been going rather well since, and I've stayed well - at least physically. But this being the worst I'd been sick in many years, it rattled me, especially how suddenly this hit me and laid me low. It's left me with more than a little anxiety, and it's flared up at inopportune moments. Most of the time I've managed to ward off the anxiety by distracting myself, or thinking about "you haven't been around anyone who's been showing symptoms," or things like that. In a controlled environment, that works. But what drove me here is what happened this past week, and it's left me sad because it's the "missed opportunity" in my title.
Each year I go to Seattle and spend a few days there with a close friend; it's the one time each year we know we'll see each other, and it's always fun. About a week before the trip, during the course of one of our conversations, he told me he'd been sick the night before. He doesn't know I'm emetophobic (this is about the first time I've told anyone, in this forum), and he told me in the way you tell a friend you had a cold or something, so he didn't mean any harm. That was playing in the back of my mind in the whole run-up to the trip. But the first couple days there were a lot of fun and we had a grand old time.
Come Monday afternoon, after lunch, and we were out running an errand. I started to feel weak in my knees while standing. Now, logic tells me it was from all the walking we'd done in a very hilly downtown the previous two days. But my mind ran away with it and up comes this fear: not only of getting sick, but getting sick thousands of miles from home. Then come the symptoms that you don't know if they're real or imaginary: the n*, etc. It also didn't help that within an hour, one of my Facebook friends posted that she'd come down with a virus and was on the Sprite-and-jell-o diet for the next day or so. Not what I needed at that moment. What should have been a wonderful four days, I spent the last half trying to keep myself calmed down, sometimes more successfully than others. Intellectually I knew I was at very little risk, and kept trying to tell myself that (you're tired from walking; your friend's out of the contagion period; you've taken all the proper hygiene precautions, so why worry?) but all those darn "what if?" questions kept popping up. I'd spend hours in my hotel room each morning trying to keep the fear tamped down. The plane ride home was alternately fun and torture - I love to fly, but when I couldn't keep myself amused and distracted I kept having to fight the thoughts that were tumbling over each other, and felt trapped. That doesn't happen to me on a normal basis.
I'm now back home and am dealing with my feelings. I have another trip coming up in a month (my first visit to NYC ever), and I'll be away for five days, and I want to get my mind back in the right place before then. I don't want to ruin that trip because it promises to be truly special. I'm also trying to head off the "fear of being afraid" that feeds on itself, and that did so my last two days in Seattle. I keep thinking back to those two days - and what beautiful days they were - and how I squandered them by worrying needlessly. But it's that sudden onset of what got me in March that keeps haunting me, and the fear that if it was like that when I was home, then being so far away if it happened would be far worse. Plus I'm frustrated, because for so long I could get by without having the thoughts even cross my mind, but, again, what happened in March rattled me. I know it shouldn't, and I'm working on it, but as we all know some days are better than others. Some days I feel great, and some days I wonder if the next bug is lurking around the corner ready to pounce. From reading on here, I know I'm not alone. I've felt better since reading a lot of the stuff on here, but I also never know when the next bout of fear may be about to pounce, too. I'm trying to arm myself with facts and logic, which seem to work, as well as thinking about all the instances I've dodged; between that and my awareness of good hygiene, the odds are on my side. Now, to get the emotional side of my brain to concur is the challenge.
Anyway, I post that more to vent than anything. Thanks for reading, and for understanding, and forgive this newbie for going on at length. It does feel better to just up and say it, instead of having it just rattle around in my head.
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