I honestly don't know what it was. Ever since I can remember I've been afraid of germs. When I was 4 or 5, I would scrub my hands and arms up to my elbows in the bathroom. I wouldn't eat out and I wouldn't eat anything I had to touch or others had touched. I wouldn't drink out of glasses because I was afraid a piece of glass would chip off and tear open my insides. At 5 years old!!!

I got so starved that my teachers (when I got into public school) were calling social services because they thought my parents were abusing me by not feeding me. They didn't think that a little child could have such a phobia of eating! I was sent to a child therapist and he too was absolutely baffled at my complex symptoms. He concluded that I was very intelligent, and picked up on things adults worry about, but I didn't have the emotional maturity to "make sense out of chaos" like adults can. Then at about 8 I v*d at school and I snapped. I refused to go to school, I refused to go anywhere without my parents, and started having massive panic attacks over just about anything. I didn't sleep at night. I remember banging my head against a wall hoping that it would kill me. It was bad.

I had some medical problems too. For about two years I would get strep throat nearly every other month. I also had severe chronic constipation, probably from being extremely anal retentive. My doctor now thinks I have a disorder called PANDAS that is caused by strep which for some reason causes emetophobia.