The giant blue wave sucks in houses, trees, buildings, anything it can get its hands on. It swallows my childhood playground, years of swinging on swing sets and dancing on the yellow balance beams, lost forever. My eyes fixate helplessly from my bedroom window as the wave creeps up on my home. Strangely, no one in my family is panicking or making escape plans. Silence echoes throughout the apartment. It's just me, standing motionlessly as the powerful, unrelenting monster destroys everything I know. The wave is coming, rolling over the apartments across the street. I wait there, accepting my fate, my heart exploding, and my breath freezing. Just as it reaches me, my eyes flutter open.
I am staring at my white bedroom ceiling.
I have had this recurring nightmare for three years now, ever since returning to in-person high school after a global pandemic, which left me extremely paranoid about catching diseases. It’s no coincidence that my anxiety started getting worse around this time. Every cough, every muscle ache, every heart palpitation meant I was dying. I convince myself that I am dying, that there is nothing I can do. My body is a ticking bomb, and it’s only a matter of time before the doctor tells me I have a terminal illness.
These aren’t the thoughts an eighteen-year-old girl who successfully finished her first year of college should be thinking about. I should be breezily enjoying my summer vacation, relishing the joy of calling friends and making plans. Instead, I’m searching, “Signs you have colon cancer” on the internet.
The hypochondriac’s first reaction to discomfort is to go on Google. Let’s say that I have pain on the left side of my abdomen. I’ll ask, “Why does the left side of my abdomen hurt?” Google will give me a list of possibilities, each worse than the last. A myriad of gastrointestinal issues, ulcers, kidney infections, appendicitis, pancreatic cancer, and the list goes on. My breaths quicken immediately, my arms lose their feeling, and I have the nauseating sensation that I am falling, falling down a never-ending dark hole.
It’s all my own doing. No one pushed me down this claustrophobic hole, just my mind.
Going to an actual doctor? As if!
My family and I traveled to Ecuador for Christmas break a few months ago. Switching from my normal diet to heavy Ecuadorian food did wonders for my stomach. First came the gases, diarrhea, and then constipation as the cherry on top. I hadn’t worried too much about the gas or diarrhea because I usually got them when I visited Ecuador. But when the constipation lasted for five days, alarm bells went off in my head and I rushed to Google.
As expected, I got horrible results. Colon cancer, inflammatory diseases, I know them all. I repeatedly begged my mom to buy me a laxative. She gave in to my annoying pleas and handed me a teaspoon of magnesium milk. I expected this to work in minutes—it did nothing.
My mom, brother, and I were staying at a vacation house in the country. While they enjoyed the comfortable linen sheets and lush green mountain landscape in the front garden, I kept rushing to the bathroom in hopes of shitting. Nothing happened. My stomach started aching, and at that point, I was full-on panicking. I ran to my mom, who solved puzzles with my brother in the garden of the vacation house, urging her to take me to the doctor because something was seriously wrong with me.
“Calm down, hija,” she said, touching my arm. “Just be patient.”
“But my stomach hurts!” I insisted, on the verge of tears. What was wrong with me? From my brother’s perspective, I was acting like a dramatic, whiny girl.
“You’re gonna die,” he said meanly, fitting a puzzle piece into the almost complete picture of a koi fish.
“Shut up!” I screeched with teary eyes, producing annoying laughter from my brother.
My mom, creasing her forehead and chastizing my older sibling for his insensitivity, told me she’d call for a taxi to take us to the hospital in the city.
“Thanks for ruining our time here,” my brother shot with a scowl on his face as we got in the taxi. Although I hated abruptly ending our stay, I was more concerned about the disease affecting my stomach.
We made it to the hospital, my mom walking beside me and my brother begrudgingly moving behind. A medical assistant who was seeing patients for a consultation before their appointment greeted us and asked about the problem. My mom explained the situation while I stood ashamed by her side like a five-year-old. The assistant invited us into a room where he told me to lie down on a bed. My brother stayed in the waiting room. The assistant felt my stomach and pressed down hard, asking me if I had any pain. I shook my head. The assistant stopped at the lower left side of my abdomen.
“I feel something here,” he said.
A tumor? A stone?
“There is a buildup of stool here. She has what is called a fecal impaction, when a large stool is stuck in the rectum. We might have to give her an enema.”
My mother’s face paled. “What? Is that really necessary?”
I started feeling light-headed. What the hell was an enema? The medical assistant explained that it’s a device inserted up the rectum to suck the lodged stool from your butt. My stomach flipped over at the idea of having to go through something so humiliating and potentially painful.
And then I felt it. THE URGE.
The medical assistant showed me where the bathroom was and he pointed to a brown wooden door, where I promptly headed to relieve myself. As I sat on that toilet, all I could think was thank you God for loosening my bowels.
Embarrassment warmed my cheeks as we left the hospital. I couldn’t face my mother or brother, who were both silent.
“If you’d only been patient, we could’ve stayed at the vacation house. Getting so anxious over nothing,” she said.
I couldn’t muster anything to say back. She was right. I’d let anxiety completely overtake my thoughts and spiral into a hundred worst-case scenarios. We hailed a cab to where we were staying, and I remembered something that may have started my insanity.
...
Seven years ago, I experienced what it was like to lose complete control.
Seven years ago, my family and I traveled to Ecuador for summer vacation, as we usually did. Because we traveled to Ecuador often and stayed there for about a month, my parents decided to rent an apartment for when we visited. The building was pretty tall, holding fifteen floors and a wide terrace overlooking the northern city of Quito. I loved going there early in the morning because of the gorgeous view of the snowy tip of the Cotopaxi volcano.
That summer day, my family and I had returned from a dinner at one of my mother’s friends’ houses. The sky was already dark, and most people in the building had returned from their long work day. I headed to the bathroom. Just as I was about to go, I noticed that the towel on the rack in front of me was shaking. I stared at it for a couple of seconds, confused at why it would be moving of its own accord. It must be the wind, I figured. Scanning around the bathroom, it hit me that there was no window.
“Earthquake!” my mother yelled from outside. Only then did I notice that the toilet I sat on was shaking. I jumped to my feet, lifted my pants, and dashed out of the bathroom while my brother and cousin followed my mother outside the apartment to the stairs. Everyone on my floor rushed upstairs to the terrace. My heart hammered in my ears as I darted up the wobbly stairs, trying my best not to fall over anyone. I was so close to vomiting, but my fear overpowered my nausea. The building swayed, tripping me. My brother gripped my arm and pulled me upright, his palms damp with sweat.
By the time we made it to the terrace, the earthquake stopped. I stared off at the distant golden city lights, catching my breath and watching as several people cried around me and comforted their loved ones. Many of them were still traumatized from a powerful earthquake that hit three months ago. What my family and I experienced was one of the aftershocks. The earthquake was over, but I still trembled. I’d never experienced such a terrifying, debilitating sensation before. You have no control over anything. You are at the mercy of nature’s will.
Upon returning to the US that summer, I was convinced that I was going to have a heart attack because my arm and chest hurt, unaware that they were physical symptoms of anxiety. My fingers constantly typed “possibilities of earthquake in NJ” on my iPad screen.
Now, seven years later, the constipation incident left me reflecting for a while after returning home. I confronted the fact that it’s not normal to be excessively paranoid about your health, to feel like you are drowning in a flood of worry. I also confronted the fact that I didn’t want to live my youth away by being worried about things I couldn’t control: nightmares, diseases, and natural disasters. But what I realized I could control was how I chose to face those things.
So, I’ve started accepting how being a hypochondriac affects my life. It makes me restless and paranoid every time I find that a healthy celebrity has passed away from a tragic illness. What if that happens to you? an evil voice whispers in my mind. I went to a therapist and talked about it. She made me aware of how my hypochondria is just another symptom of my overall anxiety. Something that I have to face daily, but I’m trying not to drown.
Just this morning, I researched “What is the likelihood of breast cancer in young adults?” Of course, the information Google gave me increased my panic and squeezed nervous sweat out of me. But what did I expect to happen? A magical assurance of NO, YOU WILL NEVER GET BREAST CANCER.
Life isn’t like that. We can never predict or know what is going to happen to us. But if I ever see someone I love go through something terrible, or if I go through something terrible, I don’t want to thrash and cry about my problem. I need to face it head-on because I believe that is the only way to come out strong on the other side.
The anxieties haven’t engulfed me in an endless ocean of worry yet, or else I wouldn’t be writing this. I’d be standing by my bedroom window, despairing over a problem that is out of my control, and let it become so massive that it kills my peace of mind.
I will escape the wave before it reaches me.
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