Ironically, because I hardly ever got sick, I developed hypochondria. Hypochondria (or officially: Hypochondriasis) is the fear of getting, or having, a serious (mostly lethal in my case) disease, disorder etc. You might wonder what on earth this has to do with the main subject of my Blog (GBS), but trust me, in my case this matters.
Whenever I felt a pinch in my stomach, short chest pains, or anything I couldn't (or even could) explain, I was positive that something was very, very wrong and nobody could tell me otherwise. This is also the time I started Googling for symptoms. I can tell you from experience that this is not always a very well thing to do, because you always appear to find the worst possible outcome, while often your fear is based on nothing. Not always, because in my case you will find that sometimes it does indeed come in hand.
One of the 'symptoms' of hypochondria, or at least for me, is that you look everything up on the Internet. As a side effect of doing so, over time you become a medical professional. At least you tend to think so and so do people around you. Even though I can not emphasize enough that you should always visit a real doctor, and I have no official medical education, sometimes people would ask me 'I have these symptoms, what could it be?'. Often I knew what it could be, but I would always suggest them to go to a doctor.
Because of the fear, amplified by the findings on the Internet, I developed panic attacks and hyperventilation. I've been to my doctor over a hundred times (not exaggerated) and in the end he didn't even look at me anymore because he assumed it was another one of my episodes. Now I can understand this, but if any practitioner is reading this, please promise me that no matter how hard it can be, to treat each visit as a new one. Because my story will prove to you that one out of a hundred visits can be the one that is serious. And in my case it was very, very serious.
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