Last semester, I started getting nauseous all the time. Really nauseous. Sometimes I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but lay down, I could barely eat more than a few bites of any meal without feeling sick and I threw up one or two times a week, when I had barely thrown up one or two times in all of the past several years. That’s not exactly normal, but somehow I convinced myself that it was fine.
“It’s just nerves,” I told myself. Once I got through the next assignment, the next exam, the next deadline, the next responsibility, oh yeah, and that study abroad trip to Spain a couple days after my last exam, I’d talk to a doctor about my stomach issues. The nausea was probably just anxiety, so better just to tough it out until I didn’t have anything going on. I was a big girl; I could deal with a little nausea. Meanwhile, my relationship with food got worse and worse as I began to expect everything I ate to make me feel even more nauseous.
It wasn’t until my trip to Spain that I finally had to confront the fact that I couldn’t live like that anymore, after about a month of suffering through the pain. My second day at my host mom’s house, I got too nauseous to stand for any long period of time, much less go to class. My host mom was horrified that I let it get that far and insisted on taking me to see a doctor right away.
Finally, there was someone there who was responsible for me but didn’t know me well enough to accept my protests of “Oh, it’s fine. It’ll pass,” and I couldn’t explain myself well enough in Spanish to convince her. I needed that, for someone to see me saying everything was okay while I clutched my stomach — and call BS. Someone to tell me to go to the doctor now, not later, to drink some chamomile tea, take some medicine and take the day off.
I’ve always had a problem admitting how much I’m struggling with things. I like to complain, sure, but that’s not really the same thing. I’ll go on and on about how annoying a certain situation is, but you won’t catch me asking for help, taking more of a “it sucks, but also it’s fine” sort of attitude. I’m terrified of being a burden to others, and I’m not very good about setting boundaries around when I’m too overwhelmed to help someone work through a problem of their own. I let myself bottle everything up until, evidently, I throw all of that stress right back up.
After a couple doctor’s appointments in Spain and back in the U.S., I got the verdict. My nausea was, in fact, anxiety, probably exacerbated by going off a hormonal acne medication I had been taking. With the confirmation that I was not, in fact, dying of some rare stomach problem, I started feeling better. The nausea still comes back sometimes, but much more manageably.
Mental health undoubtedly has a strong effect on our physical health. This was not necessarily an unfamiliar concept to me during the months of my nausea issue. It was certainly not the first time I had been so anxious that I manifested physical symptoms — nausea, shortness of breath, elevated heart rate — and then got stressed that the symptom was actually a sign of a horrible disease which then made the symptom worse, making me more stressed.
Having one of these health anxiety episodes last several months was finally enough to get me to see that I can’t keep saying that things are fine when they’re not because nothing gets better. When my body tells me it’s time to take a break or ask for help, I need to listen before my body makes me listen. It’s never “just” anxiety. There’s no “just” about it.
