How do you feel about doctors and hospitals? To be honest, I struggle with it. I struggle with it a lot. I didn't used to, but since my father had cancer and he died in hospital and I spent too much time there, I truly struggled with it.
The smell of hospitals, the disinfections, all the white, the white coats, the white walls, the sounds of metal, all of those things, it just gets me every time. And it's not a good thing to just spend time in hospitals, but before my father died, truly I didn't have a problem with it. It wasn't nice to be in a hospital, it was nice to be at the doctor's office, but I didn't have a problem with it. Now I cringe every time I have to go to the hospital, and every time I see a doctor.
And this last year, I think I visited my primary doctor maybe 25 times, and I've seen so many other doctors as well. And I've been to three different hospitals, and you will think it would get better. But in my opinion, it doesn't. I feel this anxiety and this crunching in my stomach and sweat coming and chills coming and I get a headache.
It's like a trauma. Every single time I need to go to a hospital. It's a little bit better with a doctor, but just to enter a hospital for me, it's traumatic. I wish it wasn't, because I know the doctors, they're trying to figure out something, they're trying to help you, they want to look at you and to test you for things, and they want to make sure that they are doing everything in their medical way possible to help you.
So it's not a bad thing. But for me, it is. And I also have a mother who has spent quite a lot of times in hospital the last five years, and every time she goes there, I just, I have flashbacks. It's awful, because she goes to the local hospital, the hospital where my father spent the most time.
And when I just sit there in the hall waiting for her or sit in the waiting area and just waiting for updates or things like this, it stresses me out. It is truly painful. I stress more than I have to and more than I should. And when I get home from one of those incidents, I'm exhausted.
And it takes basically all my willpower and all my strength to influence myself, to go to the hospital when my loved ones need me. And it's not easy. People say, no, it's not a problem, you can just go there, you won't be alright. It's just a hospital, they take care of her, they take care of him, they take care of them.
For me, no, sorry. It's not the way I feel about it, and it's not helping. It's not helping. And now I'm sick, and the doctors, they cannot figure out what's wrong with me.
So I'm basically going from place to place, and I've been doing this for one year. Well, one and a half years. And they're just shipping me from hospital to hospital between doctors and doctors. And it's very stressful, it's very challenging for me as a person to do this.
I've been struggling with this for so many years, the whole hospital and doctor thing. And when basically now my health depends on it, it's just terrifying. And every time I think that, okay, I'm a little bit better now, it's okay. It's not.
Because I have the same fear the next time I go there. Or the next time I visit my doctor or the other doctor or a new doctor. But definitely my primary doctor is easier. Because I know the waiting area, I know the nurses, I know him.
And I also know the other doctors in the doctor's office. So it's not that bad. But whenever I go to a new environment where I don't know all the specifics, all the details, I really stress about it. I don't know if I, if I'm the only one, feel like this.
Because I don't hear people talking about this. So many people have fear of the dentist. I'm not happy about the dentist either. But fear of doctors or hospitals, I don't hear this often.
So maybe it's just me. And I feel kind of stupid about it because people, they treat it as it should be something normal or something not to worry about it. But for me, I worry so much about it. And if I have a doctor's appointment on Tuesday, as an example, I will start worrying on Sunday.
So that basically means I wear two days for something that is not even a big deal. The last year, the year and a half, I've been to a CT scan. I've had multiple x-rays. I've had more blood work taken than an elephant.
We'll have if he gets sick. I've had my head checked, I've had my nose checked, I've had my ears checked, I've had my eyes checked, I've had my legs checked, they measured my bones, they checked my lungs, they checked my heart. I've had more drugs put into my system than you can even imagine. They've tested me and they have tried things.
I've been to the emergency room maybe five times. Luckily not in an ambulance, but I've been in the emergency room. And the last time I was there, it was a big drama. I was carried into the emergency room.
And we had basically two doctors and four nurses standing over me. I had an asthma attack and severe allergy. And they had to give me fluid cortisone and antihistamine. And they had to put a mask over my face with my asthma medicine.
And yeah, it was a big drama. I don't like it. And I feel so anxious. I hate being in the hospital.
I truly hate it. And I feel so nervous. I feel so scared to be by myself that if someone were to leave me in the hospital, if I don't have any family or friends with me, I get almost like a panic from it because to be left there with the doctors or the nurses, it's like the most terrifying thing. And I know they're not trying to kill me.
They're trying to rescue me or save me or to help me. But I don't seem to be able to convince my head that that's going on. But the last time I was in emergency room, I was so unwell that I didn't even worry. I was so sick that I couldn't speak.
So in that point, it was not that bad, actually. I didn't even have time to worry or time to object anything. I just lay there and I took everything they wanted to give me. Whatever they would have done, I would not have objected because the state on my health when I got there was so bad that I had nothing to comment on.
There was nothing I could have said that could have helped the situation or made them treat me differently. But when I came home, I started to think about it and I just felt like, oh, I was in hospital. Oh my, I'm so glad I wasn't there by myself. Yeah.
And I'm not finished because my situation is the way it is. So it means I will probably have another year of different hospitals, different doctors, different medications, testing and testing and trying out and trials and so many things to try and figure out my situation. Because my body is not well and nothing is working the way it should. And my immune system and my lungs and everything, they are not responding to what they should respond to.
And they're responding a lot to things they definitely shouldn't respond to. So we have a very challenging situation to try and figure out what in the world is wrong with me. Just have to start to work with myself, I think, to try and think of hospitals and doctors as something positive, something good, something that might help me. Then something that can be a benefit to me and not something to feel stressful about or sad about.
I don't know how I'm going to do this. I don't know how I will shift my brain. I am actually quite good at manipulating myself if I need it. But this thing has been such a strong problem and it's been such a strong emotion in me that it's not easy.
It will be so hard, I think, for me to shift this. And it's not like anyone likes hospitals in particular, but I don't hear anyone who dislike it the way I do or feel that bad about it. I really, really, really want to be healthy and to be healthy I need help from doctors and hospitals. This is not something I can fix by myself.
If it was, I would have been well by now, because I'm treating myself very well. I'm doing everything I can possibly to help the situation. I eat well, I rest, I do yoga, I breathe, I don't stress, I try and do all the things possible to make things better not worse. And I have so many things, I don't eat it because of allergies, so I don't eat the things that I know trigger me.
But then I have things that probably trigger me that we don't know yet. It's a big puzzle, and if you think too much about it, you will also stress about it. So it's a balanced thing, and I have to find a balance. Because I'm just in this way that I'm thinking if I'm going to spend another year or two or three or five or maybe the rest of my life dealing with doctors and hospitals, I need to find a way to deal with it.
I need to find a way to not enjoy it, but to at least bear it, for it to be bearable, for it to not affect me in a bad way like it does. Because it will make things more hard than it has to be. And as you can hear, my voice is coming and going, I'm so sorry, I just hope you can hear what I'm saying. But this is part of my problem also.
But I do have more good days, thankfully. But that doesn't mean that my everyday life is my normal life or what it used to be, because it definitely isn't. I used to be so much more active and so much more positive and optimistic and outdoorsy. And yeah, I had so much things I used to do that I no longer am able to do because of my health.
So I just have to be strong and try my best to get through the doctors and hospitals and all those things. And hopefully, hopefully, I crossed all my fingers and toes for this actually. Hopefully, I will get better.