When "Hypochondria" is OCD

When you've Googled the same rare disease 12 times in one day, you might....have OCD

Heads up: this article is about how OCD can attach to fears of serious diseases, and will cover triggers relating to all sorts of medical conditions, which could be distressing for people who worry about, or who have real experiences, with these things. While this is a humor Substack, the intention here isn’t to make light of OCD as a goofy, quirky thing (even if I make jokes about it, it’s only to bring levity to something real that I, and many people, struggle with.)

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OCD lowkey serving Grimace

One day when I was twenty-four, I left my office at 10 AM to go to the emergency room, convinced that an unexplained pain in my chest was a pulmonary embolism. It wasn’t the first time I had done something like this. As a teenager, I went to the school nurse for a lump in my breast, which snowballed into having my mom pick me up to take me to the gynecologist (it was a cyst.) When my hand felt a bit odd after picking up a tea mug, I worried that I had ALS. I once thought I was going blind for no reason other than my eyes feeling vaguely jiggly (hard to explain.) For two weeks, I was obsessed with stomach cancer because I could vaguely feel my stomach at all times, a sensation I swore I didn’t have before. Generally, any disease I’m worried about has “none or subtle symptoms in its early stages,” because of course.

Despite all those fears and obsessions, I worry about my own health far less often than I worry about the health of loved ones. Once, I rushed my husband to an urgent care clinic, believing he was having a heart attack, when he was having an unrelated panic attack of his own—they sent him home with an anxiety diagnosis. I also took him to the ER for a “suspicious lump” that turned out to be a pimple on his scalp. On a separate occasion, my mother disposed of a disembodied deer leg she found in her back yard (coyotes roam in the forest behind her house.) Although she used gloves and washed her hands, I was convinced she had caught rabies, which would magically spread from person to person and kill the entire family. Now that I’m a mother, I can’t even count the amount of times I’ve worried my kids were experiencing a medical crisis, or the amount of times I was positive I was going to miscarry during my pregnancies (it doesn’t help that one time, I actually did.) And it goes without saying that COVID did a number on me—not because I was worried about myself, but because I was worried that I would be responsible for COVID infecting and killing someone else, especially my husband or baby. During the brief mpox panic, I believed there was a significant chance that tens of thousands of American children (including mine) would die from it—although in my defense, this was being said all over the depths of Insane Twitter too.

This type of anxiety is actually a form of OCD—which I already knew I had, but which I, for years, thought was a separate issue from “health anxiety.” I wanted to write about it to clear up taboos and myths, share the stories of people who struggle with it, and most importantly, share strategies for treating it.