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Anxiety is NOT the Cause for my Pain

As told by Anna, age 16, to a student in Health Humanities class

Will they believe me? I can’t keep going through this…

That is what is racing through my head as I walk into this doctor’s appointment. They keep telling me that nothing’s wrong, but I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. Everything I do causes me pain.

I first went to the doctor almost six months ago now. It was just a stomachache induced by my anxiety they say. “Oh, you’ll be fine in a couple weeks,” said the doctor. “Just wait for school to calm down. And try to eat a more balanced diet.” Still, the pain kept coming. Every time I ate, it felt like my insides were going in circles. I couldn’t even drink smoothies because even that made the tilt-a-whirl that was my stomach so much worse. I tried everything that I could think of to make the pain go away, but it was getting to the point that I was barely eating and couldn’t get through the day from the lack of energy.

It was then that my mom started taking my pain more seriously. She was so concerned that I was not eating that she made an appointment with my doctor right away. But they still did not take me seriously. I was plagued by my anxiety diagnosis that was given the year before. And I despised it. It had become a barrier to so much for me. I felt like everything that went wrong was just blamed on that. My doctor thought I wasn’t eating because I was too anxious. I tried to explain that yes, while I am anxious, this is not caused by my anxiety. To appease my mom a bit, she ordered a blood test to check for any abnormalities. But guess what, I was completely normal and healthy. It was then concluded by everyone around me that I had to be fine soon. It must be temporary because there is no physical reason for the pain to be there.

On my own, I began to investigate things that I could do to lessen my pain. If no one else was going to help me, I had to help myself. I went into an elimination diet phase. I took out all potential allergen foods from my diet – dairy, gluten, beef, soy, citrus. But that just made me miserable. Any joy I had previously gotten from anything I could eat was no longer there. I couldn’t have cake on my birthday. Or hamburgers on a hot summer day. I couldn’t have ice cream or oranges or literally anything that tasted good.

So, I decided to be done. I screamed to the starry night sky. “Why God, why me?!?” Tearing streaming down my face, begging on my knees. I don’t even believe in God, so why am I doing this? But I needed something to grasp on to. Anything bigger than myself that could help, because when no one else believed me, I found safety in knowing that it was all God’s plan.

That fretful night gave me the courage to go back to my doctor one last time to ask for help. And thank God I did. They noticed that I had lost 15 pounds in 4 months, so they finally took my word that I was in pain. They weren’t just listening to me anymore, they were hearing me. I was given a referral to a gastroenterologist, but they could not get me in for two months. Those two months were the longest two months of my entire life. I had waited for what felt like an eternity to have someone to consider that I was not lying, just for the wait to be two more months.

Back into the present, I am so nervous going into this doctor’s appointment. Will she hear me? Or will she push me aside like others have. She asks me so many questions about my diet, my exercise regimen, and even my poop schedule. Thankfully, she deems that I was being truthful. After so much time, someone took me seriously and understood that something physically was very wrong with me.

She suggests that I get an endoscopy, a procedure that involves shoving a tube with a camera down my throat to look at my very similar to a colonoscopy but through the throat instead of the butt. I scheduled that for a couple of weeks. The morning of my procedure finally came, and I was terrified. It probably didn’t help that I was starving because it was the crack of dawn and I had to fast, but it didn’t lessen the fact that I was scared. I’ve never been under anesthesia before, and I was thinking of all the possibilities in my head of what could happen. What if I have a reaction? What if I never wake up? I had all these questions and concerns, and it was causing me to hyperventilate.

My mom was the best throughout it all. She got me to and from the hospital and helped keep my nerves down as I went. She was there when I went to sleep and when I woke up. She was an advocate when I felt like I didn’t have a voice. And she was there when they finally told me what was wrong. A year ago, I had fractured my back and been told to take three Advil, three times a day for the course of three months. Unfortunately, I then fractured my back again and was given the same instructions. This had caused damage to my stomach lining, which in turn was giving me severe pain when I was eating. I was then prescribed something for about two months that was supposed to help heal the lining and stay away from spicy and acidic foods.

I have never been so grateful to finally have someone hear me, but it should’ve never gotten to the point where my weight loss was the deciding factor for that. It makes it extremely difficult to go to doctors in the future and trust that they will help me. Since they haven’t in the past, why would they believe me now? My mental health diagnosis of anxiety inhibited my ability to get proper treatment when I was in so much pain. And I hope to never have to deal with this again. My stomach pain finally went away, and I was able to enjoy food again, but my relationship with doctors will never be the same.