Chapter 11: Symptom Chasing

This manuscript is both a memoir of sorts and a work of fiction.  The stories and events included are based on my life experiences and memories but I have changed names, details, event sequences, and outcomes throughout the work.

Read Chapter 1       Previous Chapter       Next Chapter

Chapter 11: Symptom Chasing

A few days before Christmas, Elizabeth awoke with a start. She felt a shooting pain in her left hip. "Now what?" she thought. She lay still for a few moments, trying to remember what she had done the day before. Had she bumped her leg? Did she do some kind of different exercise? Had she carried something heavy? She remembered she had gone the market and brought home two good-sized bags of groceries. She thought she had made sure that the weight in the bags was evenly balanced but perhaps she hadn't been careful enough. She checked in with her body again. Yes, the pain was still there, although it felt a bit less intense. What could it be?

Elizabeth's thoughts continued to churn, trying to figure out what the problem could be. She could feel her worry thoughts feeding the fear growing inside of her, which was rapidly becoming a terrifying monster that would soon control her. Elizabeth tried her worry technique, but it wasn't working. This worry was increasing in each moment, threatening to explode the top of the Worry-o-meter scale. So Elizabeth decided to take control of the situation by heading to her computer and starting what she liked to call symptom-chasing. (Vincent would always warn her against succumbing to this temptation because it rarely ended in what Elizabeth desired—peace of mind.) 

She sat in front of her laptop, hands poised over the keyboard, ready to type her search terms into Google. Her fingers struck the keys as she typed “hip pain” and “arthritis.” That would be a good place to start. The search results page was displayed and she perused the list. She chose one of the items and began reading about arthritis and hip pain. She checked the symptoms—Yes, she had that one, no not that one, no not that one, no not that one. She decided that her hip pain didn't match the criteria for arthritis. So she began again, this time typing “hip pain” and “menopause” (after all, these days menopause seemed to be the blame for so many ailments). Once again, she got her results, chose one, and began the hunt for the symptoms she had. Elizabeth continued this process again and again, using other search terms, eventually ending with her ultimate worry and fear—cancer.

By the time she had finished searching and researching her symptoms, Elizabeth was drained. She noticed that her hip was hurting even more. She now had a whole host of diseases and their symptoms buzzing like angry hornets in her brain, injecting venom in each thought that surfaced. At this point, she knew two things for sure: she felt dis-eased and she had absolutely no peace of mind!

Elizabeth pushed her chair away from the computer. She decided to go sit in the living room and try to relax by quieting her thoughts and eliminating the stories that were playing out in her mind's eye, each one with more pain, debilitation, suffering, and agony than the one before. She positioned herself on the couch and took a deep breath. She could not believe how fast her heart was beating, and as if to keep the thoughts going, there was another twinge from her hip! The drama of the moment overwhelmed Elizabeth. She believed she could only see the fear and feel the pain and experience the suffering. She believed she was hopeless to stop these racing thoughts. 

Elizabeth closed her eyes and took another breath. As she did, she thought back to the beginning of the year and all the different symptoms she had chased. She considered the long list of diseases that she could name along with their symptoms because of her need for discovering and controlling any type of illness or discomfort that would come her way. (Vincent was always astonished that she knew the names of so many different diseases, syndromes, and conditions. Why shouldn't she with all the “research” she had done!) She realized that not one of the diseases of which she was afraid had manifested. After thinking that thought, she noticed that the projections had finally slowed down from the quantum speed at which they originally were racing through her brain. She sighed. How could she have allowed the spiral of fear and worry to overtake her yet again? What benefit did this cycle of pain, symptom-chasing, fear, and exhaustion give her? What did she hope to accomplish by submitting herself to this time-consuming and useless process? These questions were ones that she never seemed to be able to answer satisfactorily. 

The challenge for Elizabeth was the knowledge that fear always lurked just beneath the surface of her consciousness, even on the days that she felt a relative peace with her life. All that was necessary to unleash the fear in varying degrees of fury was some perceived change of the status quo, or what Elizabeth believed was the status quo. Elizabeth wanted to learn how to control the fear without having to experience the downward spiral into its clutches. She knew that at least part of the answer rested with her ability to control her own thoughts. Certainly, she didn't have to choose to be a symptom-chaser to discover what her symptoms meant (if, indeed, they meant anything at all, an idea which Elizabeth often failed to consider). Chasing symptoms just added to her fear and worry. 

She was reminded of a conversation she had had with Stacy, her astrologer friend, earlier in the month. Elizabeth and Stacy had been talking about the topic of pain in the body. Stacy has said that pain in the body meant that the body was screaming, trying to communicate something that the person had ignored or missed in the spiritual body, emotional body, or mental body. Elizabeth understood the concept because many times when she had a pain she would check the list of symptoms in Louise Hay's book You Can Heal Your Life. She would often be amazed at the correlation between her pain symptom, the body part, and what was going on in her life or how she was feeling. Sometimes she would even do the affirmation that Louise provided for a particular symptom or ailment.

Stacy went on to say that focusing on pain only brought you more pain. That didn't mean that you pretended that the pain wasn't there or didn't exist. (Stacy was also not advocating that a person should never go to the doctor.) She said that we need to acknowledge our pain, look for the message that the pain is communicating, act on that message, and then remove our focus from the pain. Elizabeth was still confused about the difference between acknowledging and focusing. She would have to consider Stacy's idea and see if she could come up with a plan to implement it the next time she was experiencing a pain she didn't understand.

Elizabeth had been a symptom-chaser for quite a while. A few years before, she had broken her ankle and was confined to the apartment for close to two months. During that time, Vincent had to go away for training courses, leaving Elizabeth at home alone with their cat Felicity, her broken ankle, and her fearful thoughts. At that time, Elizabeth had come face to face with her fear of death. Over the next few years, though, she discovered that more than death, she was scared of pain and suffering, of being dependent on others for help, of being debilitated, of going to the doctor and being told there was something wrong with her, and of the opinions of others if she didn't go to the doctor and died because of her own foolishness. (Elizabeth just shook her head at that last thought. Her concerns about what people thought extended into the future, even beyond her death! What kind of mixed-up thinking was that?)

Elizabeth had noticed that she constantly thought there was something wrong with her. At times she thought her body was just mirroring what she believed about herself at some subconscious or unconscious level. Vincent agreed with her. He had talked with her repeatedly about her own destructive perceptions about herself. Some of those talks had illuminated her comprehension, but the diminishing of herself seemed like the only way for her to be accepted, liked, and even loved by others. Elizabeth's opinions of herself fluctuated between two extremes—either feeling like she had to diminish herself because she was too much, too powerful, too overwhelming for people or she was lacking in so many areas, that she was always less than others. Of course, there was also the other strategy Elizabeth used—judging herself before others could. She could remember many times when she told Vincent during heated discussions where she felt that he was judging her, "You don't have to tell me I am flawed; I am well aware of that fact, and I could give you a list of all of them."

What Elizabeth wanted was some way to see herself as she really was. She was tired of seesawing between less than and too much. She was weary of fearing others and their thoughts about her. She desired to cease her endless struggle with fears and worries. She longed to feel accepted fully within herself and to be happy with who she was, exactly as she was. 

Elizabeth took a deep breath, grateful that the fear was being held at bay, finally. As she arose, her hip complained. She could feel the worry trying to entangle her thoughts again. She began to feel the fear quaking her heart. She sighed and thought, "I can't go through this again today." She decided to go outside and take a walk, even though the sun had decided not to peek through the clouds today, the temperature was bone-chilling cold, and the snow had not been cleared from the sidewalks yet. But Elizabeth hoped that a change of scenery might just bring a change in her thinking. And who knows, maybe there might be a piece of magic waiting for her just outside her door.

Copyright © 2011-2012 by Vicky Lynn Macchione.
All Rights Reserved.
No reproduction of this text is allowed without the written permission of the author.

Chapter 10: The Worry-o-meter

This manuscript is both a memoir of sorts and a work of fiction.  The stories and events included are based on my life experiences and memories but I have changed names, details, event sequences, and outcomes throughout the work.

Read Chapter 1       Previous Chapter       Next Chapter

Chapter 10: The Worry-o-meter

As Christmas crept ever closer, Elizabeth had just finished creating some cards for her kidlets and assembling two packages of gifts to give to her granddaughter, whose birthday was two days after Christmas. This year she had managed to get everything together in plenty of time for the parcel to arrive in time for the holiday. She put on the many layers it took to go outside during the cold December days and went to the post office. Of course, there was a line, and she did her best to wait patiently. (Patience was a virtue that was in short supply in Elizabeth's life.) Finally, she arrived at the front of line and was served. She paid the fees and received the tracking number for the package. 

Later that evening, Elizabeth began what would be a daily exercise of checking on the transport of her precious package. The clerk had said the package would arrive in five to seven days. But Elizabeth had her doubts since there had been other years that the annual package took much longer. As the days went by, Elizabeth fretted and fumed more and more. The tracking information was not being updated, and she had no way of knowing where the package was and when it would actually be delivered. 

Since this obsession with package delivery was a regular occurrence, Vincent asked her yet again why she got so worried about the situation. "After all, there is nothing you can do to change it," Vincent would remind her. Elizabeth would bristle inside, knowing he was right but somehow feeling that her worrying increased the odds that the package would arrive on time, certainly a thought that lacked credibility.

This idea that worrying protected her or kept "bad" things from happening was one of Elizabeth's mental challenges. She would try not to worry but it seemed like the whole process was built into her very being. As she considered that idea, she knew, of course, that made no sense. Her "very Being" would never be worried for there would never be any reason for her "very Being" to worry in a Reality that was created perfect and unfolded perfectly. Nevertheless, worry ended up being her best friend or her worst enemy.

Elizabeth remembered one day when she decided to investigate the word worry to find out what it meant and from where the definition had come. She discovered that the word came from an Old English word that meant to strangle and an Old Norse word that meant rope. Elizabeth had immediately pictured a hangman's noose as she thought, "How appropriate." After all, if someone wanted to strangle or choke the joy, life, and peace out of a situation, worry was the way to accomplish that task, which Elizabeth knew from numerous personal experiences.

Elizabeth found that she worried almost constantly about almost everything, including the most banal situations, as in the case of on-time postal delivery. She noticed that words like worried or concerned often made their way in her daily conversations, in her writing, and, most importantly, in her thinking. Elizabeth was sure that if someone looked up the word “worrywart” in an illustrated dictionary, a sketch of her face would be found there.

Worrying the way she did exasperated Vincent. She had so many concerns about daily life and rules about how things should work. One time (and this had happened more than once in their ten years together), Elizabeth opened a jar of jam (and you could substitute mustard, applesauce, salsa for the word jam) and was extremely concerned because the lid did not pop exactly as she thought it should. Instantly, she heard her mother telling a story about botulism that had occurred in some home-canned string beans, and somehow Elizabeth would connect her situation with the story her mother had told her all those years ago. Elizabeth would grow more and more uneasy and worried and then she would approach Vincent to get some peace of mind. Vincent never understood her concern and eventually began to tell her, "You are going to die," which didn't bring Elizabeth any measure of comfort or peace. So she would do a search on the Internet to see if the food that was now suspect had been recalled. Remembering this series of events, Elizabeth realized her worrying was out of proportion with the actual situation.

For Elizabeth, worry was just a way of life. She didn't want to have it be that way but she felt powerless to change. She tried to analyze why she worried so much. She understood that she felt worry gave her some measure of control. She believed that the act of worrying somehow guarded her against the very thing she was worrying about. And she knew she was not alone in that idea. She had once watched a television interview with Michael J. Fox and his wife in which his wife had mentioned her own worry problem. She said that she used to worry about Michael and their children getting sick from all sorts of diseases. But she had never been concerned about Parkinson's disease, the illness from which Michael was afflicted. Elizabeth often thought about what his wife had said, and some part of her would whisper, "See, worrying works; if you can just worry about all possibilities, you will be protected from them." But even Elizabeth could see how ridiculous that premise was.

So Elizabeth took steps to change. One idea she had read about in Oprah's magazine said to look at a situation about which you are worried and develop it to its most dramatic and extreme end. Of course, most situations about which Elizabeth worried had death as the final result and most often a painful death, full of suffering. Although she tried this method, she didn't find that it helped much. She did discover, however, that she was more afraid of pain and suffering than she was of death.

Another method she had tried was a kind of hybrid of the previous idea. She would allow the worry to play out in her mind to its final result. Then, she would try to take an I-don't-care attitude. "The lid didn't pop right. Could there be botulism in a jar of jam? Oh well, I guess I am going to die." Sometimes this method actually helped her to let go of the worry. The only difficulty with this method is that she had to, at times, keep repeating the process. She had tried adding one more phrase: "I don't care any more." And that last phrase was never really the truth, which was glaringly obvious.

Elizabeth had become more aware that her worries were always about future happenings, not about what was necessarily occurring in the present moment. Of course, when she opened the jar and thought about botulism, that was happening in the now; but all the thoughts that came rushing in about what she would experience if she had botulism were a future projection. Her thoughts were creating a dire prediction of a dramatic, undesirable, even horrific future. 

Elizabeth also noticed that she had a sort of scale or meter to measure her worrying. She called it the worry-o-meter. Those situations on which she could apply her technique successfully were low on the worry-o-meter. But those with which she had to repeat and repeat her technique or those that filled her heart and mind with paralyzing fear, those measured high on the worry-o-meter. 

Elizabeth knew that at some level there was a part of herself that never worried. She also knew that all her worrying was only about trying to control anything and everything that could possibly cause her distress, unhappiness, discomfort, or that simply did not fit into what she think should be happening in her life at any given moment. She realized that she could have more peace if she could just accept that life was unfolding exactly as it should. For her, though, acceptance looked more like resignation. She struggled with the idea that letting go of her worry and her need to control what life brought her way somehow meant she would be giving up the dreams or wishes or ambitions she had for her life. This struggle made her life feel like she was engaged in a no-win battle at times just as much as worry made her life feel like hell, if by hell one meant a place of torture and torment. And both situations were in her control. That was the truth some part of her failed to realize. The very control she was seeking was the ability to control her mind and her thoughts! The irony was not lost on her.

Elizabeth often wondered if struggle and worry kept magic from occurring. Or perhaps it kept her from "seeing" it or perceiving the experiences when they happened. After all, if she sometimes could see pieces of magic in her life, wasn't it possible that magic was all around her and she just wasn't aware of it? She contemplated that question for a few moments. What would it mean if the magic was already part of her life, or even the very river in which her life moved? What if she only saw "pieces of magic" at certain times because those were the times when she let go, ceased struggling, and simply flowed with what was happening, not worrying about future results and outcomes?

Elizabeth had grown weary of worry's energy-sapping grip. She wanted to stop feeling like she was strangling the magic from her daily life with her own hands. She desired to know the freedom she believed she could have if she learned to embrace what arrived in her life each day. She longed for peace of mind. Now, all she had to do was figure how to do that.

Elizabeth's thoughts returned to the parcel. She sighed as she checked one last time to see if she could actually tell where the parcel was. Amazingly, she discovered that the parcel had finally arrived at the post office in her children's home town. "What a relief!" she thought. That was one worry that she could lay to rest. Now it was time to face her day.

Copyright © 2011-2012 by Vicky Lynn Macchione.
All Rights Reserved.
No reproduction of this text is allowed without the written permission of the author.