Day 25 Day 25

The prompt today was to write a forum post about how I'm doing so far and what my apprehensions are.

I think I've improved a lot, but its been a lot of ups and downs. Things seemed to be fairly steadily through last week. A friend of ours from out of town visited, and we had such a wonderful time, and it was so good to have a friend around again. But then she left, and it threw me into a bit of a depression and several very symptom-heavy days. It was like moving all over again.
One really interesting thing about this was that the first day after she left, I came home and told my husband I'd had a pretty rough day. I'd had lots of symptoms and I was practicing being aware of what I was thinking/feeling - but what I kept thinking all day was that I was simply frustrated by my symptoms still being so strong. When I mentioned my bad day to my husband, he said "yeah, I thought it might be a tough day today" and when I asked why he thought that he told me that after he moved away from his family, it was always hard to leave them again after visits, that it took him a few days to recover. And it dawned on me that OF COURSE I was having a bad day because my friend left, and that I was ALREADY repressing it.
Good news: the last few days have been much better on the symptom front, but also on with feeling/remembering that I have control over this. Its just fear, its just TMS, everything is fine.

That being said, I am running a race tomorrow, and I am very anxious about it. Exercise anxiety is something I've developed over the last few months, which is very frustrating because exercising had been helping my anxiety before that. I get so much hypochondria surrounding exercise - that my heart will explode or something, even though I have no heart problems. So I've been a constant broken record of self talk today. It helps, I just have to keep it up.

 

Hi, Guseman. I always feel a letdown after a good friend leaves after a visit. It goes away after a few days.
Your husband is very perceptive and understanding.

About the race... try to think positive about it and that you are going to run without worry of pain.
Exercise is one of the best ways to take the mind of any pain.