Why I’ve Avoided Doctors: The Thrilling Sequel

Apologies for my one week blog-cation.  I’m back now.  I have been mired in medical tests, playing nursemaid to my husband who had his wisdom teeth surgery last week, and trying to remove viruses from my laptop that has all of my (non-backed up–I know, I know) blog documents on it.  The bad news is I’m still working on the computer situation; the good news is my husband is fine, and according to one of the world’s leading physicians specializing in vestibular disorders, so am I.

My decision to finally have a doctor look into my dizziness totally paid off–it turns out I have this totally minor vestibular disorder where particles from your inner ear get knocked loose and float around in your ear canals, messing up one’s balance.   Wanna know how it’s treated?  Gravity.  Yup, I’m serious: you do a series of head positions until the pesky little granules back float back where they ought to be. The doc “adjusted” me in the office, and my dizziness has totally vanished.

The fact that there was such an easy fix for my medical problem (it feels like a cure learned at Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry) seems ludicrously lucky.  I didn’t realize how worried I was until I felt the relief of not having to worry anymore.  In the back of my mind–so quiet that I didn’t even notice–I now see that there was a mental laundry list of the Top Ten Scary Things that could be wrong with me causing microscopic amounts of stress that were  probably building up to potentially toxic levels of concern.

"Wingardium dizzy-osa"

I, my friends, am an Avoider.  I’m not ashamed to admit it; it’s how many of us cope with anxiety.  It’s the root of 90% of the world’s so-called procrastination.  Funny thing is, I know from studying psychology that avoidance doesn’t fix anything.  On the contrary, it feeds the anxiety and makes it worse.  Take for example, let’s say, a person with a phobia for driving over bridges. The phobic person becomes so terrified of bridges that they avoid them completely, making bridges seem even more unfamiliar and scary.  By avoiding bridges, the person deprives themselves of the chance to confront their fear and realize that they can drive over a bridge without freaking out and careening over the edge or having a heart attack.  Successful therapy for the phobia is gradually, step-by-step, having the person confront their fear a little at a time so that they can realize that their nightmare scenarios are unfounded, and that they are stronger than they thought.

So what does this tell me?  I have to be as brave in my own life as the patients I’ve treated for anxiety disorders.  I have to use my insight to look inward at things I might be afraid of and avoiding, and then confront it head-on: no delays, no denial.  Sometimes, the confrontation is hard, scary, and maybe worse than we could imagine.  More often though, as this week has reminded me, we find that that the monster under our bed is a bogeyman of our own imagination, which we would have known if we just had the Cojones or Ovaries to get up and check sooner.  Life is hard enough.  I’m going to do my best to stop making it harder by worrying myself into inaction.