Report: Caught norovirus again, anxiety is once again lower.
I think I've made a couple comments or posts about getting the dreaded Ohio virus for the first time in 30 years last year. I was in bed when I started getting that "rock in the gut' feeling I used to when I would do shots of Scotch, minus the justified social judgement. I decided to just give in, purge, and then went to bed. Combined with the fever and the long sleep, it was almost like a psychedelic trip and the vomiting sort of "commenced" the journey. I was better in a couple days. In a weird way I enjoyed the experience, like I'd been cleansed of something that had plagued me for decades.
These last couple months, for some reason I've had dramatically increased anxiety around illness and will get nauseous from it. It comes out at night and I get a weird urge to hide, so I go in the spare bedroom to sleep, which makes me suddenly feel better. One night the nausea was particularly bad, and I started having symptoms during the day. My husband started having much worse symptoms and that's the only way I was able to tell I was actually sick. We are both several days into it and slowly starting to feel better, meaning that this is a particularly bad case...but my anxiety is still a little lower than before.
Unlike last time, I haven't thrown up, and the anxiety hasn't gone away completely. Something about saying, okay, I'm going to let go and let this happen, changes things. I don't think I'll throw up, the waves of nausea are too brief and not intense enough, but a part of me actually wishes I'd done it, like I missed an opportunity to challenge my thinking. I feel sort of cowardly.
There's not really a point to this post except to add to the chorus of people who have had the virus and can testify that it's the phobia, not the virus, that makes you truly sick. It's a lesson I'm still learning, and I'm not as far along as I thought, but if that dreaded moment comes, I think I'll be better for it.