Symptoms connected to Anxiety?

[ihaveaheart]

About a month ago i started having quite severe anal itching. I immeadatley thought it was hemmorhoids (due to the fact i had them once when i was about 6 years old) I tried using hemmorhoidal oinments for about a week and a half, and the itching seemed to just get worse. So i went to my docter, and she did a rectal finger exam and found nothing other than what looked like a tear. So she told me to use hydrocortisone cream; and i did but after about another week and a half of using it, it just seemed to get worse, and start feel weird shooting pains in my head, twitching almost all the time in random places on my body for about 2 seconds, abdominal pain, swollen lymph nodes in my neck and a flu i could not shake. So i got an HIV test along with a few other STD tests and they were all perfect, and i talked to my docter about maybe having pinworms or some other form of parasite, so she prescribed me Albendazole, which i took, my itching seemed to go away but i found out that soda may have something to do with it,

or are all of these weird symptoms a sign of anxiety, i mean i have been really uptight and nervous due to the fact that i am moving away to go to college in a week, any connection

[ihaveaheart]

Wow! Thank you so much for your response and greatly appreciated advice! I definetely have been worrying so much about it, and as you may know researching symptoms and self-diagnosis sometimes only makes things worse, and in my case i think it did. My itching has been getting better, i just try not to itching and let it rebuild "itself" and trying not to drink soda, i have a feeling that it hasbeen contributing to my itching, and as for the anxiety that is just the icying on the cake, if you will. I am leaving for college next week and am very anxious about it.

But i just want to thank you so much for taking time to respond and telling your story.

Thank you!

[JSGeare]

To this day, I still have what I regard as anxiety reactions to stress. They are physical annoyances as opposed to fearful experiences. I look at these as sort of battle wounds from the Panic Wars, as it were. One of them is the difficulty in swallowing; another is some trembling in my fingers and hands, another is coughing if anxious while talking, and yet another is the pain in my ...

and you know the rest. That "pain in the *ss" is a real deal. Under conditions of high stress, it feels like a cross between someone turning a hunting knife inside my anus, and the the onset of the most explosive evacuation ever recorded in the anals (oops! I mean annals) of human experience. I also know how to make it go away.

Now, about itching, "down there." As a young man (late 20's) I was out of work for awhile and this situation was driving me NUTZ. I had some of the anxiety and panic things going on. And I also developed this exquisite, "must scratch it" itch, you know where. My ASSUMPTION was that I had not cleaned myself well enough (and I'm prettty fastitidious about that) so I started using soap and scrubbing extra thoroughly. And after my daily shower, I could have been licensed as a class 3 clean room, let me tell you.

But it got worse! And now, little red spots on the TP indicated I was bleeding! So I used good old Prep-H. No help.

And so I sought medical help.  I cleaned up extra well and went for my appointment. First words out the doctor's mouth: "You've been stuffing Preparation H up your butt, haven't you?" I felt like he was addressing a new way of serving a Thanksgiving turkey.

He prescribed a soothing Glaxo ointment that DID give me relief and told me to keep things really clean. And so for years and years I made sure to keep that ointment around, because it really did the job. And I scrubbed carefully as always. But if I missed just the slightest fragment of yesterday's breakfast, or had exerted myself physically a lot -it came back! And so, out came the ointment. I had sort of accepted this as my "fate."

Then one day after I moved to the "country," which shall remain nameless (Oakland, Md) I consulted an old country doctor for a physical exam for insurance. He scoped me out with the usual "Hmmm's" and "I see..." type noises, then said I was fit and asked if I happend to have any problems I would like to mention since I was lying naked on his table at the time. I told him about the butt situation and he said, "Let's have a look." And you know what he said? He said, "You've been stuffing that Glaxo soothing ointment up your butt, haven't you?" I couldn't make this up.

So he consulted me in his office and gave me the facts -which have for ever thereafter proven to be correct.

No one can NOW say what the initial itch WAS. But what the old doc believed was that my aggressive scratching and cleaning sort of plowed new ground, as it were, and I created the conditions to make it WORSE by "roughing up" the cells of the anal wall down there. So my smooth schedule-40 PVC pipe was now more like a rusty old section of iron -stuff got caught up in there. Worse yet, the soap had irritated the lining. Si\o I had now given myself a first class case of "folliculitis," which means "inflamed little hair holes" to the ordinary folks like me. That soothing oinment took the fire out, but left the problem festering for next time. I stared in drop-jawed attention.

And then he said that the anus should not be TOO clean -there's a bunch of little guys down there whose job it is to clean things up -and I was messing up their work. So what he told me to do, next time I took care of business, was to wash gently with plain water ONLY. And I did. And it worked -better than the ointment. But the "fix" must be, and is to this day, on-going. I wash carefully EVERY time with plain water and have never had the "itch" return. And I'm not about to stop just to see what happens.

Now, go figure, for a moment. If anxiety shows up in all kinds of itches, tingling, discomfort, scratching, hair pulling, nail biting and other such experiences all over the body, why should your BEE-HINDE not be invited to the party? So I say that anxiety very well could be a factor in your case. One thing for sure, whether or not you are pre-disposed to anxiety anyway, the discomfort physically and psychologically with stuff that MIGHT be contributing is not likely to put you at ease -as you know. All I'm saying is that, in addition to all the dreaded conditions that might be a factor, also consider the simple possibilities -and see if the old country doctor's advice makes any sense to you, too.