have a real bad HIV phobia and it relates to my day to day life. Like if i cut my finger on a knife or something i start getting scared and thinking what if somebody else cut them selves on that knife before and they have HIV then i start getting panicky and i get anxiety. It scares the **** out of me. I am going through some hard stuff right now and ill explain it all. Last Saturday on 7/21/07 i went to Walgreens and i was walking out of the store with my bag in my right hand and my receipt in my left hand and i was about to throw the receipt in the trash can by the front doors but the can was full, i didn't just want to shove my whole hand in there so kind of just stuck it in there. I got in my car and drove away and i was almost home and something popped in my head part of my fear and phobia. I started thinking what if i got poked by a needle when i put the receipt in the trash, so i actually turned around and drove back to the store and i started digging in the trash looking for the supposed needle just to calm my fears and prove to myself that there wasn't a needle and that i didn't get poked and that it was all in my head. Well i didn't find on and then i went home and i could not sleep. I was so scared that i got poked or something and i was scared that now i am gonna have HIV so i drove back up to the store looking through the trash again. I know this sounds crazy and i even know its crazy but i was so scared. I started looking in bags and looking through everything just to make sure. I searched for a long time and i didn't find anything. I kept leaving and going home and i could sleep so i would go back to the store and look for more. Its like it would make me feel better knowing that there wasn't a needle that poked me and that i was alright but as soon as i would get home i would get real scared again. I did that probably about 4 or 5 times. Finally i just stopped. About 9 in the morning the next day i went back up there and the trash was still in there and i went inside and asked the lady who worked there if she had a plastic bad that i could have. She gave me one and i took everything from pretty much the top layer of the trash can, anything that i thought that i could have came into contact with when i first threw the receipt away and anything that i may have came into contact with when i kept digging through there. I took the bag home and dumped it out by my trash cans and went through it all making sure there wasn't a needle or anything in there. There wasn't, So i felt like i was ok. I didn't get poked cause i didn't find any needle but then i started to get scared over the fact that i had some small scratches and little cuts on my hands and i was digging through the trash, what if there was some blood in there that i didn't see or something. I asked this question to the HIV doctor on this website and he said that there was no risk and that i don't need any testing at all. So know im over the fact that i am not gonna get HIV from digging through a garbage can but im still nervous about "did i or did i not get poked from a needle" I think that if i was actually poked i wouldn't have this doubt whether i was or not, i think that i would absolutely know. Is it just my extreme anxiety and irrational fears that is making me so scared and believe that i might have been poked and is it my fears/ocd or whatever not letting me think rational and know that i wasn't poked