You’ve had two doctors look, and you have had your chest imaged.
To give a bit more context, whenever I had the GPs “touch” the parts that I feel were alarming, they never managed to “feel it” or “grab it” the way I do. So I don’t feel like I gave them enough evidence. And for the “chest being imaged”, it was about one year ago (things might have changed since then), and the doctor did it quickly looking at my heart, not really looking precisely at the part that I’m concerned about.
(I know that I sound a bit like “the medical evidence is wrong, they didn’t find anything because they weren’t doing it right, I know what I truly have”, but that’s how I honestly feel).
your aliefs are misaligned. Those are harder to change. More evidence isn’t going to do it though.
I didn’t know about the concept of alief, that’s really cool, thanks!
Do you have a psychiatrist or a therapist?
Not now, definitely needed. I feel like someone specialized in illness anxiety would help more with the anxiety than a psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist would know what’s psychosomatic and what’s not.
possible that you’ve injured yourself causing some scar tissue in the muscle, with possible inflammation
I’m unsure how much you could injure yourself from just probing daily (with different levels of intensity) for like 6 months. That’s definitely something I considered. When I probe my right chest, it’s painful for like 10-20m, but I almost never do it. When I saw the first GP, he told me the region I was pointing at was near a tendon in the “pectoralis major”.
If you probe the location often, have you considered covering it with some rigid material to block unthinking probing?
Interesting. I haven’t reached the point where I do it every hour. For now, it’s maybe 10m in bed, so not too constraining. I also have enough self-control to not do it during the day (even more now that I wrote this post).
For anxiety like this, cannabis can be an option.
Word. I’m the kind of person to develop new anxieties with cannabis though.
I starting feeling anxious about left chest pain about 18 months ago. I would say I started touching/feeling lumps maybe one year ago, and I started being really concerned (touching more) six months ago.
Number/size/distribution
#1 and 2: they’re both soft, smooth, connected in a chain, movable and more elongated than round. Size: kind of a cylinder of length approx. 1cm and diameter 5mm (each).
#3: also soft, smooth, movable, but solitary and length is more like 2-3cm.