Sudden hypochondria

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My son started the sixth grade in the fall. He has AS, general anxiety, and ADHD. Has really improved since his diagnosis in the second grade, but he is suddenly very concerned about health and safety issues to the point where it is interfering with his sleep and our family life. Today, for example, he stressed out about lead coating on Christmas lights, a callous on the side of his foot, a dust ball in the back of his throat(?), a scratch on the back of his leg. In the last week, he's also worried that he has Marfan's Syndrome, and that the tiny bit of gingivitis he has will lead to pancreatic cancer.
He is fully mainstreamed with A's and B's. He's a great kid, but the constant worrying has me...constantly worrying.
He is due to go back to the doctor in less than a month. He has been out of therapy for about a year now.
What do you think? Might it be just a 'special interest' like airplanes or computers? More? I'd appreciate hearing from anyone who has experienced something similar to this.

My 7 year old goes in and out of these phases.

He's currently got a list of worries:
- what if highschool is too noisy for him and hurts his ears?
- what if the scratch on his leg gets infected and he has to have his leg amputated?
- what if he eats something he doesn't know he's allergic to and gets sick and dies?

My 7 year old is very tired (it's nearly the end of the school year) and this is why he's going through this worry phase.

In the past, his worry phases stop when he is well rested.

Maybe your son could go back to therapy for a couple of sessions for a refresher on managing his emotions. Is your son tired and just needs some time out?

Helen

i think it'd be a good idea to send him back to therapy.....my son goes through phases where he's considerably more anxious about everything~usually this is when he's experiencing more stress

oops..sorry.....i am a non-parent who clicked the link from the home page...I was alot like this when I was in elementary school....
I was constantly going to the nurses office and wanting to go home. I made myself sick with my hypochondria. It was my general hypersensitivity combined with my unhappiness and akwardness in school......It is hard to explain...
I also had to leave the room everytime they sprayed lysol...
I broke out in what was supposedly a psychosomatic rash that the doctor said was caused by stress...during a time when they were doing loud and dusty construction work on the premisis
I was the queen of nausea and vomiting...I really did have a tendancy towards severe headaches...but I didn't ALWAYS have one when I went to the nurses office with one..

I think the root of all my ills was my unhappiness in school.

Wow! First of all, I truly appreciate your quick and thoughtful replies.
All three replies so far have said it's stress, and I agree. He just started middle school in September, and has mostly good days, but some very, very bad ones. I teach at the same school, in a different grade level, and have hand-picked all his teachers. If there is a fire to be put out, I can be there literally right away. Even with that, sometimes things blow up in his face so quickly that he doesn't think to use his coping skills or the pass he has been given to excuse himself from any class in order to 'reboot' himself.

He loved the therapist he used to see, but my husband and I were less impressed. Do you think I should send him back to the same one, or choose one that we believe is a bit more competent? I believe I know the answer...the stress of getting someone new would just add to it all.
Again, thanks.

I have a passion for medicine and health topics. I also have anxiety. Combine them and I know enough to scare the snot out of myself sometimes. I've been known to be sure a headache was an aneurysm, a bump in my breast was surely cancer and the extra heartbeats I had (which everyone does) were fatal. One time I was sure that a terrible pain in my leg was a blood clot. Of course I was wrong on all counts, but this is the way my mind will go when something else is stressing me out.

For me, it is a need to make sense of things. If B happens and A caused it, I must know what A is/was. I'm not content with a headache that has no explanation, just like I can't settle for "extra heartbeats" unless I know their exact mechanism and triggers. Once I know, I'm fine. My doctors just go ahead and explain everything quick and thoroughly to me now. Yet still, when life is too chaotic, I will still find things to worry over so I can find an answer and explain them away. It's like making a mess just to clean it up. I don't consciously decide to do it, it just sort of occurs. And it sucks.

The best thing you can do for your son is inform him and reassure him. While the coating on Christmas lights can be dangerous (in quantity), let him know that it usually isn't, that due to legal ramifications everyone must label everything to the point of scaring a wary consumer, and so forth. He probably knows enough to scare him. With more information, statistics and reassurance, he should be fine. I would have him talk to his therapist about this though.

Thank you so much for your thorough explanation. I think the Internet will be a good friend,here, too, because quick 'down and dirty' explanations of natural body rhythms will help. I'll just have to filter carefully, for the reasons you stated about the necessity of scaring people to death in order to be in compliance with the law.
Again, thank you.

sometimes the internet is not your friend....it gives way too much information & may cause even more anxiety over threats your son hasn't even heard of................as far as a therapist goes, i'd find one you both are comfortable with. my son changed therapists in the midst of quite a crazy time in his life~ i wouldn't suggest changing, but his therapist was a complete lunatic & crossed over some very serious professional boundarie....but i digress.........it didn't take son long to get along with the new therapist. in fact, he has come much farther with the new therapist than he ever did with the old one.
it's very easy to underestimate the stress levels in middle school. once my son got stressed out, the coping skills went totally out the window. we ended up pulling son out of district because they simply couldn't handle son's anxiety. they insisted that son was being defiant, not just overly anxious. i mean, doesn't every defiant kid sit on his heels & rock back and forth on the floor ?

I have two sons, and BOTH have been slight hypochondriacs at various stages in their growing up. We've spent a lot of our time downplaying their hypochondriac tendencies. Now that the oldest is in college, he has had to deal with hypochondriac roommates, and the funny thing is, now, he's the one that basically says "get over it!"

I do think that it becomes kind of a "special interest". I think what can be helpful is highlighting the times that your child is actually sick with the flu, or a broken bone, or something like that, and really downplaying any other perceived illness. Also pointing out how rare a thing it is for gingivitis to turn into cancer, using numbers or something that your son relates to in order to prove the point, could be helpful in lessening the interest in "catastrophic illnesses."

Kris

As a child, I developed a phobia about getting diarrhoea and vomiting (still a bit that way but the fears aren't crippling now). If I even got a tiny tummy ache, I'd be worried I would get sick and people would make fun of me. Add to that stressful situations in middle school and I got really bad tummyaches and headaches. It took years to grow out of these fears and even now, I get leery of eating food that I think might have food poisoning germs in it.

I don't know if counselling would have helped me with the fears but it could help some other people.

Last night was a good one...he only got out of bed twice, neither time for a concern about a medical problem. I'm definitely going to make a doctor's appointment tomorrow, and the old therapist is in the same building as the doctor...hoping I can get them both in the same room at the same time. Looked up lead on Christmas lights so I could follow siuan's advice (didn't send my boy there, though, because I agree with a lot of what ster had said.) about explaining away fears, and it turned out the little bugger is right! It's not just California hand-holding, it's really there! Got him to touch them briefly to help me put them up, and we both washed our hands. I needed to be reminded that he does have some legitimate concerns, and that I can't turn my back on him because he cries "wolf!" so often. No wolves around here, thank goodness.

This is indeed a fine community of people.

glad to hear things are progressing......good luck with the drs

If he just started middle school its possible he is learning about all kinds of diseases in health or science class. maybe talk to the teacher to see if this is the case, the he/she can stress how unlikely these things are to actually happen to him

Once I learned that you can develop serious/sever problems later in life if you don't empty your bladder fully or if you hold it for more than 30 minutes. I started going to the restroom at every opportunity, even if i'd just went ten minutes beforehand, just to make sure my bladder was fully empty (which is of course impossible)[/quote]

You are so right about the reading. He flips through his science book, and asks a lot of questions, most of which sound like 'worries.' I did ask the science teacher to have him choose a subject for the disease project that would be something he would have no chance of thinking he has right now. He came home tonight with a great topic: Alzheimer's. I know he won't stay up tonight worrying about whether or not he has it, but I have a feeling he's going to want me to throw away all my old frying pans!

You must have been miserable having to pee every half hour. I'm glad that that fear doesn't trouble you anymore.

Once back in High School I scraped my knee and convinced myself that I had some sort of parasitic worm in there like the kind they have in Africa, Tsetse Worm or something. I know that personally learning about diseases and how the body works and things like that could get me pretty disturbed back then.