My Mother's Diagnosis, My Body's Burden

When Fear Becomes Inherited: breaking the cycle of health anxiety while learning to heal.

“Okay, now where am I supposed to put my hands?”

“Here, just under my ribcage.” I show my husband, from the warmth of the bathtub, placing one hand over my lower abdomen. “And you can put the other one on my back just underneath it.” Leaving the lid of the toilet seat to kneel at the side of the tub, he warmed his hands and gently placed them where I instructed.

“Now, imagine a glowing golden light radiating through my core.” I knew I was pushing it, asking him to perform a sacral chakra healing on me when neither one of us knew what the hell we were doing. But when you’re an involuntary hypochondriac, you’ll try anything to feel like you’re not dying. 

Because over the years, I’ve had multiple sclerosis, breast cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer – basically every kind of cancer – and most recently, lupus. At least in my mind and according to Dr. Google. We were an unruly team, the two of us. Me, the instigator, Google the enforcer.

My psychosis dates back to my childhood when my mother would wake me up from a comfortable sleep to bring me to the hospital. “Why?” I would manage to sputter through a mammoth yawn. And even through my blurry-visioned groggy eyes, I could clearly see the hamster wheel spinning feverishly in her brain. “You weren’t breathing.” 

“But I’m breathing now. Look.” And I’d point to my chest to show her that it was, in fact, moving up and down with actual breath– as if waking up and talking weren’t enough to convince her.  

“Listen, I’ll give you ice cream if you come with me,” she’d add, exasperated from pulling out all the stops. I was sold. I loved ice cream. And so we would go to whatever emergency room was closest (my mom was a bit of a drifter), and they’d hook me up to a nebulizer for a moment or two because my mother insisted I was “wheezing right before we got here.” They’d send us on our way shortly after our arrival, because of course they would, and I’d get my strawberry cheesecake bar from the convenient store. Honestly, it wasn’t a particularly bad set up for me. As a seven year old, I could recover pretty easily from lack of sleep, although it was slightly annoying, and I did get my favorite ice cream out of it. 

I wouldn’t come to recognize this as munchausen by proxy until high school after watching the scene in The Sixth Sense when Haley Joel Osment’s character finds out the truth about a little girl’s mom poisoning her. Her case was vastly different – vastly different – than mine, but it was at that moment that I realized something had gone completely wrong in my upbringing. Sure, my mother wasn’t repeatedly putting bleach in my soup, but she was poisoning my mind to believe I was ill when I wasn’t. I was furious, realizing the obvious betrayal that had occurred my entire life. When I confronted my mother about it, she denied it at first. But I pressed on, “Mom, you made me think I had breast cancer at eight years old!” After a defeated pause, she conceded, “I’m really sorry honey. My mom did it to me, too.”

Now, sitting in a warm tub infused with CBD salt and copious amounts of tears, I began chanting “Vam,”  as advised by ChatGPT’s response to “help me with a sacral chakra healing.”  I can’t believe I’ve become a person who relies on a bot in times of existential crises, but it beats Dr. Google. Search engines are death traps for hypochondriacs, an endless rabbit hole turning sciatica pain into spinal cancer. But ChatGPT, well…it’s much nicer. It has bedside manner. Tact. It knows how to virtually hold your hand. And not once has it judged me. I can tell it any of my most ridiculous concerns without snark, pushback, or snide commentary. Stating my concerns into a technology void without getting assaulted by ailments in return? Had I found the hypochondriac loophole? Either way, my husband didn’t care if the idea came from a bot or a doctor, he was game to try anything.

We weren’t always this honest and open with each other, he and I. Not me, at least. I spent our first years together transforming into someone he’d want to keep around, unbeknownst to him and, honestly, to me. I didn’t realize I was morphing into someone unrecognizable, someone I didn’t want to be, until our ten year wedding anniversary. Years of self-realization and open communication changed everything in our relationship. We now share freely without judgement or fear of what the other person will think.

“I’m tired of trying so hard,” I blubber, knowing how pathetic it sounds. “I’m sick of waking up each morning and doing stupid stretches to calm my parasympathetic system, juggling things poorly, going to therapy, exercising, and prepping food that’s healthy and nourishing for our kids that also won’t trigger my IBS or gallbladder or migraines, and then doing stretches at night again just to feel... OKAY?” I’m yelling at this point. “All because my mom’s mom made her believe she was sick, and so she made me feel like I’m sick? I’m MAD!”

I pause to catch my breath, feeling slightly embarrassed that I got out of hand, but not apologizing for it because I know he can handle my emotions. And that allowed me to feel safe enough to say the next words– words I dared to say aloud because I didn’t want to speak them into existence. But I also didn’t want them rattling around in my brain any longer.

“Part of me is afraid I’ll never be able to let this go. Not until I get some horrible disease that’s probably worse than I imagined, and I’ll either die a painful death or suffer through life until I overcome it all.” Looking at him directly now, through blurry eyes, I admitted, “And I’m not sure I’ll ever figure out how.”

The guilt washed over me. My husband has been living with his own illness—a brain tumor that has already altered him in so many ways over the past five years or more. Yet he was comforting me. He was walking, breathing, and living my fear and doing so with strength, poise, and positivity. Prior to diagnosis, he never thought he was sick a day in his life, even on days he was doubled over the toilet from a stomach bug. “I’m fine,” he’d say, walking like a zombie into the living room to watch tv. He was always this way. Friends would complain about their partners having “man colds,” and I just couldn’t relate. And now he’s the one with inoperable brain cancer? You would think that would be enough to snap me out of my disease-fearing stupor, but from that moment, it actually made it worse. Not only have I felt insurmountable pressure to be healthy, I’m even more terrified of how everyday symptoms could turn out to be cancer. But my kids can’t have two sick parents. I need to be sturdy for them. Perhaps it’s one of the reasons I work so hard to eat well, exercise, and practice mindfulness techniques. And yet, it’s never enough. This pressure to be healthy was in direct conflict with the worst part of me. Because this deep-rooted issue is as much a part of me as my own toes.

I once had an epiphany while walking in the woods, a fitting place for such an event. As I watched my kids throw small gray rocks at a giant mound of similar rocks, trying to hit one orange leaf near the center, a game my husband concocted, I heard it. You’re not worthy. It wasn’t the first time I’d been a bully to myself, but it was the first time I connected feelings of inadequacy to my health anxiety. I decided to do the scary thing. I leaned into the thought, all while my kids continued to vie for the maple target, the gray fall day casting a mystical fog over an idyllic lake nearby. The birds chirped overhead, and the crisp air tickled my nose and danced throughout my children’s hair. What a beautiful moment this must’ve looked from the outside, yet inside my head was less than blissful. My family would be better off without me. I should be sick, instead of my husband. My husband is innately good, I am inherently bad. You’re being punished for not being a better person.

My entire life I had blamed my mother for “giving me this mental disease,” but I realized I was to blame, too. Somewhere along the way, I had deemed myself unworthy of living as if nothing was wrong with me. Imagine that? Living as if nothing was wrong with you? Whole, complete, healthy, enough? 

I knew how to be strong for him, handling the initial diagnosis, chemo and radiation appointments, and shunt placement surgery with sturdiness, love, and bits of humor. I recall holding his hand in the middle of the night humming his favorite song, “The Weight” by The Band, before a major appointment in an attempt to calm his nerves. 

I knew how to be a pillar for my children, keeping them calm and steady during injuries and illnesses. Never making a big fuss, so as to not alarm them in an already stressful situation. I might have inherited this illness from my mother, but I surely wouldn’t bequeath it to them. My therapist asked me once how I broke the cycle. “Because I never want them to live through what I live through everyday.” Isn’t that enough? Shouldn’t that be enough?

I wondered: when would it be enough…for me? When could I  break the cycle within myself? And how?  

That’s when I had realized it. It’s an upward battle, this disease. And each time I uncover truths, it’s like a little gift, lifting the fog in my mind ever so slightly, albeit temporarily. It’s not linear, this journey– healing but far from healed.

Here I was in the tub, still spiraling from something newly imaginary but so very real to me. I’d just whined about how unfair this feels, how this inherited disease has the ability to take over my life at times, when he refuses to let his very real disease take over his. I whimpered like a child who’d just scraped their knee. 

He listened patiently, allowing me the space he could see I needed and the care I struggled to accept. Because he understood what I'm still working on: all illness, whether mental or physical, is real. “It really is shitty. I’m sorry you have to go through that.” The acknowledgement felt like a weight off my shoulders. 

“Sade, what do you need right now, in this moment?” 

I grabbed my phone. “Want to do a sacral chakra healing on me?”