autumngazer, thank you. I am in a much better place with it all these days than I have ever been. I don't think you can ever say you are "cured" - any form of anxiety/OCD is an insidious beast which can recur, in much the same way that an alcoholic has to always stay away from the booze even years after they've stopped therapy. However, I have made massive progress. I know you must look at what I post and think that I can't have had it as bad as you, that you'll never be able to get past this - because that's how I used to think. Honestly, I have spent days and days of my life on Google, reading about diseases. I have had more GP appointments than I care to remember where I pretended that I wasn't really worrying I was dying. For me, there were two lightbulb moments. One was last summer on a family holiday. We were away for two weeks in Spain and had so been looking forward to it. I spent the entire time sneaking away to the bathroom to obsessively look at my neck and feel my nodes, convinced they had grown and I had lymphoma. I was hiding it from DH (because deep down, we all know our anxiety is extreme and irrational - knowing that doesn't make it go away, but we do know it) but he knew something was wrong. He could see I was having a bad time but because he didn't know why, he thought it was a problem with our relationship. He got really upset one night because he could see how withdrawn I was and thought it was him and I wanted to leave him. I ended up telling him then and that was a big moment for me, when he understood. He made me see the impact that my HA was having on my life - both on my marriage and my relationship with my kids. That was when I resolved that I was going to get better and I started reading on how to get over HA.
As part of my reading I found an OCD forum which helped too. A lot of people were asking for reassurance for various anxieties, some of them health-related, others not. The pattern was always the same - people posting saying "I'm really worried about this...do you think I should see the doctor...it's not going to be serious I'm sure but I can't stop worrying...". Anyway, there was a long-term poster on there who had had OCD for years but was in recovery from it and he always took the time to respond. His response was always one of tough love - he would comment on their threads and say "look, I am not going to give you the reassurance you seek. I am not going to engage with you and tell you that your headache is not a brain tumour, even though that is what you want me to say and what you think will make you feel better. It won't make you feel better. The only thing that will is stopping asking for reassurance in the first place and training your brain not to want it." Again, that really struck a chord with me. It was honestly like an epiphany as it made me see that my whole approach to "dealing with health fears" was wrong. I thought what I needed was to read statistics about cancer, to be informed about treatments, to hear the GP tell me that everything was normal. He made me see that all that does is make things temporarily feel better but worse in the long term.
So I made myself stop doing it. I'm not going to lie, I still have moments where I do it. I'm sitting here now with a headache I've had on and off for a few days, and of course my brain is telling me it's a tumour, I should google and see if I've got any other symptoms....but I'm not doing. I am telling myself that this is my silly OCD and that it is not something I need to Google. And it does work. Not straight away, but it does.