So, a while back I noticed that once every day or two I’d have tingling in my toes and fingers. It was painless and harmless but I still wanted to know what was causing it. So I googled it and naturally convinced myself that I have Type 2 diabetes 🤦

Now I’m in an endless loop of reassurance seeking both in real life and by obsessively googling diabetes: what foods are safe to eat, what’s not safe to eat, googling more symptoms of diabetes (I even convinced myself that I had kidney failure with this one), and worst of all, obsessively perusing r/diabetes like….8-9 hours a day. I’ve become obsessed with this and it’s taking over my life.

Also, literally the same day this theme started, my tingling changed and became worse. It started happening multiple times daily instead of maybe once daily, and it feels different and more intense. This wasn’t a slow and gradual change it started as soon as my theme started, which makes me think it is related to it entirely. After I became super anxious about this I began feeling occasional mild pain and burning in my fingertips especially when I’m thinking about diabetes or when my anxiety is high.

I have been doing some stuff to stay on the safe side-working out more, portioning my food a lot (I am overweight which contributes to my anxiety about this because I do have an actual risk factor), and cutting down on carbs/carb-counting. I also scheduled a doctors appointment but it’s not until September 20th. That’s another month of uncertainty, it’s only been a week since this theme really took off and I’m going a little coo-coo, it’s gave me stress headaches and even some suicidal ideation.

What do I do to help this? I’ve already made myself stop googling anything related to diabetes, I’m thinking about deleting Reddit in the next day or so since that’s been arguably worse for my reassurance seeking than anything else has, also I’m considering stopping carb counting until I actually get a real diagnosis or a lack of one.