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Sick in the Head

Stay Free! asked our readers and contributors to tell us about their psychosomatic complaints. Here's what they said.

Several years ago my longtime boyfriend and I got engaged. The ring was a sterling silver band engraved with the words vous et nul autre (French for "you and no other"). It was a long engagement, and I wore the ring for at least two years, never removing it. After wearing the ring for so long without incident, all of a sudden it began to irritate my finger. I developed a painful, itchy rash and had to stop wearing the ring. It turned out that my fiancé was cheating on me at the time--my subconscious was trying to tell me so! --Victoria Sweat

Over the past year or so I have been hearing voices that aren't there, usually as I'm waking up. I can hear them trail off as I look around to see who's there. The strangest occurrence was at a friend's barbecue. I heard someone scream, "Hey!" in my right ear, but everyone was just sitting around eating and drinking beer. When I asked if anyone had just yelled "Hey!" they cautiously replied that they hadn't. I'm not overly worried, since the voices only seem to want to get my attention at this point. Also, it could have been someone yelling on the street that no one else noticed. But it's odd that this only started happening when I moved into my new apartment, which used to be a public school. Am I haunted by a dead, disgruntled vice principal? I don't know. However, I promise to get help when the voices start bossing me around. --Chris Karwowski

While word processing for a Chicago lawyer who specialized in bankruptcy judgments, I developed a kind of tunnel vision. All day I typed huge complaints that were mostly boilerplate, going after women who had run up their Famous-Barr credit cards and guys who had stopped paying for their Tercels. My boss assured me these people were all scum. He said "scum" a lot, and "credenza" and "I'm busy, I've got law to practice!" My work there was almost entirely powered by the Starbucks in the building's lobby. After one cup, my brain felt like it had an extra storey in it, my vision would collapse, and I would find myself unable to stop typing. My boss said he really admired my work ethic, but ethics had nothing to do with it. My eyes would get locked onto the complaint, which became clear and distant. It was like riding an elephant. The world was very small but precise and nauseating. Finally I would get up and go to the bathroom, which was down a very long hallway. The women's room was across from the men's room, and the tunnel vision effect became particularly intense whenever I crossed paths with my boss or another lawyer while heading back from the bathroom. It felt like a train coming at me. I kept vowing to stop drinking the coffee, but my boss kept buying me double espressos, so this went on for quite some time. --Angela Woodward

When I was 14, my parents went out of town, leaving the place to me and my friends. We got high as hell, went nuts for two days, and documented the entire bender via VHS. I hid the video in my underwear drawer and more or less forgot about it until late one night when I woke up with an awful stabbing pain in my abdomen. I was positive my appendix was going to burst. I knew you could die from your appendix bursting, but I was too embarrassed to wake my parents and tell them because what if my appendix wasn't really bursting? So I decided to wait it out, and if I died in my sleep, then I died in my sleep--only I couldn't die and leave the videotape! My mother could never know about that weekend. So I got up, smashed the tape to smithereens, and crawled back into to bed to await my fate. I woke up the next morning with nothing more than a sore stomach and a demolished video, which I'd give anything to see today. --Lindsay Sullivan

Several years ago I began having severe stomach pains. The doctor couldn't figure out the problem even after a couple rounds of tests. I wound up taking Prilosec, and it helped, but again, as far as the doc was concerned, I had nothing physically wrong. Concurrently, however, my wife and I were going through a tough stretch. After things got better, guess what? So did my stomach. --Fred Mills

On a fifth-grade class trip, we all took a boat ride--where we were going to, or from, I can't remember. What I do remember is that it was a cold and rainy day and that we were all inside the boat's cabin when I started feeling ill. I asked the teacher if I could go stand on the deck and get some air because I was seasick. And he said, "Do you know what a psychosomatic illness is?" I said, "No." And he explained it to me and suggested that maybe I was simply feeling seasick because I felt that I should feel seasick, since I was on a boat. He said that if I really wanted to go outside, that was fine, but that I wouldn't be able to come back inside--I'd have to make a choice, to stand on the deck, where it was raining, or to stay inside the cabin. (This is one of those things that everyone overlooks in their rosy accounts of their childhood: the fact that you are at the mercy of strange and arbitrary rules.) Anyway, his explanation that my seasickness was imaginary seemed sensible to me, so I opted to stay in the cabin, nursing my stomachache, until the boat ride was over and I projectile-vomited on the dock. The teacher, to his credit, was really, really apologetic. --Tim Carvell

I have suffered from panic attacks off and on since I was about 11, and I've pretty much been on medication since I was around that age. On September 11, 2001, I had the worst panic attack of my life. I fainted and was shivering on the floor for nearly four hours, unable to get up because every time I tried I got dizzy. A few hours later, I was finally able to get up and walk to a friend's house on the Upper East Side. The next day, however, I was riding the subway and almost collapsed. I was pretty freaked out and someone had to call the paramedics. Since then I've gotten tense and/or anxious around the same time every day, between 8:30 and 11:30 a.m. Although it is much better, I can still feel my chest tightening, and I start to hyperventilate on occasion, especially during those hours. For the first few months after the 11th this occurred pretty much every day. I don't know if it's a pattern I got myself into or if it's something biological (probably a bit of both), but it made it very hard for me to concentrate at work during those hours for a good year. --Jim Morrissey

This past summer I graduated early from college and found myself growing anxious. My whole life had been geared toward graduating, and suddenly I had no goal, no purpose. "Should I move in with my boyfriend?" "Will I be able to afford rent?" "Should I start looking for a new job?" Around this time, I noticed that my right eye began twitching. It wasn't so bad at first, but as I grew more and more concerned about postcollege life, my eye twitched ever more feverishly. Eventually I started to see "swimmies"--what appeared to be mice or bugs--in my peripheral vision. After about the third day of trying to catch the mice and bugs, I realized there wasn't anything there, that the twitching eye and the evasive mouse sightings were simply manifestations of a greater anxiety. I was forced to deal with my "issues." Now that I am exercising regularly and keeping a journal, I am happy to say that my eye doesn't twitch and the only mice I see are the ones escaping from the back alley dumpsters. --Christina DiLisio

While staying with my parents one summer during college, I started having sharp stomach pains. My mom took me to her doctor, who gave me a battery of tests, none of which amounted to anything. I was given some drugs but they only put me to sleep. When I returned to school, the pains persisted, so I visited the university doctor. I explained the problem to him, and he responded by saying that he recognized my voice. I was a DJ at the college radio station, and he went on about how he loved my radio show. Normally I would have appreciated the compliment, but, y'know, you don't want the man putting his hand up your rectum talking about your radio show. It's just wrong. And when he called me at home a couple of times, I was sure he was up to no good. At that point, I decided that the cure for my stomach problem was worse than the disease and resolved to live with it. Of course, as soon as I did, the problem went away. --Carrie McLaren

Unable to sleep a few months ago, I decided to spend time on the computer. I belong to an email list for environmental topics, and disease and disaster are typical subjects. My hand was anchored under my chin, and as I read a listing about cancer, my hand suddenly felt a small lump in my throat. I don't mean the kind of lump when you swallow but a small one about the size of a pea right under the skin. Well, I started imagining that I had some sort of cancer, and I decided the best thing to do would be to go downstairs and awaken my boyfriend to inform him that he would have to find another mate since I would soon be dead. It was just as I pushed my mouse away that I suddenly felt sick to my stomach, and my mind was taken over by black smoke signals. I passed out on the desk and awoke a few minutes later with heart racing and sweaty palms. The worst part was that the lump in my neck was still there--I hadn't imagined it. The next morning I scheduled a trip to the doctor. After a few tests, it was determined that I was healthy but suffering from a swollen lymph node due to allergies. After this experience, I haven't determined which is worse: my allergies or my mind. --Leslie Birch

A few years ago I broke up with my husband and lost my job in the same week. Soon after, I learned I was pregnant. Life sucked. I am a mostly sound person with no overt neuroses, but I suffered a bizarre mental spell during that time. I was standing in line at my local Boston Market when the voices of the cashier and people around me began to evolve from English into a strange language, completely unrecognizable. Everyone was speaking in tongues, gobbledygook, and I couldn't understand a word. I felt physically fine otherwise but alienated from the rest of the planet. It was the deepest sadness imaginable. I'd guess this was probably something hormonal, but no doctor has ever been able to confirm that. It never happened again. --Marilyn Carino

After graduating from college, I worked as a teacher's aide in an elementary school in Allston, MA. Because I couldn't afford to rent an apartment, I commuted from my parents' home. As the teaching program was winding down, I still had not quite figured out what I was going to do next. I had no money saved, and I was living with my parents in an economically depressed community, one that I had hoped to leave for good. One afternoon, sitting in a park with my friend Mimi, I began itching like mad, all over my arms and legs. I squirmed and scratched all the way home as a rash spread all over my body. It turned out that I had hives, and they lasted at least a week. During that time, I met Mimi's parents, both of whom are deaf. Mimi told me that they gave me the nickname "Ed Scratch," using ASL. When we had our graduation ceremony a few days later, Mimi and I arranged to have the signer onstage introduce me as "Ed Scratch" when my name was announced, for their benefit. --Ed Bordas

My college roommate and I both had debilitating stomachaches about once a month, though never at the same time. One time I even took Dannie to the emergency room. They hooked him up to an IV of water and then he was fine. We talked to our respective doctors, but they never had answers for us. This went on for three or four years, during which we lived in three or four apartments, so I couldn't blame environmental poisoning. Nor were the pains linked to any dietary habits. We never figured it out. After college, we each had about one more stomachache. Then it stopped. Was it the stress of college? Too much coffee? Who knows. --Chris Powers

I have bizarre "sensitivities" to cash registers and magnetic sensors, to natural foods, and to stagnant air in people's houses. I also get phantom pains, only to hear later from someone that they were hurting in the exact same place. I get mood swings and anxiety attacks the day before a major upset occurs in my life. My best friend thinks I'm psychic, but the doctors throw around that word "somatic" an awful lot. How can I be somatic about stresses I'm not even going to have until the next day? --Denise Varisco

My parents raised my brother and me (I'm a girl) as devout Catholics, so I really wasn't informed about our different biological/ reproductive makeups. My mother was also a self-proclaimed doctor. She read every medical book in sight and kept the Merck Manual handy. So after experiencing bizarre symptoms at the age of 6, I broke out her handy-dandy books, and the answer was right there in black and white. Until the age of about 11, I was convinced I had prostate cancer. --Brittany Lacour