I thought I had Steven Johnson syndrome
When I was a kid I got these weird flaps of what felt like dead skin inside my mouth on both of my cheeks, and when I tore them off my entire mouth and my lips got inflamed. I couldn’t eat and had to be hospitalized for like 2 weeks. They told me they had no idea what it was but it might be Steven Johnson’s syndrome. It kept coming back periodically, too, but each time it’d be way less severe and now I don’t get it at all.
Was that anything like your experience? Just out of curiosity.
Yikes yeah that does kind of sound like it. I’m sorry you had to experience that. It’s a shitty disease.
I developed a pretty bad ulcer on the inside of my cheek. It was super inflamed and my upper teeth rubbed it whenever they moved, causing quite a bit of discomfort. In retrospect it was probably just a bad apthuous ulcer (canker sore) but it didn’t have the typical look of one, nor do I typically get them.
The kicker was that I was taking a course of Meloxicam, which is an anti inflammatory medication which is very much linked to SJS, so I panicked.
I work in critical care and have seen a lot of bad SJS/TEN (toxic epidermal necrolysis) cases and my mind immediately jumped to those. I’ve seen every inch of skin fall off of people.
Medical people are the worst hypochondriacs lol.
Trying to park at a mall, in Toronto, in early December one year (so Christmas shopping ramping up) … amusingly for an appointment with a psychologist.
She had to come out at park the car for me.
Drivers in this city… so, so toxic.
Anxiety stopped having nearly so much of a hold on me when I realized that there usually wasn’t a “why”, that it was just anxiety chasing its own ass and only pretending to have anything to do with the stimuli.
Agreed, it took a decent chunk of therapy for me to figure out that a lot of times I was reversing cause and effect. I’m not anxious about xyz because of whatever rationalization I came up with, it’s literally just my body dumping adrenaline and my brain looking for an explanation for why.
In 2021, I was riding an Amtrak train when it derailed at 80 mph. Several of the cars, including the one I was in, fell onto their sides and slid a significant distance along the ground. Three people were killed.
After spending the night in a hotel, they arranged for me and several other passengers to get on another train to get us home. I didn’t think much of it, I just wanted to get home, but the moment the train got up to speed I realized I had made a mistake. I spent the entire journey in a state of extreme stress, on the verge of crying. This train (the Empire Builder) is timed so that you get to sit in the diner car and eat dinner while passing through the most scenic part of the trip, the Rocky Mountains of western Montana and northern Idaho. But I didn’t enjoy any of it. I remember staring at my dinner, desperately trying to hold myself together, wincing every time there was a bang or jolt (and for those who’ve never been on an Amtrak train - there are a lot of those).
I had never experienced an anxiety attack before, and based on this experience I never want to have one again. The train got to my home station at about six in the morning, and I didn’t sleep at all.
I had one at work. Nothing bad was happening at work and there was no trigger that I could pin point. It just came over me like a wave and all of a sudden nothing felt real. It was like I was watching myself in a movie. Was also trying to hold in vomit. One of the worst ones I’ve had.
