I just graduated from college a few months ago. I got my driver's license. I interviewed and got a job. I was going to move out of my parents house and it was supposed to be the start of my life. I've always had depression and anxiety, but things were looking up.

Around the time I went on a trip abroad to Europe, I got really bad neck pain. It came on pretty suddenly. It made it very hard to socialize or do much. But I pushed through as much as I could, thinking it was just a muscle spasm, and it would go away. In hindsight I don't know what exactly triggered it. I did notice a little bit of pain for the first time before flying out so who knows if its even related to the trip. I was on the bus a lot, and pulling luggage, so maybe it was whiplash or a strain. But it morphed into something much worse.

After the trip I got back home. I was still having pain so a doctor in the family referred me to a neuro. I got an MRI shortly after which was normal! The neuro told me it was just a spasm and would go away in a week or two, I believed them. And PT for my neck was suggested.

At this point I started my first full-time job, and I was looking forward to joining comedy classes and getting out more. I've never really had any good friends, just acquaintances from college that I got to know a little bit my last semester. We all moved in to the same big city, and I was excited to hang out, and finally make a friend.

At this point the neck pain was still flaring up, so I started PT. Unfortunately after a week or two, it got worse. Much worse. Like 9/10. The pain was between my neck and left shoulder, and it felt like my shoulder bone was being eaten alive by the pain. It also spread to my right shoulder sometimes.

The pain was so bad I felt like I was dying. I went back to neuro. They did some weird nerve test which showed I had carpal tunnel and told me to go to a shoulder orthopedist. In the meantime I went to an urgent care, my PCP, and then the ortho. I was told it was a left trap strain; to do more PT; and got my pain meds changed. (not opioids)

Since then I have been spending every hour, of every day, moving in and out of constant pain around my neck, between my shoulder. Pain so bad I feel like I'm dying. I have no idea how in the hell I was showing up to work and getting anything done. Really I wasn't, my productively was slowly tanking.

This whole experience has been like a PTSD/Trauma for me. I missed 2 whole summer months to pain. I spend days going to the office and back, struggling to eat, then sleeping. I became very worried about every part of my body. My hypochondria is up 10000x. For a good 2 weeks I was worried about ALS and whether my carpal was the first sign because my right hand would cramp. Then I forgot about the cramping, so I forgot about the ALS.

The neck pain stayed and turned into neck pain around this "lump" on my right side.

I couldn't take it, so I went to another doctor. Now I have an ultrasound in a few days.

Day after seeing Doc I notice a "lump" under right armpit. Great, now I might have cancer or something. I see my PCP tomorrow.

Now I'm worried about difficulty swallowing. I feel like I have too much saliva and that I'm swallowing air a lot, so I spent half of the day googling dysphagia and whether I'm going to get ALS or something like that again.

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I ask myself "why" a lot and what I did to deserve this. I think back to the time I was interning in a biology laboratory in high school and when I started college. I was there for 4 summers. My last summer I worked across from a guy working with radioactive stuff and I remember we had to decontaminate an instrument I was using when we tested it. He got some kind of oral cancer after I left. He cured it, but I've been thinking about that a lot, and whether I "poisoned" myself by being in the lab. I can't say they were good with safety stuff, but it was in a major research hospital, so it's unlikely, I think, for something serious to have happened.

\*\*\*\*\*\*

Clearly, I'm on the verge of a complete breakdown. And partially, I feel delusional. I just wish I could wake up tomorrow and feel fine. And go back to living life - enjoying comedy, dancing, hiking, meeting girls, all the things I enjoyed before this started.

In the meantime I'm living with my annoying family who yell a lot, and my sister (who is also disabled for a completely different reason). This isn't the life I signed up for. It's a living hell.