And so it goes on

You could literally drive yourself insane worrying about things and worry can manifest itself in so many different ways, even physical pain. It can cause headaches, stomach aches and even diarrhoea - each adding to the stressfulness of the situation. I think the worst thing to be worried about is health. At least when worrying about other things (relationships, exams, etc.) you can console yourself with the fact that no matter how bad it gets, it's not actually going to kill you, you're not actually going to die. Dying, of course, when worrying about health, actually tends to be the frightening source of concern.

I'm delaying going to bed now. The average person takes seven minutes to get to sleep. That is most certainly not true of me, and I know it will take even longer tonight. Why is it that worries seem so much more significant and life-threatening when you're laying there in the dark?

I look forward to going home. I will be there in five nights. There I will be able to lie in bed beside my boyfriend and voice every worry the instant it appears in my fraught mind, and he will hopefully extinguish each one with words of reassurance. But that means five more long sleepless nights alone. And four more days in fact, since I am living alone at the moment. In truthfulness, I cannot wait to get home, see my parents and tell them my ridiculous worry (that I have developed an abdominal aortic aneurysm) and for them to laugh in my face and say "Don't be silly. I sometimes have that feeling too. It's normal."

What I want most is to wake up tomorrow and never feel a pulse in my stomach again. Do you know what I also think? I wonder if yesterday I happened to feel it more than usual, which led me (unfortunately) to look it up on the internet and find this condition and therefore the pulse, which I always vaguely sensed in the past, has taken on a whole new fatal light, which I will never be able to see past. Thus I will be irrationally worrying about it for the rest of my life - an unbearably bleak thought. And one that I am in fact not willing to tolerate.

I have decided that if I still feel this on Tuesday (when I return to England), I shall make a doctor's appointment, to which I will undoubtedly go along only to be diagnosed with "states of anxiety", such was the outcome of my last visit to an establishment of this sort.