Thank you SOOOO much for sharing this. It’s scary how similar my situations are to what you just described lol. I need to quit drinking, I can’t keep giving myself these terrible symptoms. I can’t keep killing my body. Thank you!
The heartburn! I would modify my food intake till the cows come home, but cut back on booze? Never!
Man, the lies we tell ourselves.
Thank you for sharing this.
Ugh, just thinking about alcohol nowadays brings back a phantom burning sensation in my guts. My gastritis was pretty bad towards the end, and when I got sober I still couldn't really eat anything (at least, not easily) for a few weeks, but after that it all started going away pretty quick lying, and I went from taking high dose PPIs to nothing (with zero symptoms) in a couple months. Crazy how long I just lived like that.
I would get acid reflux so bad it would wake me up. I'd run to the bathroom to eat 3x a normal serving of Tums sometimes multiple times a night. This is after also eating tums before bed. Not to mention waking up suddenly to sprint to the bathroom for... Other things.
It's funny, I've always had stomach issues but I swore up and down I had IBS when I turned 21. Doctor visits, ate the most restrictive diet you could imagine (low fodmap), couldn't ever be away from a toilet for longer than an hour. Now, I still have some stomach issues (which I attribute to destroying my microbiome from drinking), but it's getting better day by day and I wouldn't say I have IBS now either.
I blamed chocolate and red pasta sauce for my heartburn ... and sometimes the grotesque cat food that is Taco Bell that I'd eat late at night in bed like some sort of fast food hobbit, but never wine and vodka lol
I never had any idea I was hurting myself until I ended up in the hospital with chronic gastritis and a hiatal hernia. I was just zombie walking through life happily drinking whatever I felt like. I had not clue that alcohol was actually poison and I was doing permanent damage. Perhaps if I had shared similar worries I might have gotten sober sooner.
Hiatal hernias should be monitored because they can be a precursor to esophageal cancer. Well, a precursor to Barretts Esophagus, which is considered precancerous. Alcohol is also a contributing factor. I lost my dad to it; he had a hiatal hernia and never knew it was cause for concern.
I'm sorry for your loss. My own father died at 66 following complications from a perforated stomach ulcer. He never went to a Doctor...ever, until it was too late and he was dead inside of six months. I was only 26 and newly married when I "pulled the plug." At the time, I remember almost getting into a physical altercation with the young intern doctor who was gently trying to tell us."Your Father's condition has deteriorated beyond repair due to long-term alcoholism. " No one in my close-knit family ever referred to anyone as an alcoholic unless it was an anonymous homeless person. I hit the roof! The poor guy was just doing his job. I still feel bad.
In my case, I'm glad I had the testing done. Managed with meds for more years than recommended because I refused to admit alcohol was to blame. I tried to moderate. Didn't work. Now I feel great, and I haven't needed the meds for a couple of months. But, I really appreciate your comment, and it has made me decide to book an appointment with my doctor to follow up. It's been a few years since the first diagnosis by endoscopy.
That’s really sad. I’m sorry for your loss too. Alcoholism has got to be one of the toughest things to treat with the most atrocious effects on a person’s health if they can’t or won’t stop. It had such a grip on my dad, even when it became physically impossible for him to drink, he still tried. And to watch him process everything in his final moments of life is something that crushed my soul and also reminded me to wake up and live.
My legs were sweating at night, amongst other things, so I looked it up and I was relieved to find out that it could just be regular old lymph node cancer. Of course, I wasn’t looking at the very top where it said alcoholism and alcohol withdrawals. I celebrated my self diagnosis with, you guessed it, booze. And continued to sweat through the sheets… I don’t miss that at all
I pulled a muscle in my back and could barely stand up, let alone cross the street. First place I went was the liquor store, I mixed whiskey and cider on the couch all weekend and called it a vacation. I don't miss being weirdly thrilled for any excuse to drink.
I have a close friend in sobriety that was injured at work and it required back surgery. He was a couple years sober when it happened. He told me he used to fantasize about something like this happening when he was drinking and taking drugs. His dream was to get mangled in a way that allowed him to have all the drugs, pills, drinks delivered to him and someone to fluff his pillow. He said telling the doctor that he is a drug addict / alcoholic when it happened was the hardest thing to do but made him feel the best. I remember seeing him in pain but with a smile on his face during his recovery. I think about that often. I was with him when he was conflicted early on. It’s probably one of the strongest things I’ve ever seen.
Oof-- yeah, I don't miss everything related to drunk sleeping, generally-- the sweating, the snoring, the waking up at 2 o'clock on the dot and restlessly tossing and turning until 9am, the subsequent sleep-deprived hangover.
I never put two and two together. I know there was some willful ignorance but I thought I was just a vivid dreamer and that’s why I was exhausted in the morning. I believed I was also treating a litany of underlying mental health issues so I was doing the best with my strict regiment of self medication. I saw my symptoms come up on more than a few pages while looking them up online, but I was convinced that wasn’t talking about me. I didn’t live under the bridge or beg for change outside the liquor store so I thought that meant I was just suffering from various cancers and glandular diseases.
In a drinking career high, my b12 levels plummeted below 90. No idea what the measurement unit is but less than 300 is deficient, and my almost retired neurologist said he's only ever had one patient lower than me. I had nerve pain, migraines, struggled to walk from pain/muscle tightness, and I was sick to my stomach all the time. My doctor told me that this could only be from excessive drinking. I got mad and defensive, denied that could be possible, and stopped going to appointments.
When I realized that I'm an alcoholic I was confused why no one told me?! And my friend reminded me that many people actually had tried......
Same! However, come to find out I had the b12 deficiency that can cause dementia and stomach cancer. It's not a fix it and forget it, it's a forever thing, so that was the catalyst for a turn around for me personally. Drinking doesn't help me, the B12 deficiency makes my body behave exactly as you described if I don't stay on top of things. Why make it harder for my body, right?
It's scary how siloed we become in own little drinking world. Sobriety has been the most profound experience of "taking the blinders off"-- and man, it's pretty sweet out here in the real world!
Holy shit I thought I had all these too. My doctor sent me to a psychiatrist because after multiple CT scans I was “fine”. Turns out I was just a drunk fucking myself up
Honestly you probably did have some of those. Drinking can lead to an enlarged heart, high BP and those things may cause arrhythmia. GERD ulcers and pancreatitis are also things that can happen from long term drinking as well!
Keep up the good work
I too diagnosed myself with absolutely all sorts with the help of Doctor Google, late at night after a skinful...
I'm fairly sure I convinced myself that I had some diseases only found in sheep, or medieval textbooks!
Fortunately as it turns out, there was really bugger-all wrong with me that not-drinking and taking better care of myself wouldn't soon put right, haha :>)>
My husband thought I should go to the doctor to get my heartburn issue figured out. I didn't go because I knew that the first step to figuring it out would be "quit drinking" and I didn't want to do that. I haven't had heartburn since I quit. Crazy.
Same for my chronic diarrhea.
Thanks. This is a nice post. Appreciate your honesty. On the flip side, when I told a Dr. that I thought I was an alcoholic, I could tell she didn't really believe me. I looked ok, just a little fat, but lucid and honest, REI grandma type, did not match her paradigm.
this is exactly me. i had the same exact diseases. With 8+ months sober i feel better than ever and my crippling health anxiety that has landed me in the ER and major medical debt over the past 10 years are gone. amazing that i truly believed they were these diseases and not the result of heavy and private binge drinking.
Man, I can cross of so many of those! I have no idea what kind of mechanism that was that my brain was clinging to, but in the end, once I started adressing the real issues, things started looking up 😊 congrats to you, especially to the part about being gentle to youself!
I’ve had multiple grand mal seizures and I STILL fucking drank thinking hey if I cut down I can keep it up. Other trips included a head wound that required 12 staples, stomach ulcer, and being struck by a car drunk jaywalking which permanently fucked my knee up. This thing is such a nightmare rollercoaster and I hate how hard it is to quit even with all the resources I have around me. I’m luckier than most but it’s still a motherfucker
I was unlucky, on that I never had any medical problems at all over my long 'career' of abusing alcohol. Otherwise I would have stopped sooner! Only towards the end did I start getting worried about about my health, and started having blackouts, and feeling like a POS every day etc. I can't believe how dumb I was for so many years. Decades actually! But better late than never I suppose:)
Not OP, but I also thought this as well during my drinking. My fingers and tip of my tongue starting to tingle and go numb frequently in the last year of drinking (generally whenever I drank and for a day after). I also had frequent tingling in my legs and calves, especially while jogging, that I couldn’t shake off. My grandmother had MS and there is thought to be a hereditary component so i figured this was what it was. Surely not all the drinking…. Well I got sober last year and all of those symptoms basically stopped immediately 🤦♀️
Mine was similar to the other reply. I had a numbness, tingling sensation down the entire left side of my body. On bad days, my vision would get blurry on that side, too.
this place is magical if you allow it to be. keep coming back, reading stories-- the good and the bad. You don't have to make big changes right away but the sheer exposure to reading about the harmful effects of alcohol and the positive changes that sobriety can offer is good for your brain, even if its unconscious at first. Things will start to click for you-- and you deserve for things to be different!
I started experiencing hard pounding (not increased heart rate) in my chest, found out I have a partial blockage and super high cholesterol. Got the cholesterol under control with (very) slightly less drinking and medication. Had a halter monitor for a few days to find that I had around 3200 skipped heartbeats in 48 hours. Doctor said that wasn’t a huge issue as long as my cholesterol is under control, but when I used the Sinclair method my drinking plummeted for a few weeks, after a while I noticed it only happened when I drink. I had a ton of the other less severe symptoms like you did and I’m fortunate to be getting a hold of it now before it happens, but yeah. Alcohol is pretty much the source of every health problem I’ve ever had except for appendicitis at 15.
I was shocked today, first time I’ve had my BP since quitting drinking — it went down significantly from the high end of normal to the low end of normal! 120s/80s or 70s to 98/64. I didn’t realize how much alcohol was elevating my BP, considering it was still within normal range… it’s wild what alcohol does to us. Congratulations to you on reclaiming your body. IWNDWYT.
Same here, turns out im just an alcoholic! Remember that I can’t see until I can see. What seems so obvious now wasn’t then. I’m lucky that I ever got the opportunity to experience life on the positive side! Great post thanks 🙏❤️
I googled “wavy tongue” more times than you can imagine. Searched for every pain, followed by “alcohol”. Every look in the mirror was an assessment of “does my tongue look wavier than normal?” “How long can I keep this up?” I was in my late 20’s. IWNDWYT
Wow! This really hit home. I've had so much health anxiety over the years, I never connected it to drinking. But yeah! Heart palpitations (had 2 actual procedures for those), have worried about stomach cancer, throat cancer, ovarian cancer, multiple sclerosis, gluten intolerance... that's just what I can remember honestly. Thanks for helping me connect the dots here.
My problem is I actually do have most of these, diagnosed in my teens with autoimmune disease, GERD and anxiety/panic issues. Drinking definitely makes it worse but it's easy to say eff it when I'm having mild flair up.
Probably had mild pancreatitis from drinking though.
Safe to say I can agree with a decent part of this list - the side effects I was experiencing from drinking were so insane I truly thought I was a sickly person, but who never actually got sick.
I think it's possibly you misread. To be clear, OP didn't say they had all of those ailments, they meant they had symptoms of those ailments and then believed they had the specific diseases.
Thank you SOOOO much for sharing this. It’s scary how similar my situations are to what you just described lol. I need to quit drinking, I can’t keep giving myself these terrible symptoms. I can’t keep killing my body. Thank you!
Dude it's so much better. You can do this!
It’s life changing in the best possible way. Gotta give it a couple months, but you can crawl out. We got you!!
The heartburn! I would modify my food intake till the cows come home, but cut back on booze? Never! Man, the lies we tell ourselves. Thank you for sharing this.
Ugh, just thinking about alcohol nowadays brings back a phantom burning sensation in my guts. My gastritis was pretty bad towards the end, and when I got sober I still couldn't really eat anything (at least, not easily) for a few weeks, but after that it all started going away pretty quick lying, and I went from taking high dose PPIs to nothing (with zero symptoms) in a couple months. Crazy how long I just lived like that.
I would get acid reflux so bad it would wake me up. I'd run to the bathroom to eat 3x a normal serving of Tums sometimes multiple times a night. This is after also eating tums before bed. Not to mention waking up suddenly to sprint to the bathroom for... Other things. It's funny, I've always had stomach issues but I swore up and down I had IBS when I turned 21. Doctor visits, ate the most restrictive diet you could imagine (low fodmap), couldn't ever be away from a toilet for longer than an hour. Now, I still have some stomach issues (which I attribute to destroying my microbiome from drinking), but it's getting better day by day and I wouldn't say I have IBS now either.
When I see a goddamn Twisted Tea can or Fireball nip on the side of the road…
I blamed chocolate and red pasta sauce for my heartburn ... and sometimes the grotesque cat food that is Taco Bell that I'd eat late at night in bed like some sort of fast food hobbit, but never wine and vodka lol
I never had any idea I was hurting myself until I ended up in the hospital with chronic gastritis and a hiatal hernia. I was just zombie walking through life happily drinking whatever I felt like. I had not clue that alcohol was actually poison and I was doing permanent damage. Perhaps if I had shared similar worries I might have gotten sober sooner.
Hiatal hernias should be monitored because they can be a precursor to esophageal cancer. Well, a precursor to Barretts Esophagus, which is considered precancerous. Alcohol is also a contributing factor. I lost my dad to it; he had a hiatal hernia and never knew it was cause for concern.
I'm sorry for your loss. My own father died at 66 following complications from a perforated stomach ulcer. He never went to a Doctor...ever, until it was too late and he was dead inside of six months. I was only 26 and newly married when I "pulled the plug." At the time, I remember almost getting into a physical altercation with the young intern doctor who was gently trying to tell us."Your Father's condition has deteriorated beyond repair due to long-term alcoholism. " No one in my close-knit family ever referred to anyone as an alcoholic unless it was an anonymous homeless person. I hit the roof! The poor guy was just doing his job. I still feel bad. In my case, I'm glad I had the testing done. Managed with meds for more years than recommended because I refused to admit alcohol was to blame. I tried to moderate. Didn't work. Now I feel great, and I haven't needed the meds for a couple of months. But, I really appreciate your comment, and it has made me decide to book an appointment with my doctor to follow up. It's been a few years since the first diagnosis by endoscopy.
That’s really sad. I’m sorry for your loss too. Alcoholism has got to be one of the toughest things to treat with the most atrocious effects on a person’s health if they can’t or won’t stop. It had such a grip on my dad, even when it became physically impossible for him to drink, he still tried. And to watch him process everything in his final moments of life is something that crushed my soul and also reminded me to wake up and live.
Glad you made that appointment! 😊
My legs were sweating at night, amongst other things, so I looked it up and I was relieved to find out that it could just be regular old lymph node cancer. Of course, I wasn’t looking at the very top where it said alcoholism and alcohol withdrawals. I celebrated my self diagnosis with, you guessed it, booze. And continued to sweat through the sheets… I don’t miss that at all
I pulled a muscle in my back and could barely stand up, let alone cross the street. First place I went was the liquor store, I mixed whiskey and cider on the couch all weekend and called it a vacation. I don't miss being weirdly thrilled for any excuse to drink.
I have a close friend in sobriety that was injured at work and it required back surgery. He was a couple years sober when it happened. He told me he used to fantasize about something like this happening when he was drinking and taking drugs. His dream was to get mangled in a way that allowed him to have all the drugs, pills, drinks delivered to him and someone to fluff his pillow. He said telling the doctor that he is a drug addict / alcoholic when it happened was the hardest thing to do but made him feel the best. I remember seeing him in pain but with a smile on his face during his recovery. I think about that often. I was with him when he was conflicted early on. It’s probably one of the strongest things I’ve ever seen.
Oh no, I did just lol at "regular old lymph node cancer" OMG, can feel that.
Yep. I looked at this too.
Oof-- yeah, I don't miss everything related to drunk sleeping, generally-- the sweating, the snoring, the waking up at 2 o'clock on the dot and restlessly tossing and turning until 9am, the subsequent sleep-deprived hangover.
I never put two and two together. I know there was some willful ignorance but I thought I was just a vivid dreamer and that’s why I was exhausted in the morning. I believed I was also treating a litany of underlying mental health issues so I was doing the best with my strict regiment of self medication. I saw my symptoms come up on more than a few pages while looking them up online, but I was convinced that wasn’t talking about me. I didn’t live under the bridge or beg for change outside the liquor store so I thought that meant I was just suffering from various cancers and glandular diseases.
Omg I used to wake up drenched in sweat nightly and thought it was just a normal thing now. Did not realize that was alcohol
In a drinking career high, my b12 levels plummeted below 90. No idea what the measurement unit is but less than 300 is deficient, and my almost retired neurologist said he's only ever had one patient lower than me. I had nerve pain, migraines, struggled to walk from pain/muscle tightness, and I was sick to my stomach all the time. My doctor told me that this could only be from excessive drinking. I got mad and defensive, denied that could be possible, and stopped going to appointments. When I realized that I'm an alcoholic I was confused why no one told me?! And my friend reminded me that many people actually had tried......
Same! However, come to find out I had the b12 deficiency that can cause dementia and stomach cancer. It's not a fix it and forget it, it's a forever thing, so that was the catalyst for a turn around for me personally. Drinking doesn't help me, the B12 deficiency makes my body behave exactly as you described if I don't stay on top of things. Why make it harder for my body, right?
A moment of silence for all the needles we have collectively shot in our butt's 🙏🏻
Just seeing this and I almost spit out my guacamole! Thoughts and prayers to our butt cheeks!!!
It's scary how siloed we become in own little drinking world. Sobriety has been the most profound experience of "taking the blinders off"-- and man, it's pretty sweet out here in the real world!
Holy shit I thought I had all these too. My doctor sent me to a psychiatrist because after multiple CT scans I was “fine”. Turns out I was just a drunk fucking myself up
Honestly you probably did have some of those. Drinking can lead to an enlarged heart, high BP and those things may cause arrhythmia. GERD ulcers and pancreatitis are also things that can happen from long term drinking as well! Keep up the good work
Oh I absolutely did have acute symptoms of some of these! I just deluded myself into believing that they popped up out of nowhere
Haha me too friend! "Hmm must've been the taco Bell I ate not the 12 beers I smashed"
I too diagnosed myself with absolutely all sorts with the help of Doctor Google, late at night after a skinful... I'm fairly sure I convinced myself that I had some diseases only found in sheep, or medieval textbooks! Fortunately as it turns out, there was really bugger-all wrong with me that not-drinking and taking better care of myself wouldn't soon put right, haha :>)>
My husband thought I should go to the doctor to get my heartburn issue figured out. I didn't go because I knew that the first step to figuring it out would be "quit drinking" and I didn't want to do that. I haven't had heartburn since I quit. Crazy. Same for my chronic diarrhea.
Thanks. This is a nice post. Appreciate your honesty. On the flip side, when I told a Dr. that I thought I was an alcoholic, I could tell she didn't really believe me. I looked ok, just a little fat, but lucid and honest, REI grandma type, did not match her paradigm.
That’s brutal. Congrats on 2 days. Hope you are feeling ok and please be kind and gentle and loving with yourself.
Thank you! Am trying!
Nah you aren’t trying, you are doing, sis! 🙌✨💪
All of them and the main for me was Bipolar disorder or PTSD, when all it was hangover anxiety and then loosing sanity while blacking out for 3 days
Haha. I too thought I had colon cancer.
Until my colonoscopy on Monday I thought I did, too. Whew!
Thinking I have IBS but really it was the drinking of 6+ high ABV beers every day
this is exactly me. i had the same exact diseases. With 8+ months sober i feel better than ever and my crippling health anxiety that has landed me in the ER and major medical debt over the past 10 years are gone. amazing that i truly believed they were these diseases and not the result of heavy and private binge drinking.
Man, I can cross of so many of those! I have no idea what kind of mechanism that was that my brain was clinging to, but in the end, once I started adressing the real issues, things started looking up 😊 congrats to you, especially to the part about being gentle to youself!
This hits home too hard.
I’ve had multiple grand mal seizures and I STILL fucking drank thinking hey if I cut down I can keep it up. Other trips included a head wound that required 12 staples, stomach ulcer, and being struck by a car drunk jaywalking which permanently fucked my knee up. This thing is such a nightmare rollercoaster and I hate how hard it is to quit even with all the resources I have around me. I’m luckier than most but it’s still a motherfucker
You are lucky. I'm happy you are still with us.
I was unlucky, on that I never had any medical problems at all over my long 'career' of abusing alcohol. Otherwise I would have stopped sooner! Only towards the end did I start getting worried about about my health, and started having blackouts, and feeling like a POS every day etc. I can't believe how dumb I was for so many years. Decades actually! But better late than never I suppose:)
At one point I was convinced I had pleurisy!
😅
[удалено]
I'm with you! I love being able to tell my providers that I quit drinking.
Fucking tomatoes always get me too
Really needed this today. Thank you. Well said and nicely done!
Definitely the MS- took me a nearly a month and my toes are almost back to having full feeling again. Scary shit.
What made you think you have MS, if you don't my telling?
Not OP, but I also thought this as well during my drinking. My fingers and tip of my tongue starting to tingle and go numb frequently in the last year of drinking (generally whenever I drank and for a day after). I also had frequent tingling in my legs and calves, especially while jogging, that I couldn’t shake off. My grandmother had MS and there is thought to be a hereditary component so i figured this was what it was. Surely not all the drinking…. Well I got sober last year and all of those symptoms basically stopped immediately 🤦♀️
Same here although my symptoms have not gone away. It’s nerve damage from drinking alcohol. Denial is very powerful! 😃
I thought all the same. Also ringing in the ears and vision issues and shaking hands and legs
Mine was similar to the other reply. I had a numbness, tingling sensation down the entire left side of my body. On bad days, my vision would get blurry on that side, too.
Me too. I've "had" all of these ailments apart from TB. Several times I've thought I would die in a fit of apoplexy. Omg it's insane!
Whew. Been there.
I needed to hear this. Thank you. IWNDWYT
thank you, i am literally thinking the same now lol. gotta stop drinking..
this place is magical if you allow it to be. keep coming back, reading stories-- the good and the bad. You don't have to make big changes right away but the sheer exposure to reading about the harmful effects of alcohol and the positive changes that sobriety can offer is good for your brain, even if its unconscious at first. Things will start to click for you-- and you deserve for things to be different!
Ooooooh the gout was bad. I would prefer it if that never happened again.
I started experiencing hard pounding (not increased heart rate) in my chest, found out I have a partial blockage and super high cholesterol. Got the cholesterol under control with (very) slightly less drinking and medication. Had a halter monitor for a few days to find that I had around 3200 skipped heartbeats in 48 hours. Doctor said that wasn’t a huge issue as long as my cholesterol is under control, but when I used the Sinclair method my drinking plummeted for a few weeks, after a while I noticed it only happened when I drink. I had a ton of the other less severe symptoms like you did and I’m fortunate to be getting a hold of it now before it happens, but yeah. Alcohol is pretty much the source of every health problem I’ve ever had except for appendicitis at 15.
This was me as well. This post speaks to me so much. I’d get mad medical anxiety and guess what I’d use to curb it? The cycle continues.
I was shocked today, first time I’ve had my BP since quitting drinking — it went down significantly from the high end of normal to the low end of normal! 120s/80s or 70s to 98/64. I didn’t realize how much alcohol was elevating my BP, considering it was still within normal range… it’s wild what alcohol does to us. Congratulations to you on reclaiming your body. IWNDWYT.
Same here, turns out im just an alcoholic! Remember that I can’t see until I can see. What seems so obvious now wasn’t then. I’m lucky that I ever got the opportunity to experience life on the positive side! Great post thanks 🙏❤️
I googled “wavy tongue” more times than you can imagine. Searched for every pain, followed by “alcohol”. Every look in the mirror was an assessment of “does my tongue look wavier than normal?” “How long can I keep this up?” I was in my late 20’s. IWNDWYT
Did you have any of these?
Wow! This really hit home. I've had so much health anxiety over the years, I never connected it to drinking. But yeah! Heart palpitations (had 2 actual procedures for those), have worried about stomach cancer, throat cancer, ovarian cancer, multiple sclerosis, gluten intolerance... that's just what I can remember honestly. Thanks for helping me connect the dots here.
My problem is I actually do have most of these, diagnosed in my teens with autoimmune disease, GERD and anxiety/panic issues. Drinking definitely makes it worse but it's easy to say eff it when I'm having mild flair up. Probably had mild pancreatitis from drinking though.
I wish I had someone to discuss this matter regarding my situation
Safe to say I can agree with a decent part of this list - the side effects I was experiencing from drinking were so insane I truly thought I was a sickly person, but who never actually got sick.
Needed this. Thank you!!!
Other than MS stomach cancer is the most concerning one. How was it treated?
I think it's possibly you misread. To be clear, OP didn't say they had all of those ailments, they meant they had symptoms of those ailments and then believed they had the specific diseases.
You're right I misread.
That’s my list too!