Embarrassing fear leading up to surgery.

Hi all. I’ve been struggling with pain and bleeding for years and after several doctors telling me to just lose weight, or meditate, or smile more, I finally found a doctor who took me seriously. She created a medical team for me and they have confirm adenomyosis as well as prolapsed pelvic organs and extensive damage to my muscle walls with possible bowel involvement. I am scheduled for surgery this coming Monday.

I am nervous about surgery of course. They tell me it’s a major surgery that will take around 4 hours. That recovery will be around 2 months… a year and a half before I’m fully healed. I would think that the pain of surgery and the limitations of recovery would be the thing that haunts my dreams right??

So why do I instead have this paralyzing fear that I have somehow over exaggerated my condition? I mean, how crazy is it to feel that way? I am actually afraid that I have somehow tricked people into believing that I have a major medical issue. That years spent barreling through pain and fatigue, pretending to everyone that nothing was wrong, were somehow an act? That the tests were somehow wrongly influenced by my account of things.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is it maybe a medical gaslighting response? Is it trauma? Is it some kind of dissociating?

I’m really so embarrassed that I can’t bring myself to discuss it with anyone in my life. I feel like this is a next level crazy response. If anyone can shed some light on this little mental health crisis of mine I would really appreciate it!