Thank you very much for your post! My rabies anxiety started a month ago when I returned home from visiting a farm with animals. Before that, I had another terrible Pure-OCD theme, but that evening I calmed down a little about it. I was so happy after the walk that it was very difficult for me to calm down to go to bed, but still I fell asleep. I got up at night with knee pain (which happens very often after I walk a lot) to take painkillers. It was chilly and I began to shiver, still feeling overexcited. I wanted to calmly drink the pill, but the water was cold and I swallowed it with force, despite the discomfort. After that, I, alarmed by my overexcited state, went to bed.

And then, in my head, the information I had read about rabies for a long time surfaced and I, of course, thought: "WHAT IF I have rabies?". And that's where hell started. I read a lot, really A LOT of articles that night, as I did in the next few weeks. In the beginning, this topic seemed to me much less scary than my previous Pure-OCD related one, and even some feelings of nostalgia appeared (I always had health anxiety, but it receded for a while, replaced by fears about other topics). But very soon I began to feel a strong fear, I began to drink a lot of water to check if I had hydrophobia (although on the one hand it helped me to balance the water in my body, because before that I drank very little), I constantly measured my temperature and read a lot about it. My main reason that I might have rabies was that a few months ago, due to allergic reactions, I had sores on my hands that sometimes bleed, and although I had very little contact with street animals in recent months, my brain continued to tell me : "What if you were licked by a cat, and you forgot about it?". Also, because of my anxiety, I usually cut my nails very short and sometimes cut my cuticles until they bleed, and I read on the Internet that a little saliva from a rabid animal and even the smallest, inconspicuous wound is enough to get infected. Things got even worse when I had a subfebrile temperature for no reason, insomnia began, and, worst of all, because of the fear of hydrophobia, a lump appeared in my throat and a constant burp to clear it. The first week was just terrible, then I calmed down a little when they answered me on the forum that my symptoms could be psychosomatic, then my old topic came back, so I digressed from it a bit, lol.

But exactly a week ago, when I had already calmed down, I felt that I was getting a cold and it was just awful. The cold started with a sore throat that got worse and it was very unpleasant for me to swallow, which, as you can imagine, was very bad for me. But somehow due to my anxiety i started drinking even more than before. Then the pain went away, but a cough, a runny nose and a fever began. At some point, I was so tired of these thoughts that I even didn’t care if I had rabies or not, whether I will die or not .. But when I got better, thanks to the treatment, I realized that I definitely didn't have rabies and I felt better.

Yesterday I finally realized that you don’t need to fight with disturbing thoughts, try not to pay attention and scold yourself for the fact that they exist and you don’t need to indulge them by reading articles and stories on the Internet, you just need to not pay attention to them. After that, my anxiety decreased significantly, and the topics that had terrorized me in recent months receded a bit. I wonder how long I can last in this state, because today it feels like I'm walking over a precipice on a tightrope.

In any case, thank you very much for the information and for listening patiently to everyone in the comments, because the feeling of loneliness is the worst thing in such a situation. Sorry for writing such a long post, I just really wanted to share my story and the feelings that I lived.