Severe Health Anxiety - Need Reassurance

Hello I'm a 20 year old female who has suffered from severe anxiety - especially health anxiety - for my entire life. For the past 2 months I've gone through a particularly rough episode of health anxiety that started with the onset of physical symptoms after a period of high stress. I've had sharp stabbing/shooting pains in my head, body-wide tingling/numbness at random times, chest pain, heart palpitations and high heart rate, weird feelings of pressure in my head, prickling feelings on my head and face, jaw and facial pain/soreness, burning feelings in my head and much more. I've gone through a chain of various illnesses/conditions that I convinced myself I have including MS, brain abscess, brain tumor, brain aneurysm, skull cancer and more. I went to multiple doctors all of which have put my symptoms down to anxiety and tension.

However, my new obsession is vertebral artery dissection, which all started about a week ago when I was doing some stretches to release tension and felt this weird feeling of slight coolness/tingling go down my neck to my right shoulder/arm as I turned my head to the side. This feeling subsided after a few minutes but I immediately thought of an article I had read about a woman who tore her vertebral artery while doing a challenging yoga pose and had a stroke a few days later. It wasn't long before the thought moved from the back of my mind to the forefront of my worries, and I hopped on google and began reading article after article about symptoms, stories and medical records of vertebral artery dissection. I wasn't experiencing the main symptoms listed (severe neck pain, severe to moderate headache in back of head or unilateral headache, dizziness, nausea and vomiting, balance issues, loss of senses, stroke symptoms) but then I read that sometimes the onset of symptoms is gradual and it could take hours, days and even weeks for symptoms to appear. Naturally this sent me into a panic that I would begin to experience these symptoms any minute, and I added this to my long list of health fears. On top of the symptoms I'd been having that I listed above, I then began to feel like there was a weird feeling of pressure at the base of my skull. Then I began to feel this weird pulsing sensation around this area and I began to envision that this must be my artery tearing, pooling blood and the blood collecting to form a clot. Then I started getting dull jabbing feelings around this same area that really freaked me out. At this point I was in a state of pure panic and my fears were bouncing from brain aneurysm to brain tumor to vertebral artery dissection every minute.

Finally my roommate had had enough of my obsessing and panicking and a few days ago took my to the emergency room. I was given a CT scan of my brain and a strong dose of anxiety medication since my heart rate was soaring (165 at one point). After the doctor came in and assured me that the CT scan was clear and my brain looked healthy I felt immensely better, and by the next day pretty much all of my symptoms that I'd had for months magically subsided.

However, I began to worry that a vertebral artery dissection wouldn't show up on a CT scan of the brain, since it could be located in my neck. I then began to realize that I still had a weird feeling of pressure around the base of my skull, so this fear of a VAD continued to manifest in the back of my mind, though I tried to ignore it since everyone was so happy that I was feeling better and not panicking anymore. I continue to worry that the symptoms are slowly appearing, and today I felt like my neck might be sore/hurting and for a moment a had this dull ache in the back of my head. And I still feel that weird pressure thing at the base of my skull sometimes, and like I can feel my pulse in the back of my neck sometimes too. I'm trying really hard to ignore this fear but it's been the only thing I can think about today. I don't know if my obsession and constant worrying about a VAD has caused me to start manifesting physical symptoms or if I'm hyperfocused on my neck/back of head and reading normal feelings as discomfort, but either way I can't seem to shake this worry. I know that a vertebral artery dissection is incredibly rare and usually the result of blunt force trauma or extreme/jerky neck movements but I can't get the thought out of my mind. I'm just so scared that my stretching caused a tear that's just continuing to grow until it causes a stroke. I know my mom is tired of wasting money on my imaginary illnesses so I don't want to go back to the hospital, so I was hoping someone could give me some reassurance about this so I can get over this. Does anyone think I could tear my vertebral artery by stretching and that my symptoms could be indicative of VAD, or is my anxiety just taking over?

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