As a child, Natalie Altman would spend an hour before bed touching items around her room that she felt correlated to a bad omen – all to keep an inevitable sense of doom at bay.
With her Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) centred around death, she believed to her core that her loved ones would pass away if she did not complete her extensive 'checking' routine, or would become ill herself.
'I'd have to shut my curtains multiple times, because if I thought of someone during it, I'd worry it meant they were going to hang themselves,' the 27-year-old told the Daily Mail.
'If I smiled or pouted in the mirror, I'd have to do it evenly on both sides of the face, or else I'd have a stroke on one side.'
Enter adulthood and Natalie's paranoias about her own health would grip her so violently that she would visit hospital multiple times terrified she would be dying of an incurable disease – throat cancer, pleurisy, a stroke.
