Hypochondria

I am a hypochondriac. I am not proud of this fact but I think it is part of my genetic make-up, for it is a a trait I share with my father. I am writing this piece for other hypochondriacs and the people who struggle valiantly to live with them.
If, dear reader, you are also a fellow-sufferer, I know only too well what you have been obsessively worrying about for the last month and a half. You have been turning the pages of your memory, back, back, back and you have been trying to figure out just how much British beef you could have possibly consumed during the last decade. I know you have been doing this, because it is what I too have been doing. My worry has been fueled, no doubt, because my family and I did spend six months in England in 1989 and I have tried to piece together every meal I cooked in that six month period. That bit of ground beef; it all seemed so innocuous at the time. While we were in England the only food items they were worried about were salmonella eggs and listeria-laden cheeses, not the beef. I think of those meat pasties and sausage rolls, so many consumed and all of dubious origin. Why, why, why?? Could we have eaten the flesh of a mad cow? Could our family be stricken sometime in the future with Creuzfeldt Jakob disease? Even now, when I forget a name or a telephone number, I feel that panicked realization that my brain is already sponging up and will soon have the consistency of a nerf ball.
My hypochondria took a significant upward spiral three years ago when I actually did come up with something that could have been serious, and fatally so. If you are also a hypochondriac, you will know the answer to the following question immediately. If you are not one, think carefully about your answer because it should be obvious. Just what one disease or condition would give the average, garden-variety hypochondriac the daily wobblies and nightly sweats? What one organ does everyone have miles and miles of? Skin of course. On that skin what does the average person have plenty of? Moles. These moles are at the crux; they are the matrix for much hypochondriacal musing. Has that one changed? Does this look irregular to you? Is that one darker? I actually had the hypochondriac's nightmare assume reality when a mole on my leg turned out to be melanoma. I couldn't believe it. Hypochondriacs worry so obsessively and nothing ever turns out to be anything, so I simply was dumbfounded. That wore off quickly enough and I wish I could report to you that I reacted to my doctor's news with calm equanimity. I truly wish I had accepted his diagnosis with magnanimous grace and had not grabbed his white coat lapels and demanded that I be allowed to live to see my precious babies graduate from high school.
The dermatologist told me that I would have to have my entire birthmark removed and he looked at me kind of peculiarly when I asked if he would be doing that procedure himself in his office. After I had the surgery done at the hospital I know why he looked at me as though I were nuts. The surgeon must have used an ice-cream scoop to get at that birthmark. The stitches were these big, thick, black affairs and there were many of them. The bandage was huge and I realized a career as a leg model, while never in the cards before, was definitely out now. Some months later my trendy sister-in-law saw my leg and said, "cool scar." I shot her a withering glance and realized that I, as an uptight, prissy, PTA mother did not want a 'cool' scar. What I wanted were long, lean, tan, suburban legs.
I spent the week after the surgery worrying about the biopsy report. To divert myself a bit, I decided to plan the readings for my funeral. My family and I attend a Unitarian Universalist church and if left up to someone there, I would be eulogized by having our parish minister read "Goodnight Moon" or something dreadful like that. I decided to write some 'extemporaneous' words my husband could memorize beforehand and thereby rouse the congregation to weeping levels found in African American churches. I abandoned this effort when the thought of Bill saying things like, "she was the beacon of light shining in my life," or "I will never, ever, love another woman as I have loved Heather and will spend the rest of my days as a celibate father immersed in the raising of our three children" simply didn't ring true. I spent the rest of the week thinking about all the women who would make great future wives for Bill and wonderfully superb mothers to the kids. I know there are women in our acquaintance now who think Bill is poorly served by his present companion. To boost my flagging spirits, I decided to turn my trauma into art and wrote a short story about a woman who sees malignancy in everything around her: the brown spot on the apple, the eye on the potato, and the little red dot on the top of her electric curlers turning to black when heated. The biopsy report came back and it appears that I'll be able to see my children in cap and gown unless, in the poetic words of my dermatologist, I'm "hit by a bus first."
Americans adore the silver lining and there was one exquisite moment during this ordeal. It occurred when I called to tell my father that I had melanoma. I absolutely love it when people close to me behave in completely predictable ways. My father, true to form, spent perhaps thirty seconds making soothing parental noises about how everything will be okay and how much he and my step-mother would be thinking of me. I had my watch out and had to stifle a laugh because I had been eerily accurate about just how long it would take for him to begin to muse aloud about whether or not he should be checked out at the dermatologist's and about the mole he had been worried about recently. We ended the conversation by my giving him words of bucking up and encouragement. I happened to call him on a Friday at his place in the mountains in North Carolina, far, far away from his retinue of doctors in Charlotte and virtually not able to make any medical appointments until after the long week-end. It was immensely cheering to think of someone else whom I love writhing in obsessive panic about the possibility of having skin cancer. Hallmark should come up with a card for this!
Now that I have inched my way back a bit from the yawning abyss, I have a word of advice for those suffering from something serious. I had heard people can be unwittingly undiplomatic when responding to bad news from another, but like so much else, you don't believe essentially well-meaning people can say such numbingly stupid things until the horrible happens to you. Be judicious upon whom you spring crummy news. There were some people, who upon hearing about my skin cancer, gave me detailed lists of people who had died from the same thing I had. I have one friend who grew up in Southern California and let me tell you, her list was prodigiously long! One friend grilled me about past sun exposure and whether or not I had ever used sun block. My gynecologist, to cheer me up, said, "Well, Heather, statistically speaking, you're much more likely to die of breast cancer." Someone else breezily said, "They must have caught yours early, because otherwise you'd be dead." No matter how tempting it is to fill someone in with grisly stories you've heard of their recently diagnosed illness, resist the temptation, literally hold your tongue if you have to, strangle out a "That's too bad," and leave it at that.
Hypochondriacs are also a quirky group. I know I don't read many women's magazines and it's not because so many adopt such an irredeemably inconsequential tone about anything truly mattering in life. I don't read them because they all seem to feature an account written in breathless first-person about a "disease of the month." These stories all employ the familiar trope of using hyper-normal beginning gambits like: "It was just a regular, sunny day here in Pasadena when I heard the piercing shouts from the guests around our pool," "Nothing really was wrong, little Angelica just didn't seem to be herself, I thought she was only teething. Little did I know the diagnosis would be leukemia," etc. etc. I can't stand them, they are too similar to my own pulp fiction turn of mind.
Finally, hypochondriacs should be given lots of love and care. We aren't really as self-absorbed as it may seem. As a last word of advice, remember, if you are a woman, your primary care physician's level of respect will plummet dramatically if you ask him about the advisability of having a P.S.A. test done because you are experiencing all the symptoms of an enlarged prostate. Sometimes it is helpful to learn from the mistakes of others.....
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