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It's true: I can be a bit of a hypochondriac. I'm not a germophobe - when picking up that ancient jellybean from under my dresser, I have no qualms about sticking it in my mouth and eating it. "I've got a young, strong immune system. I'll be fine," I tell myself confidently as my teeth work through the hardened sugar. As soon as I get a nose bleed though, or a headache, or a momentary pain in my lower back, my faith in my body's defenses flies out the window: Leukemia! Brain aneurysm! Kidney stones! I'm dying! It's one of the many reasons I will never be a medical doctor. (Others include perpetually shaky hands, squeamishness, a fondness for regular sleep and a terrible bedside manner.)
Obviously hypochondria can be an actual psychological problem. And obviously it can be a very annoying tendency. But it's also kind of funny. Sure, when you're freaking out at 3 in the morning that the weird twinge in your back is actually spinal cancer, it doesn't seem that funny. But I tend to lack a sense of humour when suffering insomnia (worst discovery of all time: there is a - really ridiculously rare - genetic disorder that causes people to actually die of being unable to sleep. How am I supposed to get to sleep knowing that? ). With a little bit of sleep though...it's funny in the way all our little neuroses are funny if we look at them objectively.
My illness fears were a lot stronger when I was little. I blame it on being an early and precocious reader. A children's history of Toronto that I read in Grade 2 or 3 may have sparked a long-lasting love of history but it also sparked an almost equally long-lasting horror of polio. There was something terribly vivid about the description of the experience of being stuck in an iron lung that caught my paranoid imagination. I started to read the newspaper at about the same age and quickly discovered a whole new host of ailments in the Health section. I was also fond of stories about pioneer girls in which there was always someone dying of typhoid or cholera or blood poisoning. Then I found out about Black Plague.
"It doesn't exist anymore, Charlotte. That was hundreds of years ago."
"But sometimes monkeys still get it. And this one woman in the US got it and died."
I was kind of a strange kid. Clearly, it wasn't just the reading - I was also naturally anxious and simultaneously completely horrified and a little bit fascinated by death. I refused to go past the wolf enclosure at the zoo after I heard my parents saying that one of the wolves had died. I also read obituaries (ok, I read everything. I even read the sports section when I was little.)
While diseases like polio, cholera and the Black Death were pretty remote from my modern life, the media provided several front page stories tailor-made to freak out the young and paranoid. There was West Nile Virus. There was Mad Cow Disease (alright, fine, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) - particularly horrifying to me because of emotional news reports about people who couldn't remember their families. I lived in Toronto when the whole city was panicking about SARS. My Girl Guide camp was cancelled because our leaders were nurses and had to work crazy overtime hours.
At some point between the end-ish of elementary and the beginning-ish of junior high, I mostly got over my biggest fears of illness. Maybe I just learned to take myself less seriously. Maybe I got busy enough that I didn't have to analyze every little ache and pain. I still anxiously check my moles to make sure I'm not getting skin cancer. I still feel a spark of panic when my joints feel odd, when I find a weird splotch on my neck. But it's funny now. Sort of. And I like to think there are certain fringe benefits to paranoia. I may have higher blood pressure from anxiety, but I'm unlikely to let undiagnosed symptoms develop into something terrible. I'm unlikely to let myself get obese or go to the tanning salon or take up smoking. Plus, the stories of weird little fears can be exploited to produce new blog material.
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