I'm a hypochondriac. Or am I? All my adult life, I've been wracked with occasional but awful fears that I am suffering from something wasting and incurable. It started three nights before my college graduation, when I became convinced that I'd found a lump in my breast, my roommate drove me to the emergency room, and a very nice doctor said it was a harmless cyst and that I shouldn't waste my youth wracked with fears.
Oh, doctor. If only I'd let what you said sink in. But it was too late already, probably, because something about growing up was beyond my ability to bear, and this has translated into incidence after incidence -- every six months to a year or so -- of noticing "symptoms," then researching them fervently, then locking into panic mode, fixed on my certain (yet not mercifully quick) end. These occasions make my husband's life hell. As for doctors -- well, I'm not the type of hypochondriac (that is, the common type) who appears at the doctor's office every week, demanding tests. I'm the doctor-avoidant type, because (a) I know my problem is mostly mental, not physical, a fact of which (b) I'm ashamed, plus in the event that a symptom is proven real and I am doomed, I (c) don't really want to know.
So yes. I suffer, fingers affixed to computer mouse, Googling words and phrases which I will not repeat here -- see (b) above -- even though a behavioral therapist used to advise me: Never, ever, ever Google symptoms. She was smart. While I was seeing her, I didn't. That was eight years back. I know my problem is mainly anxiety, I realize I should address my anxiety, I grok the fact that I imagine myself dying and dead because I cannot abide growing up, because I cannot let myself grow up, because I think I am not allowed to grow up, because when I was very small my parents were authoritarians and told me to do this and that "because I said so" and "because I'm the parent and you're the child" -- which made perfect if painful sense back then. But something in their voices -- sometimes booming, sometimes growling, sometimes jubilant -- implied that it must always stay this way, that they would always be the parents and that I would always be the child, and thus that I must always wait for them to tell me what to do. Taking initiative, back then, and simply doing stuff sometimes brought scoldings. Arms upraised, voices upraised: What have you done?!
So I learned how to lack initiative. And that's another reason for my hypochondria: Being afraid of illness means being afraid that something I've done (or at least something my cells have done) will upset/disappoint/anger my folks. If I got sick, my child-mind thinks, they'd be so furious.
Absurd at my age, eh? But see, I'm stuck.
As a hypochondriac (or, as certain therapists have preferred to put it, "a highly fuctioning person with health anxieties"), I am appalled at all this recent news about a new human-infecting strain of swine flu raging through Mexico and popping up in Texas and my own state, California. After 800 cases were identified, the Mexican government shut down schools from kindergarten through college today, keeping millions of young people out of class, for fear of a full-blown pandemic, we read in the New York Times. The Mexican government is now also encouraging Mexicans not to shake hands. And two days ago, the Independent reported on a surprising new upsurge throughout London of "Victorian diseases" such as whooping cough, typhoid, mumps, measles and scarlet fever that were long thought pretty much obsolete. Various reasons for this have been proposed, but none yet proven. Some 3,000 scarlet-fever cases were recorded last year. As for mumps, 998 cases were recorded in the first two months of 2009, compared with 322 in the whole of last year.
Uh oh. This will get worse before it gets better.
Or should I say if.
