Friends and neighbors, I come before you today to say the Internet is not just an invaluable tool for researchers, not just a best friend to every lonely single guy in the world, not just a source of entertainment and community and wonderment and video game cheat codes. It’s also the greatest boon for hypochondriacs ever created.
I know this, because I live with one.
Actually my wife Teresa is more of a hypochondriac hobbyist. She doesn’t panic or stalk her doctor around the ninth green with meticulous charts of her bowel movements and the latest Reader’s Digest list of trendy diseases. Instead, whenever she feels ill she looks up all the possible medical conditions she could conceivably be suffering from, no matter how obscure, and picks the absolute worst one imaginable. Only then can she relax, take a couple of Tylenol, and go back to bed, strangely content.
This was fine when she was forced to read through medical books the size of engine blocks to find her favorite infirmities because it kept her occupied and just picking the things up was good cardio. But now, thanks to www.medical-library.org, www.yourdiagnosis.com, www.easydiagnosis.com. www.wrongdiagnosis.com, www.ecureme.com, and many, many more, I get instant messages at work like this:
Teres: I have Hansen’s disease.
Chris: What?
Teres: Paucibacillary Hansen’s disease. Or maybe multibacillary. I’m not sure yet.
Chris: You’re telling me you have leprosy.
Teres: All the signs are there. I even got a second opinion from a different site.
Chris: You have a rash. A small rash. And you got it right after you planted flowers next to that three-leaf plant.
Teres: You know, it’s that kind of discrimination that forces people like me into leper colonies.
Chris: What people like you? Crazy people?
Teres: I’m going back to bed now, I’m exhausted. Don’t nudge me when you get home, something might fall off.
My browser suddenly sprouted bookmarks for Lyme disease, ulcerative colitis, and endometriosis. One whole summer she was convinced she had benign prostate hyperplasia. I tried explaining that she didn’t, medically speaking, have a prostate, but she simply said, “That’s why it’s benign,” and smiled a sad, brave smile.
Last Saturday I threw my back out.
As is required by law, it was while doing something meaningless. I bent to open a bag of dog food and spent the rest of the evening eating Advil, walking like Mr. Burns in a high wind, and staying in the shower until I’d used up all the hot water in the Volusia County area.
Just for the heck of it, purely for fun and to get my mind off the spasms that woke me at 4 a.m., I went online and tried looking up “lower back pain.”
An hour later I was spinning (carefully) from all the possible disorders that might have struck me down. I could have transverse myelitis, Cushing’s syndrome, or a herniated disc. I could have gall stones, kidney stones, or intercostal neuralgia. Pancreatic cancer! Scheuermann’s disease! Post streptococcal glomerulonephritis! Even worse-sounding stuff! Some with pictures!
Here I’d been thinking it was because I was out of shape, had terrible posture, and hadn’t lifted anything heavier than a bagel since 1986, but no! I was host to a veritable plague of potential plights! Suddenly I didn’t feel helpless any more.
I felt afflicted, which is way cooler.
I wasn’t suffering from a lame-sounding problem that happens to old guys in sit-coms. I was a victim of random and possibly malicious diseases I had no control over. And some of them were rare indeed, which made me special. How many other guys suffer from chlamydia, huh? Huh?
Now I take quiet pleasure in discovering new and exciting conditions to adapt as my own. Japanese encephalitis? Had it last week. East African Trypanosomiasis? It’s a struggle, but I get by, I get by. No longer just some guy with a bad back, I am now the guy with the really interesting out-sick excuses and the cough that can cause a public health emergency if even half the stuff I found out is true.
And now I have to go lie down. All this typing wears you out.