September 17, 2007
When I talk about hypochondria.
When I was a little girl I was quite dramatic. I had a very low pain tolerance and the littlest injury was quite traumatic. Once, while playing with my brother, he raised his head up under my chin and caused me to bite my tongue. As soon as I saw the blood I ran screaming to my mother that I had bitten my tongue off.
My medical drama was only exacerbated by the fact that my mother worked in a hospital emergency room and I often heard tales from her workday. I was worried I was going to fall from a treehouse and break my arm (even though I didn't have a treehouse.) I was terrified of lawnmowers, afraid I might slip underneath and lose a limb.
If medical maladies that never happened to me were of great concern, even greater was my concern for things that DID happen to me. I dreaded visits to the doctor, and I like to think that they were exceptionally mean to me in an attempt to cure me of my hypochondria, instead they only caused me to be scared of doctors.
My fear of doctors reached a peak when, one summer, I got a thorn in my foot and refused to tell my mother about it. It ended up getting terribly infected and I got blood poisoning. The nurse gave me a speech about how my delay in telling my mother about the thorn could have caused me to die.
Die? But I was only nine years old! After that little speech, I never hesitated to tell my mother any time I felt 'odd.' I nicked my finger with a knife one evening and immediately jumped up, wrapped it in a rag and held my hand over my head, just like I had been taught in my first aid class, and ran to tell my mother that I needed stitches. When she looked at my finger she rolled her eyes, ran it under cold water and put a band-aid on it.
I became obsessed with medical ailments, and would read the encyclopedia about every ailment I had a name for. As I got older I used my "medical expertise" to help the doctors diagnose me. When I was about ten I told my doctor that the pain in my jaw was because my wisdom teeth were growing in. He assured me that I had many years yet before I should be concerned about that, but I informed him of my medical knowledge and told him that he was probably wrong.
When I got the mumps in 7th grade I told my mother that it wasn't mumps, that I probably had a tumor. When I got a nasty cold one rainy winter I claimed it was likely pneumonia. My mother grew so tired of my complaining that when I actually DID get pneumonia a couple of years later, she was hesitant to believe me when I described the sharp, shooting pains in my chest.
One visit to the gynecologist was enough to cure me of most of my hypochondria, and in fact, when I became pregnant with my first child I told my family and friends that I was going to have my baby naturally and that I didn't NEED a doctor. They talked me out of that unwise decision, and I delivered my first baby by c-section a few months later.
Having a baby was my ultimate cure for hypochondria. I wasn't going to drag a crying baby along to appointments with the doctor every time I had a headache, and I certainly wasn't going to be one of those mothers who took their baby to the emergency room for every snotty nose. I took vitamins to maintain my good health, and took care of my baby to make sure that he rarely got sick.
I still have moments where I revert to my old ways. Earlier this year I fell and had to have stitches in my chin (the first ever in my 33 years.) A couple of weeks after I got the stitches out, when I was brave enough to feel around a bitI felt a large "knot" at the very tip of my chin. It had very defined edges, and I became convinced that I had probably broken my chin and what I was feeling was a bone fragment. My kind and patient doctor reassured me that what I was feeling was just a hematoma and offered to take an x-ray to prove it. I left the office feeling rather foolish, and made a new commitment to being an anti-hypochondriac.
You might be wondering, if you've read this far, why I'm writing about all of this. The answer is twofold. Part of it is that I can laugh at myself for being such a drama queen as a child. The second part is that over the weekend I developed a lump on my tongue. Since I recently started smoking I became immediately worried that I had a sudden-onset case of oral cancer.
I called my doctors office this morning and made an appointment for this afternoon, but once I got there I dreaded telling the doctor that I had recently started smoking again, so I just told her that I wasn't sure what had caused it.
Upon examination she diagnosed me with thrush. I thought only babies got thrush! I'm really glad that people with short attention spans didn't get this far.
She did tell me that if it hasn't resolved by this time next week to come back. It could still be cancer, you know.
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jktty at 5:05 p.m.