Make me go to the doctor

Dispatches from medical trauma and hypochondria

There’s a story I like to tell about how my parents made me go to therapy as a kid because I was certain I was going to die after watching the episode of Fresh Prince where Uncle Phil has a heart attack. Maybe it’s not a particularly funny story, because maybe it’s not actually funny for eight-year-olds to be so afraid of dying that they barely eat for a week in 1999 and cowered at the thought of eating chili cheese fries at summer camp, but I look back on that time with a sort of humor that I assume only forced detachedness and time can inspire.

As an adult, I managed to put more pieces together: A few months before the Fresh Prince episode, I was in a waiting room at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, waiting to hear news about my uncle who was stabbed by someone he knew. He ended up surviving the ordeal, but it was my first real brush with mortality. So maybe it wasn’t actually Fresh Prince, and Fresh Prince was just the trigger. But it was a bad enough trigger to derail summer 1999. My bedtime prayers morphed into pleas not to let me or my family members die. I started pulling my eyelashes out. I ate again, but I was still terrified. In the coming years, I got freaked out by the premiere of Caitlin’s Way, because the main character’s mom died of an aneurysm. I’m still convinced I will drop dead of one any day. I remember overhearing a news story the following summer about roller coasters killing people with high blood pressure, and a part of me believed those stats were relevant to me. There were other things I developed fears of too: I was terrified of plane crashes after 9/11, car crashes are always in the back of my mind, and so are terrorist attacks. I once spent the entirety of my friend’s bat mitzvah party in 2003, worried about an asteroid hitting Earth because I heard some kook on the radio yapping about the possibility. The moon had a reddish tint to it, which I was certain was a sign of our impending doom. I was going to die, right there, among my peers, while an Avril Lavigne song was blasting on the dance floor.

I have far more recent examples, too: A couple of months ago, I spent a full day convinced that my apartment was going to blow up in a gas leak. I saw Beyonce last night at MetLife and was experiencing awful lower back pain and, of course, wondered, “Am I going into kidney failure? Will I have to be put on a dialysis machine? That’s really going to impact my pregnancy plans.”

But I still went on planes. I still drive. I’m convinced that a catastrophic asteroid impact won’t happen in my lifetime. I still saw Beyonce.

I realize that some of these examples have nothing to do with health, but they all play into the overall fear I have of premature death. I don’t think I would be so afraid of planes or gas leaks if I weren’t already convinced since 1999 that I’d die of some horrible illness.

Some years back, not too long after Rob’s diagnosis, I experienced abdominal pain and wondered, aloud, if I too had peritoneal mesothelioma, too, because my stomach hurt. He let out a laugh of disbelief before sneering, “you do not not peritoneal mesothelioma.” He’d bring this up every now and then, saying, “Hey, remember when you thought you had—” and I’d groan and feel very stupid and say “yes, yes, I remember.”

I’ve long hesitated to call myself a hypochondriac, because when I thought of hypochondriacs, I think of people who are so terrified that they’re sick and dying that they become shut-ins who don’t do much of anything but obsess over the fact that they must be sick and must be dying.

I figured, well, I go outside, so that label doesn’t pertain to me at all.

And while I’m at a point in my life where I’m generally skeptical of self-diagnosing if you have the resources not to, I’m finally coming around to the idea that I’m actually a bit of a hypochondriac, have been since Clinton was in office, and that I’m regressing back into my worse fears. Badly.