Hypochondriaphobia

Sophia is descended from a long line of people who have lived their lives in the shadow of death. Sophia's paternal grandmother was so certain that a dirt nap was imminent that she retired to her bed in her fifties, finding it useless to keep up the pretense of health any longer. As fate would have it, she did in fact contract a malignant disease and died when Sophia was twelve. The disease that finally felled her was not one of the many she had claimed to have over the years, however.  This proved to Sophia that the Grim Reaper is a tricky bastard, and, moreover, that hypochondria is little more than failed magical thinking. Fearing the worst will not keep it from happening.

This logic was lost on Sophia's father, however. For as long as she can remember, her dad has been certain that his aches and pains were actually the first sneaky signs of a lingering demise. He's now almost eighty-two years old, which would seem to lend support to the magical thinking theory. Maybe spending one's life worrying about sickness and death does keep mortality at bay. Maybe what kills people is the surprise.

Sophia, for her part, has inherited a mutation of the hypochondria gene. She's terrified of being a hypochondriac. So whenever she faces a health crisis, or even a routine test, she goes through not one, but two awful phases. The first is the genuine fear that Something Might Be Wrong, and then, like a tsunami after an earthquake, the even greater fear that She's Turning into Her Dad.  At what point, she wonders, does worry or legitimate concern become a pathological obsession with one's health? How many symptoms does one have to Google before mild anxiety tips over into sick self-absorption?

Sophia can only hope that hypochondriaphobia has its own magical effect. That worrying about being a hypochondriac means one isn't.

Throwing a Mastoid

She considers herself lucky that her dad was not an active hypochondriac in the Age of Google. He was, however, a research immunologist, with just enough medical knowledge to torment his entire family with the specter of rare and horrible diseases.

Chief among these was....Mastoiditis.  Never heard of this? Welcome to Sophia's childhood, where mastoiditis lurked in every childhood earache, headache, or crick in the neck. Mastoiditis is the bacterial inflammation of the mastoid bone, which is behind your ear. Feel it. It's that hard bony place where some people like to be kissed. Not Sophia. Kisses in the Dangerous Mastoid Zone are not erotic, thanks to her dad and his utterly bizarre mastoid obsession.

If Sophia had a few thousand dollars to throw to the winds, she might be able to sort this all out in therapy. Blogging, however, is all she can afford.

Sophia's dad had similar weird ideas about cars, by the way. He knew considerably less about auto mechanics than about the human body, but this did not stop him from predicting vehicular doom. In her dad's world, the car equivalent of mastoiditis was throwing a rod.  Cars were always on the verge of rod-throwing, especially when driven by the teenage Sophia. "Stop, or you're going to throw a rod!" Sophia's dad would shout as she attempted to execute some tricky driving maneuver, like passing or parking.

Sophia inevitably felt the urge to throw a rod right at her dad's head.

She never did find out what "throwing a rod" meant, exactly, but it sounded dramatic. She always pictured a long metal bar shooting through the hood as the car careened out of control and her dad yelled "you've thrown a rod, dammit!"

Needless to day, these two bizarre, unlikely occurrences became conflated in Sophia's mind. So now, whenever she feels like some strange disease is lurking in her Over Fifty body, she wonders if she's really sick, or just Throwing a Mastoid.

The Dark Continent

That's what Sigmund Freud, famous psychoanalyst and crazy person, called womankind. In case you're ever on Jeopardy, and the answer is "Africa," you can say "What continent did Freud compare women to?"  You won't win the point, but you will make an impression on the TV audience.

For the first time, however, Sophia has some sympathy for this perspective. Because her postmenopausal body is not behaving as all the books and websites say it should.  It seems her rousing Tae Kwon Do classes shook something loose Down There, and she had a little bitty Menstrual Event. Threw a Hormonal Rod, as it were.  So of course, she goes straight to her computer and Googles this problem. And what do you think she finds? It could be Nothing, or it could be

• Cancer (endometrial)
• Cancer (ovarian)
• Cancer (fallopian--a type she didn't even know existed)
• Cancer (from Somewhere Else)

Eeek! She calls her doctor and makes an appointment. The nurse says they will clear the schedule for her, because this is Potentially Very Bad. Okay, the nurse said the first part, and Sophia inferred the second.  So, a few days later--after much repressed anxiety, which included such fantasies as

• wondering if she should get a video camera, so she can give Percival some Lasting Wisdom to Treasure in Her Absence
• getting angry at Thor ahead of time, for he will surely imply that all serious illness is simply a Failure of the Will
• imagining herself withholding news of her imminent demise until the Very Last Moment, thereby
• making the whole thing lots more dramatic, a la Garbo in Camille
• making her selfish brothers who never call or email feel really guilty
• inspiring others with her courage and selflessness, ultimately generating a made-for-TV movie on the Lifetime Network

--she finally went to her appointment.  A preternatural calm settled over Sophia as she Assumed the Position, and she felt herself surrender her fate to the Will of the Universe.

Okay, not really. But that's what the voice-over will say in the TV movie. Anyway, to make a short story not quite so long, the doctor got out a tiny little laptop computer with a predictably-shaped Wand attached to it. Sophia marveled that this little device did the same thing as the giant ultrasound machines that were a window onto Percival's in utero world ten years ago. The doc explained that these cool portable machines were invented so that medics in Iraq and Afghanistan can look at the injured body parts of our troops in the field. Like most great inventions of the modern era, this one was a direct result of the human propensity for violence on a mass scale.

This little bit of information made Sophia feel guilty for Throwing a Mastoid. Soldiers lost legs, arms, and lives on a daily basis over there. She could surely face a little gynecological uncertainty.

But this brief flare of bravery faded instantly as the doctor put a condom on the Wand. Sophia almost giggled with repressed hysteria at this moment, imagining Safe Sex with an Ultrasound Machine. Would the machine call for another date, or just assume Sophia was Easy?

Anyway, a few moments later, the Game Was On.  The pictures were materializing on the screen. Sophia could see them, and they looked just like when she was pregnant, only sans tiny Percival. In other words, she was looking at a blurry gray landscape that resembled nothing so much as a giant dust storm.

The doctor, however, began to show off her training. "Look, there's the lining," she said helpfully. Sophia looked, and saw...nothing but video snow. "Look, there's an old fibroid."  Sophia perked up at this. At last, something to see. An old fibroid. She imagined a tumbleweed rolling across this barren tundra, but saw pretty much nothing.

Finally, ten minutes and several hundred dollars later, it was determined that Everything Looked Normal. Sophia was instructed to go home and call again if she threw another hormonal rod in the future.

So, no video diary of Sophia's Last Months. No Lifetime Movie. No fight with Thor about his insensitivity. No medical marijuana. Sophia had, as it turned out, simply Thrown a Mastoid.

Her fear of death was not justified, but her fear of hypochondria certainly was. She went straight home, endured Thor's "I told you so's" and filed away her genetically-acquired phobias for another day.

In retrospect, she realized one thing. Hypochondria is where imagination goes to live when it has no other outlets. Perhaps she ought to begin writing another novel.

Yes, another. More on this in a later post.