Who's Afraid of...

In my experience, there are two flavors of people who suffer from problems with anxiety. The first, and most common would be your normal, average, everyday moron. These are the type of people who get anxious about everything because they don’t know enough about anything to really know what goes on in the world. They know just enough about what could happen in the world, and they think they know why, but they are so far off that the reaction makes no logical sense.

These are the type of people who don’t get their children inoculated for diseases because they believe that the government is going to use the shot to chemically control their children. Conspiracy theorists without proof, a great deal of these people invent situations in their head to make them feel as if they are more important than they really are. Don’t get me wrong, there is a need for conspiracy theorists, especially in this country, but some just straddle the line between thinking outside of the box and paranoid.

Then, there are the polar opposites. A group of people who are informed enough about most things that they know enough to be dangerous to themselves and the people around them. These people are rarely conspiracy theorists, and more likely than not to be hypochondriacs, spending a great deal of time with their heads in medical texts of some sort, trying to figure out what that scratching in the back of their throat is.

Admittedly, I am one of the later. In the age of information, born of the Internet, it has become ever increasingly easy for us hypochondriacs to gather information about the diseases we have this week. All we need is a small symptom, a sneeze, a headache, or a cough to make us start looking on the net for information, and at our wills to make sure they are up to date. All we need do is to pick a disease, and our brain will fill in the blanks, developing any symptoms that we don’t already have.

In an age when we are bombarded by information about diseases from sources such as Web MD, Discovery Health Channel, and various other sources, there are very few sites or informational programs that wont tell you what will kill you in your sleep tonight. For those with Internet addictions, and a compulsion to learn more about ourselves and the world around us, this is a curse.

September 1999:
I had to be excused from a late morning Latin class because I thought I was having a heart attack. After much, much retrospection, I determined that the 6 cups of coffee I had that morning, nervousness I had due to an upcoming test, and an upset digestive system caused by my breakfast had caused me to have an acute anxiety attack with heartburn. I took four Tums and two Tylenol PM and the heart attack ended.

August 2000:
After staring at my red, itchy hands for an hour at work, I convinced myself that my hands were swelling up, and I was breaking out in hives. This was something that actually happened to me in high school, but not once since. At the time, I was a 411 operator, and when a customer was kind enough to ask me how my day was going, I replied:

“I think I am breaking out in hives, my hands are all itchy and swollen…”

This turned out to be a bad idea. Unbeknownst to me, a classroom of 35 new-hires was sitting in a room 30 feet away listening to every word I said over a muted speakerphone. This was only pointed out to me after I passed 15 people chuckling and pointing at me.

My dermatologist suggested I obtain a bottle of what he called ‘moisturizing lotion’ and use it on my hands. Within three days, my hives were gone.

Late 2001:
Sitting in a training class, after a long lunch and a news report about the latest anthrax scare, I started writing an email to my parents about what ‘arrangements’ I wanted to be made. This included, what songs I wanted at my funeral, who my pallbearers were to be, and who was to be invited to my rosary service and funeral reception. Interestingly enough, I had no symptoms whatsoever until I started to read a synopsis on Web MD.

February 2002:
After waking up with sharp, stabbing pain in my right hip off and on for a while, I was convinced that I either had a bone spur or some sort of ligament or cartilage problem in my hip. Interestingly enough, the problem stopped immediately following when I started to make sure that my keys weren’t in my pajama pants pocket before crashing for the night.

November 2002:
Could not sleep for three days before finally going to the doctor. Even though I had already started feeling better, and I was quite certain that I had never been to Asia, I was convinced that I had somehow contracted SARS. After a multitude of tests, and arguments with my physician trying to convince him of what I knew, regardless of the results of the tests, it was determined that what I had was, as he called it, ‘a common cold’.

June 2003:
After noticing an oddly suspicious red mark on my right forearm, I was determined that I had necrotizing fasciiatis, or as the common folk would call it, flesh-eating disease. After further inspection, and pacing about my apartment for 5 hours, I realized that the red mark was caused by accidentally bumping into a brick wall earlier that day. My killer bacteria was, in fact, a simple scrape.

November 2004:
After watching a Discovery Channel special, and feeling under the weather for a week or two, I somehow managed to convince myself that I was the first American to come down with the avian flu. I kept imagining myself giving interviews to various news sources from my hospital bed, with the eyes of the entire country on me, wondering if I was going to pull through or if others would come down with the disease. As it turned out, my fever and headache were caused by nothing other than sinusitis.

July 2005:
After awaking with my left arm numb, my heart started racing, and I believed that I had been in the middle of a stroke. My first instinct was to go online and double check the symptoms of a stroke before I called for an ambulance.

In a panic, I was unable to find any sites with stroke symptoms listed. After ten minutes of still being alive, with my arm getting less and less numb by the second, I started to calm down. Considering I was starting to feel better instead of worse, my vision wasn’t closing up, and there was no blood shooting out of my nose, I came to the conclusion that my arm was just asleep from lying on it all evening.

March 2006:
After bringing all of this to the attention of my shrink, plus a laundry list of psychological ailments that I thought I once had, including Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, ADHD, and Tourette’s Syndrome , she determined one thing. As she put it, I am a reasonably intelligent individual who knows too much about what can go wrong and has an overactive imagination, or as I like to call it, a dude with too much free time on his hands, or a fucking nutjob, for simplicity sake.