05 January 2025 | The Hypochondriac in Me

I’ve got everything under the sun! (Adobe Stock)

As I get older, like it is with everyone else, I’ve become more sensitive to those little creaks and aches of my body. Problem is, rather than accepting that it’s part of aging, I’m convinced it’s cancer.

Maybe this is one of the downsides of having so much access to information, especially from my colleagues at Dr. Google. No matter what it might be, I tend to look online for anything remotely resembling to what I’m experiencing and I come away convinced that I am on the verge of medical disaster.

It's a tough thing, I tell you, to be living in a state of anxiety driven by a sense of foreboding. It doesn’t help when my doctor always quips on my yearly physical, “You know, we’re not meant to live past 50!” to the point where I finally replied, ”Look, are you trying to tell me something?” (He wasn’t.) But it happens to almost everyone who enters that phase when you notice more things about your body, the last time being when you entered puberty. Now, it’s not seeing hair where there was none before, but wondering ”Did I sleep on something? Because there’s a weird feeling on my side.” Or worse, you can just sneeze a little hard and suddenly you throw your back out. Not that long ago, you could flip over tires and feel just fine the following day. Not any more.

And here's another milestone you reach: an interest in what diseases run through the family. Before, you would have shrugged or felt bad when someone was diagnosed with something, that person usually being much older so it was to be expected. But when you are young, you don’t make the connections at all. Until you do. Suddenly, you’re grilling parents about who had what malady, what the symptoms were, and going through a checklist in your head.

My mother has tried to put this into perspective: “There are things that you can plan for, but more things for which you can’t.” A person should not be so consumed with dreadful images of a doctor telling them bad news to the point of being freaked out all the time, but for me, I can’t completely get away from living in fear that my annual blood work is going to reveal multiple diagnoses of Terrible Things. I have to figure out how to calm down and live my life with some purpose and meaning.

Right after I look up why my right shoulder is suddenly aching. It’s probably bad.