Is it real or hypochondria?
When she told me she felt sick on the Tuesday after Christmas — sore throat and a cough — I remembered the goodbye kiss she had given me on the Sunday night before she left our house.
And I knew what she had. And she knew, too. Hell, even you know.
I ordered my daughter her COVID test. It was scheduled for Wednesday. As for me, I had never felt better. Wednesday night on my rowing machine after work, I beat my personal best time for rowing 6,000 meters. And since she's in better shape than I am, I really wasn't that worried for her.
But reading her test results the next day: “Covid-19 detected.” A whole lot of parental worry crept in.
And then I remembered that last goodbye kiss and envisioned spiky little balls of coronavirus slinking around my cheek after that kiss, little red devilish balls waiting to strafe my airways with each inspired breath.
All logic abandoned, I instantly began to feel exhausted, a tickle in my throat, ear pain.
I called my daughter, and whatever symptoms she felt, I started to feel. I wondered if my sense of smell was intact because the garlic to make the pasta sauce that night did not smell as “garlicky.” I lost my appetite. (Me! Lost my appetite!! For pasta!).
I was sure I had coronavirus and scheduled my own test.
Incidentally, my wife felt fine. When my test came back negative the following day, instantly I felt all my energy surge into me, my strength resume, my hunger ravenous, and I was able to resume my rowing workouts.
My wife was talking to our daughter at this point, and now she, instead of me, began to feel all the COVID symptoms that our daughter felt. She, too, was laid low until the normal results of her test came back, and then, miraculously, she sprang back from near death like Lazarus, reborn in health. (At the time of this writing, my daughter, too, thank God, is fully recovered.)
The funny thing is, I'm not joking. I really and truly felt sick. And
so did my wife. But in retrospect, it was all hypochondria. I always thought I was pretty sane, but clearly, I'm a bit of a head case.
In truth, I see this sort of thing all the time. This evening, I was talking to a patient whose cardiac cath got denied by his insurance company even though he had an abnormal stress test suggesting a blocked coronary artery. I told him about the appeal, and he was justly worried, saying that ever since the abnormal stress test, every little ache and pain, every little back pain or stitch in his shoulder, he wondered if he should call 911 and rush to the hospital. “I have a lot of people counting on me, doc. I just don't want this to be the big one.”
When my brothers and I were just old enough to babysit ourselves and our parents went out for their first date night without using a babysitter, we decided to watch the movie playing on TV that night, “The Exorcist,” which our parents would never have let us watch if they were home.
Two hours later, we were so scared, we locked ourselves in their closet with the fire place poker and a baseball bat, and all the noises of the house we normally ignored — the furnace, the baseboard heater clicking, the ticking clock — became Satan and all of his minions, until our parents came home and all these noises became the usual household noises they always were. I'm pretty sure that this state of heightened anxiety is what happens when I got those nutty hypochondriacal feeling.
Of course, it's always hard to know when you're just being a hypochondriac and when you're stubbornly ignoring symptoms. Too many epitaphs are written for people who thought their chest pain was just heartburn, so it's far better to err on the side of being a hypochondriac.