Self diagnosis gives a dire prognosis

I’M a survivor.

In the past month I’ve had about seven forms of rare cancer, possible HIV, random growths of the chest, viral infections, sinusitis, a serious stroke, allergies to dust mites and grass, reflux, gout, arthritis, costochondritis and Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria.

Hang on. Hutchinson-Gilford what?!

Can you believe I’m still alive to write this column?

I’m a victim of Dr Google and I absolutely hate it.

I’ve been a bit crook for the best part of two months now.

It started with some bad chest pain that died down over the course of the month. It’s still around, by the way. So it’s not a stroke, but could be cancer of the chest?

The anti-inflammatories I took to calm it down sparked some stomach problems. Stomach cancer? Then I had some sort of cold with a post nasal drip.

Brain tumour? Parkinson’s disease?

That triggered an inflamed throat ... which still hasn’t gone away. Throat cancer? Laryngitis? Type ‘sore throat and chest pain’ into Google and have a look at the results ... I dare you! So there I was, wide awake at 2am frantically Googling my symptoms to find out what was wrong with me. And let me tell you, the more you Google, the closer to death you are ... well in the search engine’s eyes anyway. There’s plenty of great websites out there that make it really easy to self diagnose yourself. All you have to do is type in your symptoms and the website spits back about 50 to 100 possible diseases and cancers that are most likely to be infecting your body ... right now. Think I’m full of it? Well, it’s been proven! Researchers from health insurance company Bupa found 47 per cent of searches for an illness — such as headaches — returned at least one result for cancer on the first page.

And because of our reliance on the internet we’ve become a generation of Cyberchondriacs.

I even Googled Cyberchondria and guess what?

I have the symptoms for that too!

I’m not sure how to get rid of my new-found disease. I hope in time it will disappear.

But for now I’ve got to get back to Googling.

I’ve got some swollen glands in my neck and I need to know what is causing it.