It’s not hypochrondria if it’s true: A week of feverish worry arises
Never mind that three days ago the test results came back negative: Randall, my husband, thinks he definitely had COVID-19.
Me? I’ve been avoiding takeout food and wiping down grocery deliveries. Yesterday a contactfree delivery left a pulse oximeter outside our door. Now the whole family can check our bloodoxygen levels any time we please.
Three months ago, I’d have considered all of that to be a little unhinged — textbook examples of hypochondria. Or, as actual textbooks call it, “Illness Anxiety Disorder.”
But now? Who doesn’t have “excessive worry over having or getting a serious illness”? A “high level of anxiety or alarm over personal health status”? Or “excessive health-related behaviors”?
In the COVID age, dominated by the thousand things we don’t know about this disease, a touch of hypochondria seems downright adaptive — like OCD for an auditor, or paranoia for a spy.
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Last week Randall, my son Ben and I had the dreaded “flu-like symptoms”: headache, body ache, fatigue. Randall and Ben ran low fevers. My temperature was never high, but it felt like I had a fever. I had chills. Lights were too bright, noises too loud. My family — the people I love most in the world — was extremely annoying. I slept a lot.
Once I’d have grumbled a bit, maybe wondered idly whether we’d had some flu variant that our shots hadn’t covered. But this time, every decision seemed fraught.
Randall was the first to feel lousy. We’d already discussed how, if anyone in our four-person household showed symptoms of COVID-19, the rest of us would almost certainly have been exposed already. But we put Randall into quarantine anyway. Feeling a little ridiculous, I left his meals outside the door of the guest room-turned-office. “I feel like your pet,” he said forlornly on the phone.
For company, he let in Ziggy, our cat. I decreed that Ziggy henceforth would not be allowed in the main house, but Ziggy ignored me, escaping at will and sauntering where he pleased. The Plague Cat, I called him. Vector of Disease.
Was I joking? I think I was joking. Three months ago, it would definitely have been a joke.
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Mary Jo, my 25-year-old daughter, had moved back from Austin a couple of weeks before. She cooked us lentil soup. She never showed symptoms.
Ben was the one who worried me. He’s 21, home from Texas Tech, 106 pounds of languor and attitude stretched over a 5-foot, 8-inch body. He has celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder. Normally I think of him as “skinny as a stick,” not “dangerously underweight.”
He began running a fever a couple of days after Randall. The next morning, I got a pounding headache. Randall emerged from his quarantine room to be sick with the rest of us.
We lay around, grumpy and achy — no coughing, no shortness of breath, no loss of smell or taste. After four days, Ben’s low fever broke dramatically; he woke up soaked in sweat but not sick anymore. For Randall and me, the misery petered out slowly.
When he felt sorta-kinda better, Randall went to the drive-thru testing site in Baytown, where he was instructed to insert a swab into his own nose. On Tuesday, we found out he was negative.
Ben doesn’t want to bother getting tested, and though I intend to, I haven’t made it there yet.
By phone, my general practitioner told me that she didn’t think it was worth the trouble for me to get the drive-thru test — that the rate of false negatives is too high on the viral-swab tests, even when administered by skilled professionals, not selfswabbers.
Besides, she asked, “What would you do differently if you found out that you’re infected? You already have to act as though you’re infected.”
Living as if we’re infected with a deadly, symptom-free disease: There was a time when I’d have thought that was purest of hypochondria.
Now it’s what doctors tell us to do.