Hypochondria, Goddess of F-f-fear!

My first hypochondriacal tendency can be traced back to my twenties when I started to imagine every headache was a brain tumor.  I didn’t know anyone with a brain tumor but I had heard that the English writer, Anthony Burgess, was once diagnosed with one which miraculously disappeared after he got Clockwork Orange out of his system.  So I figured if I ever did get one, I’d write that novel, dammit!  As the years — and occasional headaches — came and went, I laughed and told myself, “Oh no, not my biannual brain tumor scare again!”  After I had children, I was so busy taking care of them and trying to make ends meet, I really didn’t think much about my health, other than figuring I never got enough sleep.  But now I’m over 60 and the morbid death demons are back taunting me.  I run to the dermatologist every time a red spot or dark spot appears.  I go see my family doc every time I feel a weird lump that wasn’t there the day before.  Like today.  I found myself Googling “weird lump near hipbone” and being terrorized by endless feeds of scary comments. Some of them — the ones describing hard lumps as probable poo stuck on its journey south — brought a grin to my face.  But others suggesting questionable lymph nodes gave me a rapid pulse.  I switched to “hernia” and “lipoma” but I couldn’t shake off the panic of something more dire.  Maybe it’s good to imagine having only a few weeks or months to live.  Maybe the adrenalin pounding me senseless was telling me to Carpe diem, baby.  But I was too far gone to be either rational or hedonistic.  When I heard that my husband had a follow-up doctor’s appointment this afternoon, I piggybacked onto it.  “I’m kind of a hypochondriac and I just wanted to have you take a look at something,” I said.  The Doc was agreeable but I still had to go through the usual routine — temperature and blood pressure (and official appointment for insurance purposes) — before he would look at my lump.   I pulled down my jeans to expose my hip and showed it to him.  He felt it, asked me to bear down like I was taking a dump, felt it again, then measured it, and concluded, at least for now, that it was probably a lipoma.  “You mean like the one, here? On my shoulder?  Or this one?  On my thigh?”  He nodded.  “Well, makes sense, huh,” I rattled on.  “I mean, it’s like why is there more fat on my right hip than my left.  Just is.”  And I pulled on the fat layer to show him.  By now he was half-way out the door, his parting words:  “If it gets any bigger or starts hurting, come back in.  But it’s probably just a lipoma.”  All the tension in my neck and shoulders immediately disappeared.  “So I’m not going to die?”  “Not yet,” he said.  “I mean, I know I’m going to someday.  That’s why after 60 you gotta enjoy every day!”  But by now I was talking to myself and he had gone into another examining room.  I walked home (I’m lucky to live a few blocks from my doctor, lucky, that is, for a hypochondriac) smiling away and chatting up every single person, dog, and child that passed by.  Once again I had triumphed over the great goddess of fear!  Dear Hypochondria, you make me feel so alive!