and i've been guessin', but i coulda been guessin' wrong

a lot of people i know fall victim to the hypochondria that can so easily arise when you look at sites like webmd. a stuffy nose can suddenly be a symptom of meningitis instead of just the common cold. a stomach ache is a form of cancer, and a sore throat a sure sign that they have only days to live. i barely ever look at medical sites. i hardly give any sickness i might have a second thought. i try my best to just ignore any symptoms i may have until they go away. unless i have a cold, then i fill myself with alka seltzer plus because that is a miracle medicine.

but moving on, yesterday i did what i had sworn never to do. i caved and looked at webmd and emedicine and all the rest of those, and oh my god i was far sicker than i had originally thought. i did not just have cramps anymore, i was going to need to head to my doctor immediately and get prepped for surgery. a surgery that was sure to leave me paralyzed on half of my body which would surely lead to other diseases. this was not just a migraine that i had gotten and ignored millions of times over the past few years. (except for that time when i got prescription medicine from the doctor and my throat closed up the first time i took it and i could barely breathe and the migraine didn't go away. that was fun.) this was a tumor that they would not be able to remove without making me brain dead. that is, if i didn't die of a heart attack first which was what the pain in my jaw meant i was heading for. what was the point of going to a doctor, anyway, when i was sure not to make it to the end of this month. 

convinced as i was that i was dying, i knew that i had to make every day count. live them all to the fullest because there were so few of them left. i first thought of all the delicious food i had yet to eat and the restaurants i kept saying i would try but never did. (i was fasting... it's perfectly normal for the first thought to enter my head be food.) but since i couldn't eat until sundown, i pushed the thought out of my mind as quickly as i could. then i thought fleetingly of all the things i had yet to see and all the places i haven't been that i always wanted to visit. but those would all require getting dressed, and i mean, i was dying. you can't expect someone practically on their death bed to get dressed and go outside. so that was out. 

i ended up reading barrie's peter pan and playing online scrabble. i was just reading about wendy, john, and michael learning to fly - they hadn't even run away yet - when i decided that having just days to live put too much pressure on a person, and i think i'd prefer to just drop dead suddenly in the middle of eating a bowl of clam chowder with no expectations than to sit around and wait for my symptoms to kill me. and then and there i gave up my brief life as a hypochondriac. i have no idea how people can do it. 

*Mad Season - Matchbox 20