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Confessions of a Hospital Hypochondriac
I’m from the Once Upon a Time… Life generation. That 80s cartoon series where antibodies were like CIA agents, and flu viruses looked like knife-wielding thugs from the Bronx. I spent far too many hours in front of the TV watching the platelet wars and learning about the importance of vaccination to prevent disgusting green bugs with antennae from eating red blood cells and puncturing their oxygen bubbles with pins. You really have to be evil to puncture the oxygen bubbles of red blood cells, which don’t hurt anyone. Perhaps because of all this, I belong to that class of people capable of spending more than an hour holding their breath while waiting in the ER.
I maintain that hospitals are a small zoo of bacteria, viruses, and microbes, and that anything you look at, smell, lick, or touch could be the beginning of a terrible infection. The Emergency Room waiting area, in particular, is a jungle. In other parts of a hospital, illnesses are already classified, so you know roughly what to expect depending on where you step. In the ER, however, viruses are still undiagnosed and share space wildly, mingling happily and jumping from one patient to another with impunity.
I always greet my doctor friends with a slight nod, keeping my distance. I avoid their hands as if they were lava, and I don’t mind saying so publicly here. A doctor’s hand looks like a normal hand. But if you put it under a microscope, a doctor’s hand is the closest thing to what you’d find if you dug a 10-meter hole in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. All those bugs don’t affect the doctor, because nobody bites the hand that feeds them, but they’re more than happy to latch onto your skin and cause all sorts of illnesses.
In the Emergency Room waiting area, I’ve developed a lung capacity far superior to that of any Olympic diver. I’ve gone as long as three hours without breathing, sitting between a woman who looked like she had yellow fever and an elderly man with obvious mumps, surrounded by a coral reef of sneezing unsavory characters.
The doctor’s office is another place where I try not to touch anything. Every time I go in and sit down, I imagine the lady with yellow fever and the man with mumps have meticulously licked every corner of the armrest and coughed with all their might onto the table where my fingers are resting. I rest my fingers instead of my whole hand to minimize the surface area for infection, you see. Another hypochondriac explained it to me years ago. He was a good guy. The nicest in the whole psychiatric ward.
And then there are the doctor’s questions — the ones they fire off routinely, hastily, and without enunciating, while they palpate your tonsils, take your temperature, squeeze your testicles, measure your blood pressure, and explore your ears.
Tell me, is your cough dry or productive? My cough is annoying.
Could you describe the mucus?
And that headache you’re talking about — did it start before or after you began carrying it loose and tucked under your arm? Huh?
Once the diagnosis is made, things always end the same way. The options are to take a series of medications that wreck your stomach and worsen all your symptoms, receive an intensive treatment that’s far worse than the illness itself, or let them poke you anywhere on your body with one of the sharp instruments they always keep in a display case. Doctors particularly enjoy displaying their weapons. It’s a good technique. The moment you walk into the office, you’re confronted with such a collection of scalpels and bladed tools that you imagine the worst, the most painful things. So when it’s all over, and they prescribe a suppository every half hour for a month, you leave feeling like you’ve won the lottery.
In another century, a guy who went around sticking needles into other people’s buttocks would have been imprisoned or burned at the stake.
On another note — and since you asked — yes: I’m terrified of syringes. I’d be capable of drinking sulfur just to avoid enduring an injection. The ailment is rarely more serious than the ordeal of the needle itself. I know doctors have to justify their line of work, which consists of examining fevered backs with a freezing instrument and sticking needles into butts.
In another century, a guy who went around sticking needles into other people’s buttocks would have been imprisoned or burned at the stake. Here, on the other hand, we protect them, adore them, and pay them a fortune. I don’t understand it. I didn’t get a penny the day I stuck a compass into the leg of the class idiot. It’s true I didn’t have the pretext of curing him of any disease — unless we consider stupidity an illness. But it’s still an injustice.
And since you’re begging me, let’s return to the subject of contagion. There’s another terrible moment in the life of a hypochondriac, something I can’t overlook. It’s when, after sharing a meal with a friend, the friend confesses over dessert that he has a strange viral disease that’s kept him out of work for several months. You turn pale and, instinctively, begin to subtly back away in your chair. And you hear nothing else. From that point on, all your faculties are focused on trying to remember whether you accidentally swapped glasses of water at some point during the meal. As he describes the symptoms of his illness, you experience them all. And finally, you faint. But before you completely lose consciousness, you run out — just in case the supposed patient decides to revive you with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
I don’t hide my admiration for doctors who dedicate themselves to saving lives. I have nothing against them. From here, my homage and my respect. On the other hand, I confess my contempt and opposition to those who devote themselves to sticking scalpels into people of goodwill and needles into innocent buttocks without a justifiable cause. And frankly, I can’t think of anything that could justify sticking a needle into someone else’s buttocks.
READ MORE from Itxu Díaz:
Diary of a Very Dark Tuesday
A Fairly Open Response to ‘An Open Letter to Europe’
Thank You, Trump, for Reminding Europe’s Leaders How Utterly Stupid They Are
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