I don’t really like you. You have made a select list of groups of people that I generally dislike by default, which is admirable in a way, but as I get older I find that people irritate me more often, so perhaps it’s me that needs to do a little soul searching. Either way, I find hypochondriacs to be a drain on society for two primary reasons: 1) The whole self-pity thing is a bit played. 2) It’s manipulative. It’s the domain of those who want to be fretted over, who want to be worried about. It’s a way for people to blame every little miscomfort on a dramatic health crisis, and it’s a waste of about 20 million dollars in unnecessary medical expenses each year.The advent of WebMD.com, Yahoo! Health, and other sites has given these people more misinformation to arm themselves with than I originally would ever have thought possible. Back in the day, the whining of hypochondriacs was mostly limited to the realm of ill-defined but terribly exaggerated phrases like “horrible, awful migraines”, which is not very specific, meaning they couldn’t take it much further than that. Now, those same headaches can chalked up to an arteriovascular malformation, one of the harsh realities of the technology age that fills me with sadness.Exhibit 1: A woman I worked with in an office who would complain of things like “lumbar-vertebrae displacement” brought on by her substandard office chair.
For research’s sake, I went to WebMD and decided to see what (if anything) is wrong with me. You’re given a picture of a human body to click “where it hurts” and a list of symptoms to choose from. It’s hot as hell this afternoon, so I immediately checked off “Excessive sweating”. No problem. I then moved on to “Hunger” and “Food cravings,” as I have almost an hour left until lunch. Because I’m doing this instead of working, I went ahead and added “Easily distracted” and “Poor concentration” as well, then rounded it out with “Difficulty staying awake during the day”. Finally, I realized how depressing and profoundly cynical it is that I’m doing this at all, so I finished with: “Inability to care for self”, “Low self-esteem”, and “Sense of impending doom”.
I would diagnose myself this afternoon as a workplace slacker with a poor attitude towards humanity, but imagine my surprise when WebMD broke the news to me: I have supraventricular tachycardia. Son of a bitch, a potentially fatal heart condition. I saw this on Dr. House.
This is going to be problematic.