Ketta B has some concerns. She suffers from a brain tumor. Sadly, that is exacerbated by her skin cancer and incipient malaria. Today she found a couple of lumps in her throat that may be a sign of lymphoma. I took her word for it. But without doing my own assessment of the size and quality of the nodes in question, I could not be certain that it wasn’t the plague. I opted not to mention the possibility.
Needless to say, I dig Ketta’s brand of cool, and not just because she laughs easily and is the best cook I know—now that my father no longer rattles the pots. No, Ketta is also the perfect Emma Peel to my Guy In The Bowler Hat (nobody remembers his name). That helps when you’re trying to fake credibility.
Not that there is the slightest chance that she will succumb anytime soon to a denizen of the rogues’ gallery of complaints she imagines upon herself. I estimate she has about seventy years left in her and will dance merrily on my grave for a good number of decades. But you know someone like her, frantically scanning the internet for an explanation of the mysterious mark on her neck that most closely resembles a not-very-impressive zit.
I suppose that my own tragic demise may come as the result of a long-ignored and badly infected ingrown toenail. Still, I don’t get—I’m going to use the word now—hypochondriacs. And I know a lot of them, like the lawyer who returned from a trip to Northern California convinced that she had West Nile, and the flight attendant who sprays Clorox Anywhere on her food while visiting foreign countries, just in case.
Sure, your run-of-the-mill hypochondriac is not likely to drop dead mysteriously. She will know far in advance what is letting the tension out of her mainspring. In the meantime, a lot of doctors will be sending their kids to private school on the backs of those who greet every bodily sensation with horror and self-diagnosis.
Maybe it’s just a cosmic rule that taunts the medical insurance industry. For everyone like me who will not visit a doctor until something threatens to blow up, fall off, or just stop doing what I want it to do, there will be a Ketta B asking whether her eye is supposed to feel like that.
But I am not totally without sympathy, so I have pre-ordered Ketta’s headstone, bearing the inscription that all who share her obsession would like to have resting above them for eternity: “See? I told you I was sick.”
