As someone who has a host of health complaints, I often find myself toeing the line between being attentive to my health and body and feeling like a hypochondriac. I don't look sickly. I wouldn't really categorize most of these complaints as illnesses—that word carries a gravity I don't think any of my problems really deserve. At their worst, I consider them to be chronic conditions. They're wholly manageable and they don't usually interfere with my ability to live a pretty solid life.
However, I am a champion worrier. Like the other members of my immediate family, I've been pretty good at worrying my whole life. Combine my insatiable curiosity and my somewhat macabre interest in disease, and suddenly being an anxious person with pre-existing health problems moves a step closer to hypochondria. Where do I draw the line between paying attention to possible symptoms and making a big fat deal out of nothing?
In large part because of my interest in diseases and patient populations, I took a job that requires me to read about health and medicine all day. This means that I sit in front of a computer adding more and more possible conditions to the already crowded catalogue what has been, is now, and could soon be wrong with me. Most of these conditions are pretty preposterous. If any of them really were an issue, they would likely have been picked up by one of the many attentive healthcare professionals I've seen in my life. I probably don't have adult onset ADHD, fructose malabsorption, deep vein thrombosis, or uterine fibroids. Cancers of any variety, which make up the bulk of my research, are also pretty unlikely.
However, all this research does nothing to lessen my already overactive imagination. Often, I give in these hypochondriac impulses before I try and snap myself out of it. In some cases, all it takes is talking to someone else to help me realize how insane I sound. Where I really get into trouble is when my worries are plausible. And then, well, I have a hard time convincing myself I'm wrong.
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