Hypochondriacs are never happy because we know that eventually all of us are vindicated. As Spike Milligan said on his gravestone: ‘I told you I was ill.’ In fact, he had it engraved in Irish: ‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.’
Another one was Alan Clark, who for years listed symptoms – including the merest twinge – in his diaries, along with sentiments to the effect that he knew something would turn out to be serious one day and eventually, at a fairly respectable age to get to, it did. These people are my heroes. They know of what they speak.
‘It’s a two-tone mole!’ I screamed, as I stood in front of the mirror in the downstairs loo, top hitched up to examine a blemish in a most inaccessible part of my torso. How was I supposed to have noticed that there?
After Katherine Ryan became the latest celebrity to describe her physical woes – a mole that turned out to be melanoma – I launched into a physical inventory which involved a lot of bodily contortion.
The builder boyfriend was away in London doing a job, and I was alone in the house in West Cork with only a B&B guest, the American with whooping cough, to keep me company.
Wheezing and whooping away in his room he was, although he had antibiotics from the local doctor and insisted he was getting better, an assertion supported by the fact that he now appeared downstairs each morning, and would traipse through my kitchen French windows to drag on a cigarette on the driveway.
I didn’t say anything, of course. Not polite. But as he coughed and smoked outside one morning, I sat reading the news on my phone in the kitchen and there was Ms Ryan telling everyone to check out their moles or they might be sorry.
So I had a good rummage and I found one that was a bit weird-looking and when I looked up a mole chart – impossible things, they make almost no sense – I found a similar mole on the danger list. Anything two-tone is suspicious, apparently, and this one had a brown bit and a less brown bit. It was definitely two colours, not one even colour throughout. Measurement? I got a tape measure. Yep, definitely more than 8mm.
‘I’m doomed!’ I screamed inside. I texted the BB to say I’d found a mole I was worried about, and he didn’t reply for a really long time. I started to fret that maybe this meant even he was worried – and he doesn’t worry about anything – when a friend texted me back. I had sent the message to the wrong person, texting my bodily details to someone I had happened to be in contact with on another matter. ‘I’m sure it will be fine!’ he said.
Right, that bodes well, I thought, for any superstitious sign will do for a hypochondriac. I decided to make an appointment to have it looked at by the local GP, the one with the string holding up his trousers.
But after making this appointment, out of interest I looked up top dermatologists in London, where I will be in a few weeks’ time. The first few I clicked on were booked up until the tenth of never, but for some reason a nice-looking lady, who sounded renowned and operated at a very posh yet convenient location, happened to be advertising availability in April. When I clicked on her site, she happened to be free the very day I happened to be in London, and at any time. I searched other months and other dermis and this was almost never the case.
Right, that bodes well, I thought, for any superstitious sign will do for a hypochondriac
That was both a good and a bad omen, I decided, as I booked the slot. In the space given for details of why I wanted to see her, I simply typed ‘mole’. ‘A mole. A mole! A two-tone mole!’ was what I had wanted to type. But I restrained myself.
How do I get myself off Mail Online? How to I stop looking at all these celebrities describing their horror illnesses? Because it is driving me mad. These stories, I don’t remember them before. Where did they come from? Am I imagining it or is the media suddenly full of this? Did we not report these matters before? Because suddenly, it seems to me, you can’t make your way down a news website without negotiating the various health horrors. Is it the fashion? Are more people talking about their bodily dilapidations now?
I can’t go on like this. Once I’ve got this mole checked out I’ve got to go cold turkey from the health horror stories.
I could spend the whole day reading them. One leads to another, because once you are reading about a celebrity brain tumour, or a celebrity heart attack, there is a link to click on a celebrity melanoma, or a celebrity early Alzheimer’s.
They induce me to actually feel the symptoms they are describing. Tightness in my chest, pains in my brain, sudden memory loss… I imagine I am actually experiencing the illnesses described, and the sensations are so realistic I can feel them for days.
It’s going to get expensive in specialist fees if I don’t get on top of it. But first, the two-tone mole.
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