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.
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