Chiggers Plays Pop

I confess to being a closet hypochondriac.  Like all English people, and a large proportion of the French (one of the only things we have in common), I enjoy ill health.  I have yet to reach the stage where I like to talk about my illnesses to all and sundry, or to show people my scars (I still have vivid memories of my exhibitionist grandmother showing me her hysterectomy scar in the pantry of her house.  She called it her extra ’smile’!)  I merely like to revel in illness in a quiet and mostly private sort of way.  It’s embarrassing to admit now.  In thirty years time it will be the equivalent of my passport and allow me to gain access all areas to various social events of my choice (whist drives, doctors’ waiting rooms and bingo halls being the top three).  I will probably have to have one of those shopper trolleys on wheels just to carry my medical notes around in.

I am ill quite a lot, mainly because I have three children, very little sleep and a tendency to refresh myself with unlimited supplies of carbohydrates.  This kind of low grade illness is fairly standard for anyone who has children under the age of twelve, and manifests itself in headaches, bags under the eyes and wandering around listlessly, staring at life through a kind of permanent low grade smog and aimlessly chopping off various extremities through tiredness induced clumsiness.  As such it doesn’t really count as ‘illness’, it is a state of normality to be endured until normal service resumes, just before I hit the menopause.  I shall probably appear jolly, happy and exuberant for twenty four hours between these two states.  I believe this kind of in between phase is what is known as a liminal state.  If the shock of good health doesn’t kill me, I shall slide gracefully from my liminal state into hot sweats, facial hair and fainting with ease and the poise of a contestant on Come Dancing.

So, this is not hypochondria, although those smug people who don’t have children seem to believe it is.  A friend of Jason’s the other day rather sneeringly said: ‘Hmmm! You and Katy seem to be ill a lot of the time don’t you?’ Like we were trying to wiggle out of our cross country run or something and he had produced a fraudulent note which said; ‘Jason cannot do p.e. today because he has his period. Yours sincerely, his mum.’  Jason fixed him with a beady eye and then gave him the beady finger, before taking to his bed for a spot of light moaning. 

Another friend at work who only had one child up until six weeks ago, and now has two, came in to work a gibbering wreck on Friday, announcing that his life was over.  He and his wife were doing shifts with a camp bed in the living room and hadn’t spoken to each other since he screamed ‘Breathe’ at her just before the baby shot out.  He thought he might have temporary blindness and he definitely had twitching.  He was feeling particularly jittery because he had just nearly crashed his car, falling asleep at the wheel.  Jason looked at him in sympathy and then uttered the words: ‘I told you so!’ with great relish.  Misery sure does love company.

In this, my naturally befugged state I do like to do to a good bit of moaning.  I don’t mean: ‘Oh! I feel poorly.  Oh! I do feel poorly! Oh! Do you know, I feel a bit unwell?’ type of thing.  I mean proper moaning like: ‘Aaaahh!’ and ‘Urghhhh!’ and ‘Eahhhhhh!’, and not in a sexual way either.  I always find a bit of light moaning several times a day generally makes the world feel like a much more manageable place.  It is therapeutic.  It promotes well being and dispels phlegm from the lungs.  I highly recommend it if you’ve never given it a go before.

Then there’s the hypochondria.  This is a secret thing.  It is a shameful thing in which I take no pleasure. Unlike most men who seem to revel in hypochondria and immediately assume the worst, look things up in a medical dictionary and then expound upon their ever alarming list of symptoms, I do my hypochondria at home alone.  It usually happens when I wake up in the night feeling unwell, or when I am very tired and stranded only with a small child to assist me and feeling unwell. 

I suddenly decide that my headache cannot be just a normal headache, because surely a normal headache wouldn’t feel like this.  Surely, as a stalwart member of the human race, inured to regular suffering, if this were a normal headache I would pop a couple of paracetamol and be back to my happy, yodelling self in half an hour?  Because I am clutching my head and can’t remember past the first line of ‘The Happy Wanderer’ I suddenly decide that I must be ‘really’ unwell.

I don’t own a medical dictionary for this very reason.  If I did I would be like the protagonist in Three Men in a Boat, who suddenly discovers they have everything from dropsy to housemaid’s knee, even though he has never been a housemaid in his life.  What happens instead is that I remember every illness I have had the misfortune to read/hear about and play a cruel little middle of the night game called ‘match the symptoms’.  Last week from having poorly sinuses I surmised that I had in fact got a very rare form of bone cancer which eats your face (I didn’t even read about this one. I just made it up through sheer terror) leaving you at the mercy of anti English French plastic surgeons who would undoubtedly make you look like the Elephant Man just because they opposed the Channel Tunnel and hate Kent.

When my sinus pain spread so that my ears and neck hurt I decided I had misdiagnosed myself and that probably I had got meningitis. This diagnosis was firmed up when I staggered to the bathroom to stare at my stomach to see if I had a rash (and roll a glass on it for half an hour, wondering what the bloody hell was supposed to happen when I did), and hurt my eyes turning the light on too quickly.  This was clearly not just wandering around at two in the morning and going from dark to light. No.  This was advanced photophobia, which probably also explains why I couldn’t see the rash properly, not because I did not in fact have any such rash in the first place.

I decided that if it was meningitis I was probably too far gone for anyone to get in a state about, and that I didn’t fancy an ambulance ride at that time in the morning because they don’t drive very gently over the bumps in the road and my head hurt too much.  I crawled back to bed and decided that if I were still alive in the morning I would revisit the diagnosis.  I woke up feeling much better.  It was obviously one of those six hour meningitis bugs.  They’re very rare, but it’s possible.  It was a close shave.

Today I made the executive decision that I have chiggers.  Chiggers are a kind of parasite that lurk about in rain forests and South American places and not as surmised, an illness you get when randomly confronted with that hideous grinning idiot, Keith Chegwin.  Unlike Keith Chegwin, chiggers get into your bloodstream by burrowing up through the earth, into your foot and then corkscrew their way out of your flesh in festering little sores which make you itch like mad.  They are highly unpleasant and very contagious.  I read about them once in an essay by P. J. O’Rourke and have been slightly unnerved by them ever since.  It is unlikely that they would inhabit the grasslands of Glenfield, but one must be careful in these days of climate change.

Other things that I have convinced myself that I may have/had include:

• Lymes disease – I spent most of my childhood rolling around in bracken and making ‘dens’.  The ticks that pass on lymes disease lurk about in bracken waiting to pounce.  As a child one laughed in the face of Lymes disease.  Now, when I go to Centre Parcs (thankfully not very often), there are posters on every tree warning about the dangers of wandering naked through the bracken and I spend my entire ‘relaxing’ weekend scaring myself sick with the idea that I’ve probably got dormant Lymes disease and just looking at bracken will bring it bounding back to life with a ferocity unrivalled anywhere else in the natural world.
• Beri Beri, Scurvy and Rickets – All things my mother spent my entire childhood years telling me that I would get if I didn’t eat my greens/carrots/gravy and cauliflower.  I never did.  It’s bound to get me one day, even though I now eat all of these things and have done for years.
• Brain Tumour – I know this isn’t a disease, but every time I get a migraine, after about twelve hours of clutching my head, getting double vision, a super sensitive sense of smell and a bed full of vomit, I naturally reach the conclusion that I am in my death throes due to the doctor failing to diagnose a malignant brain tumour that just looked like a spot in my eyebrow, but which was in fact the vastly oversized tumour trying to push its way out of my eye socket because there was no more room left in my head.
• Staggers.  I convinced myself that I had the staggers, which is a kind of griping bellyache with much vomiting, pooh and dehydration as far as I understood it, unless I turned over two pages of the internet at the same time and read the wrong symptoms.  I rang Andrea,  to tell her my woes.  She laughed.  Apparently only animals get staggers.  So, unless I have turned into a dairy cow, which despite my bovine tendencies is unlikely, it was probably just mild food poisoning.  Still, better to be safe than sorry.

I have decided that on perusing my symptoms I definitely do have hypochondria though.  So before I take to my bed with a damp flannel shading my eyes I will prescribe the cure:

1. Less watching episodes of House late at night.
2. A coffee cup cake every four hours.
3. A week off from the children in a darkened room.

That should do the trick.