The Hypochondriac Chronicles

Yesterday evening Max suddenly complained that his stomach hurt, his head hurt, and his throat hurt. We thought this was him expressing how bad he felt for screaming at Philip for not washing his hair correctly. We shrugged it off, tucked him into bed, and figured he was fine. Less than an hour later he called to us for water. His feet were as hot as tin plates left out in the sun. The whole night he woke up periodically to complain about various things such as how upsetting he found it to wake up with his light off (he won't go to sleep with his light on), to complain about how Ozark (the grumpy old cat) wasn't snuggling in an approved position, or that he just didn't understand how come he ever has to go to school again.

In the morning his whole body was hot to the touch and a thermometer confirmed that he had a fever (of 102.9 degrees F.). So he stayed home from school. There is nothing extraordinary about all this that I'm relating to you. All kids get sick with colds, flus, and sometimes the occasional strep throat. I have to confess that having a sick child is one of the most nerve-racking aspects of parenthood for me. This is partly because I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder which makes each cold appear to be the precursor to Leukemia or some as-yet-undiscovered deadly disease that will be named "The Max Syndrome" after it has carried my boy away. Partly it's just because I love my boy so much it makes me crazy to see him feeling bad and not be able to make it go away right now.

Until the week before we moved here Max never complained about sore throats. He either never got them with his colds (lucky monkey!) or they just weren't bad enough for him to comment on (believe me, Max feels no need to spare us complaints about absolutely everything that displeases him in life). The week before we moved he came down with strep throat. It was so bad he was drooling and panicking because it hurt him to breath. We took him to the ER where the doctors took a strep culture (which came back positive) and started him on penicillin. Two weeks after we moved he got a really horrible sore throat again and a throat culture once again pointed it's evil fingers at strep. Had he never fully got rid of it we wondered? A week after that he was still in tremendous pain, but this time the culture came back clean of strep.

He recovered. But then two weeks later he got another sore throat, this time accompanied by clear white spots on his tonsils which, as every parent knows, is a red flag for strep. By this time, I was really feeling panicky. Why was my boy, who never got a sore throat in the first five years of his life, suddenly getting sick with them every couple of weeks? I have learned, as an unfortunate recipient of excess anxiety, to calm the panic that readily rips through my chest every time I, or any loved one, has an unexplained and suspicious illness. I have learned to sit back and talk myself through it. I know that just because a sore throat is unexplained doesn't automatically mean it's cancer. And a sore that doesn't heal as fast as expected doesn't mean I have Aids. This last time it turned out that Max had a virus that was imitating strep symptoms. Isn't that kind of strange?

Medical mysteries are the worst thing for my "heart condition" (in itself a medical mystery that the cardiologists I visited were neither especially alarmed about, nor particularly comfortable with. Ironic, no?) One of the ways I work through this tendency to stress over physical ailments is to use cognitive behavioral therapy on myself. Basically I approach the whole issue with an eye to separating rational fears from the irrational ones. But let me ask you: isn't the recurrence of maladies not usual in a patient the benchmark of ailments to be concerned about? At what point do you say to your doctor "I think you need to dig deeper because my gut says there's more to this than you're seeing."? I am always wary of revealing my fears to doctors because I don't want to get the dreaded label "hypochondriac" on my medical files, once there, no doctor will ever take me seriously again.

So yesterday I experienced a low-but-constant level of stress over the fact that my boy had tonsils the size of golf balls (again). I was itching to make a doctor appointment. But why bother? It's expensive and five times already the doctors brushed off Max's recurrent sore throats as nothing. Today Max had no fever, his throat seemed to be back to normal, so we sent him off to school. Two possibilities continue to crowd themselves into my already crowded brain: The first is that Max will turn out to actually have something serious that we won't find out about until it's advanced to an untreatable stage and I will be hating myself for the rest of my life for caring whether or not the doctors stamp my medical files "HYPOCHONDRIAC" in bright red, or the second possibility is that Max will grow up to be healthy and normal and I will die young of a heart attack from all the strain that worrying about my boy has put on the lower chamber of my heart which the cardiologist is worried about but can't tell me why.

Being mentally ill sucks.