The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. and Death. by Gene Weingarten Read Free Book Online Page A

Kenneth told ø øme that if your urine smelled funny after you ate asparagus it meant you had cancer of the larynx. This frightened me, even though I did not, technically, know where the larynx was. Kenneth said it was the “stomach bone.”
    After worrying in silence for a week and probing gingerly for signs of an enlarged stomach bone, I finally screwed up my courage and asked my mom, who informed me that some people’s urine smells funny after they eat asparagus 1 and that it doesn’t mean anything bad. So I owed Kenneth one. It proved easy. Kenneth was not a mental giant. I told him the Punic Wars were between the Phoenicians and “the Krauts,” and he wrote this on a test.
    Revenge, it is said, is sweet. Mine had a sour undertaste, From that moment on, I sensed in myself something unhealthy. Many things unhealthy, in fact. It was the first tentative awakening ofwhat was to become a lifelong engagement with hypochondria. For much of my life I was a hypochondriac, and now I am cured. Disclosure of the details of my cure will provide the spectacular denouement of this book, rewarding the loyal reader with soulshattering insights into the delicate nexus of the psychological, physiological, and spiritual roots of disease, not to mention an anecdote about unconscious people farting. But all that will come later. I will disclose this much right now: When chronic illnesses are cured, the cure often comes about incrementally, over time, without a single, dramatic, defining moment. But the cure for my hypochondria occurred on September 17, 1991, a Day That Will Live in Infirmity. It was shortly after ten o’clock 2 in the morning. It was a Tuesday. It was raining. God wept. But I am getting several chapters ahead of myself.
    When I was thirteen, I began going to the dentist all the time, complaining of tooth pain. This was partly hypochondria, but mostly it was substance abuse. My dentist, whom I will call Dr. Bliss, had a practice that, as far as I could tell, consisted primarily of dispensing nitrous oxide. He would give you nitrous oxide to clean your teeth. He would give you nitrous oxide when he
examined
your teeth. He would give you nitrous oxide when he was in the other room, working on someone
else’s
teeth. Dr. Bliss’s patients—men, women, kids, blue-haired grandmas—would sit in his waiting room fidgeting and eyeing each other guiltily, like crack addicts.
    Nitrous oxide is called laughing gas, though I never understood why. It never made me laugh. It was like sex:
waaaay
too intense to make you laugh, but hardly unenjoyable. Each time I was under nitrous oxide I would attain some overwhelming philosophical revelation that disappeared the instant I came out of the anesthesia. At this critical juncture, I once ripped off the rubber mask, grabbed a pen from the doctor’s shirt pocket, and scribbled my insight onto my bib. This is what I wrote, in its entirety:
    â€œI-N-GÜ”
    In subsequent visits I honed this revelation, eventually determining that the meaning of life involved gerunds. But that is about as far as I got. 3 Personally, I think Dr. Bliss was everything you could want in a dentist, except that by the time I was sixteen, my molars were made entirely of ferrous compounds.
    Though rooted in childhood, my hypochondria did not fully manifest itself until I was a young adult. For that I credit Dr. Katzev, my family doctor when I was a boy. Dr. Katzev was a crusty old guy who did not believe in pampering you or letting you pamper yourself. He was an ascetic. He believed absolutely in letting diseases take their natural course. Once, after he examined my brother, his diagnosis was: “If spots develop, it’s the measles.”
    Dr. Katzev actually made house calls. He would barge into my bedroom, pull off the covers, and fling open the window, even if it was the dead of winter and I had a fever of 103. “The body has to breathe,” he would