I am a "bit" of a hypochondriac.
And I'm pretty impressed with myself that I spelled "hypochondriac" correctly on my first try.
But I am - a hypochondriac (and, I guess, impressed with myself, but that's not the point here).
I don't have headaches; I suffer from brain tumors, or minor strokes.
I don't have stomach aches; I have bleeding ulcers.
I don't have arthritis; my bones have somehow becomes so thin they're on the verge of breaking from the simplest of exertion.
At the same time, I know I'm ridiculously healthy, thanks to genetics more than anything. I don't really have arthritis, except in my left thumb and that only flares up now and then (again, however, that's self-diagnosis). I don't really get headaches that often or stomach aches. I don't take any prescription drugs. In fact, I don't take any drugs at all (because what's a Tylenol going to do for a brain tumor?) I think I've discussed that my preferred meal is almost anything that comes from a drive-thru. Yet at my last physical - and I only go to the doctor about once a decade, but I did go within the last year - my blood pressure is fine, my cholestoral is ridiculously low, my heart is good, my blood work was all good. I did finally have my first colonoscopy, only about a decade late, and they did find a 'mass' that caused me to be in the hospital for a week after they cut out a chunk of my colon, but that was the first time I'd spent a night n a hospital as a patient since I had my tonsils out when I was a kid, back when they kept you in overnight with promises of all the ice cream you could eat (never telling you that after having your tonsils taken out, you didn't really want ice cream).
But the worse thing I can do is start reading the symptoms of some disease. The other night, while looking up something about muscular dystrophy, I realized I have had many of the listed symptoms for something called MMD1 Adult Onset Muscular Dystrophy. The Trophy Wife normally doesn't let me read about diseases or listen to people talk about rare diseases because she knows I'll start thinking I have one (or more).
I come by this honestly, however.
My aunt - my mom's twin sister - was a wonderful woman but had a few 'quirks.' When my mom was sick and my aunt would come by to check on her and my mom would describe what she was taking various drugs for, my aunt would say "I've been noticing that in myself lately. Maybe I need to take some of that." And she'd help herself to a pill or two of whatever my mother was taking.
Crazy? Well, my aunt did outlive my mom by a couple decades. Who is to say that self-diagnosis followed by her self-medication didn't prolong her life?
I'd better stop here and say my aunt was not a drug addict. She came from the Southern Baptist side of my family that didn't "drink, smoke, chew, or run with those that do." She was a wonderful aunt, and a terrific sister to my mom.
But she was a Smith, from rural Georgia; about as Southern as you can get. And if you've ever read any William Faulkner or Roy Blount or Carson McCullers or Tennessee Williams or Truman Capote or Rick Bragg or ... well, the people in many of those stories felt like people I knew growing up, or at least people "my people" (as we used to refer to our families in the South) talked about.
My grandfather was John Felix Smith. John Smith. Only he went by "Fel" which was pronounced "feel" and many people thought his name was "Phil." My grandmother was Lassie Wheeler. She had a sister, I think it was, named "Rose."
I used to spend a lot of time at my Mamaw's house (that's my grandmother, for those who don't know what a Mamaw is). My mother worked, and I guess in the summer when I wasn't in school there were times she left me over there. I know I always dreaded it. I can remember sitting on this big back porch with my grandmother, snapping green beans, and listening to her talk. She assigned gender to everything in her house, so when it came to things like her toaster she'd say, "he's been a hard-working toaster all his life" or of her ironing board she might say something like, "she likes to hide here in the closet where she thinks I can't find her."
Do you remember the animated movie "Beauty and the Beast," where all the servants had been turned into household items? That might have been my grandmothers house. For all I know, late at night, they all came alive and danced and sang around on the old linoleum floor in the kitchen. Lord knows I was so bored at times, staying over there, I might have imagined it happening.
Papaw (the male opposite of Mamaw) had this old black car he kept parked in the basement garage. He decided one day he wanted a yellow car. Maybe the grandkids were talking about how "in" yellow cars where, I don't know. But I know he painted his car. With a brush. Yellow. You can imagine.
Riding in the car with them, you didn't know whether to laugh or scream or, most likely, both. My grandfather was nearly deaf ("deef" as he called it); my grandmother was blind. But that didn't stop her from telling him how to drive, and of course he couldn't hear her which only made her louder. The crazy thing was, sometimes she was right. I always wonder if God didn't give her some kind of "second sight" when it came to them riding in the car together.
(Now, my other grandfather - we called him Poppy - was hard of hearing, too. He had a hearing aid, one of those old-fashion kind where you put the ear piece in your ear and the cord trailed down to a box that he kept in his front shirt pocket. When my grandma (we called her "Grandma") would get to ragging him about something, I'd see him look at me, smile, and reach in and unplug his hearing aid, then go back to reading or whatever he was doing.)
Papaw had his own way of doing things, and no patience with anyone trying to tell him to do it a different way. I'm afraid we may be alike in that way. And it had to be kind of wonderful to drive around, completely unaware of honking horns or screeching brakes or a siren behind him trying to get him to pull over. Blissfully unaware of the noise coming from both outside the car or from the passenger seat, Papaw enjoyed his drive. And, as far as I know, he always made it there and back - wherever there and back was - no worse for the wear.
Chicken gizzards and vanilla wafers. That's what I think about when I think about my grandparents. It seemed like they always had fried chicken gizzards - what is a gizzard, anyway? - and Papaw loved his vanilla wafers.
I'm getting old. That always reminds me of a Jimmy Buffet song that says, "Now that I'm old, I don't wear underwear. I don't go to church and I don't cut my hair."
But I'm getting old and, like both my grandfathers, I don't hear so well. I've tried to tell my doctor I have some kind of acoustic neuroma, paraganglioma, or maybe meningioma. I had an MRI or some kind of scan to see if there was some growth that was causing my loss of hearing, but they didn't find anything - "brain x-ray reveals nothing!" - but doctors make mistakes. Meanwhile, I've got hearing aids, although not the kind that sits in my shirt pocket that I can unplug when I don't want to hear what's being said to me.
Fortunately, my eye sight is still pretty good. And I can get around all right. I may not be as good of a driver as I used to be, but I still enjoy getting out on the interstate, popping in a CD or, just to show I'm not completely old, tuning my Sirius radio to the Garth Brooks Channel, or the Kenny Chesney channel, or the Jimmy Buffet channel, because there are only two jazz channels that I've found and I don't care much for either one of them (which is why I still like to play my CD's of, as my oldest son says, "80's jazz"). When I'm by myself, I can turn up the volume enough so I can still hear it pretty good. I've spent a lot of my life on the road, and still dream of one day taking off on a cross-county road trip (the Trophy's Wife's personal version of hell. I'm afraid).
I keep trying to develop some kind of eccentric habits. I wanted to learn to like whiskey or bourbon, so I could sit in my library, reading, and sipping on an amber-colored drink that wasn't iced tea. But truthfully, I just can't stand the taste of alcohol, so I sip my ice tea. I thought it would be kind of cool to have a 'walking stick,' and I saw this cane in a New Orleans antique store that had a sword inside, like out of an old movie. But then I saw the price tag, and decided I don't really want my eccentricities to cost that much; and if I can't keep track of an umbrella, what makes me think I would actually keep track of - much less use - a cane? And really, a cane with a sword inside? What, just in case I offended someone's honor and they challenged me to a dual underneath the big oak trees, out behind the old church? Yeah, like that's going to happen.
That's not to say I don't have my eccentricities. Heck, I already admitted my hypochondria. And probably a half-dozen other crazy things us Southerners do but don't seem to crazy to us because, well, we're "us." Crazy is what other people do.
Besides, as someone once said, when the whole world is crazy, what's the use in being sane?
I go back to get a physical soon. My doctor keeps saying I'm ridiculously healthy for someone in as bad a shape as I'm in. I tell him he's just not as good a doctor as he thinks he is, and if he can't find something wrong with me, he's not worth the money my insurance company and I pay him.
Where do you look when you've finally lost your mind?
Excellent.
ReplyDeleteFun read.
Thanks Ray.