My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

How I Caught Every Disease on the Web

The Internet is a boon for hypochondriacs like me. Right now, for instance, I’m feeling a shooting pain on the side of my neck. A Web search produces five matches, the first three for a condition called Arnold-Chiari Malformation.

This is the wonderful thing about looking up your symptoms on the Internet. Very quickly you find yourself distracted from your aches and pains. The symptom list for Arnold-Chiari Malformation is three pages long. Noting the four out of 71 symptoms that match, I conclude that I have this condition. A good hypochondriac can make a diagnosis on the basis of one matching symptom.

While my husband, Ed, reads over my shoulder, I recite symptoms from the list. “‘General clumsiness’ and ‘general imbalance,’” I say, as though announcing arrivals at the Marine Corps Ball. “‘Difficulty driving,’ ‘lack of taste,’ ‘difficulty feeling feet on ground.’”

“Those aren’t symptoms,” says Ed. “Those are your character flaws.”

Ha, ha. But I know how to get back at him. “Hey, what’s this thickening, or nodule, on the back of your neck?” Ed is more of a hypochondriac than I am. “Looks like it could be Antley-Bixler Syndrome,” I say.

I got this one from the National Organization for Rare Disorders website, which has an index of rare diseases that I’ve pretty much memorized. I move in for the kill. “Ever feel any fatigue?”

Ed gets on the computer to see if there’s a self-test for Antley-Bixler Syndrome. We’re big fans of self-tests, and the Internet is full of them. I once happily passed the afternoon self-testing for macular degeneration, emotional eating, hypochondria, bad breath. Ed found me taking the Self-Test for Swine Farm Operators. (“I conduct manure nutrient analysis: Annually. Every five years. Never.”) It’s probably fair to say that I’m addicted to self-tests, but until there’s a self-test for self-test addiction, I can’t be sure.

The dangerous thing about Internet diagnosis is that most hypochondriacs will attempt it late at night, when everyone else is asleep and no one is around to reassure them that they’re nuts. This is what happened to me on October 2, sometime past midnight, when I entered the words “red spots on my face” into the Google search page. I’d noticed the spots while scanning my face for starlike speckles, an early symptom of Ebola virus.

I ignored the 20 or 30 entries for broken capillaries and zeroed in on the following: “Leprosy… begins with red spots on the face…. Bones are affected and fingers drop off.” I began to feel panicky and short of breath. I added those symptoms to my search and found this: “I developed little red spots on my face and arms. Then last spring I started becoming short of breath….” Bottom line, I had interstitial lung disease.

I tried to keep calm. I tried to focus on entry No. 18: “Spicy pork rinds cause me to break out in red spots on my face.” I couldn’t recall eating spicy pork rinds, but perhaps I’d ordered a dish that was made with them but failed to state this on the menu. From now on, I’d be sure to ask. Waiter, is the flan made with spicy pork rinds?

In the end, it was no use. I was up all night, fretting over interstitial lung disease. For a hypochondriac, simply running the name of a new disease through your mind once or twice is enough to convince you that you’ve got it. I frequently remind myself of my stepdaughter Phoebe, who, some years ago, heard someone talking about mad cow disease. The next day when a friend of the family said, “Hi, Phoebe, how are you?” she stated calmly, “I have mad cow disease.” But Phoebe was a child. I am an adult. I should know better. Perhaps there’s something wrong with me.