Hello. My name is Johanna, and I'm a hypochondriac. Super. Now that I've gotten that off my chest, we can move on to bigger and better things...
But for real. Let me explain something to you. I am a legitimate hypochondriac. Like completely and utterly paranoid, every ache and pain is a prelude to cancer--which I probably already have anyway--kind of hypochondriac. And I'm not making light of this. I have a real problem. It doesn't help that my father died of cancer at the ripe, old age of 41 when I was only 14 and that my mother is a nurse and that I majored in self-diagnosis courtesy of the Internet and my own vast medical knowledge. It also doesn't help that I've had some small but disconcerting health concerns, including thyroid disease, ovarian cysts, and lumps in the back of my mouth that turned out to be nothing more than rotting food that was catching in some scar tissue caused by my semi-annual cases of strep throat. (That was an over-share, wasn't it?) Hardly debilitating by any stretch, but for someone who can convince herself that those white spots in her throat are actually tumors and that the uterine pain is actually ovarian cancer, any foreign pain can be cause for absolute, life-altering panic.
It's an unpleasant way to live life, particularly for someone still under the age of 30. I often feel like I have no control over the thought processes that lead me from neck and back pain to tumors on my spine. It's utterly terrifying.
