Hypochondria (hie poh kahn dree ah) n. Abnormal anxiety over one’s health, often with imaginary illnesses and severe melancholy. {Webster’s New World Dictionary}.
THE LAZY HYPOCHONDRIAC
Most of us either know or play the part of a hypochondriac at times. My Aunt Clara takes the cake in my family, and she’s done it for as long as I’ve been aware of her ceaseless nose-blowing, lugubrious foot-dragging and griping about invisible illnesses.
But it takes a lot of work to properly cry wolf at the door of failing health. You’ve got to do research, read the latest medical journals, do your best to appear tired and sickly, make countless phone calls and trips to the doctor, and be a fountain of incessant woeful whining to everyone you meet. What happens if you’re lazy, too? Well ...
1. You come down with SAR instead of SARS. You got it by watching specials on Hong Kong and Taranto on the Travel Channel. Plus, you only manage to get East Nile Virus because you’ve never liked going west.
2. You get a lone monkey pock just by looking at your neighbor’s pet prairie dog.
3. Salmonella is too hard to pronounce, so you call it “chicken flu.”
4. You’re tired of downing medicine after medicine, so you have a Nyquil® I.V. drip.
5. It takes too much energy to call, so you’ve set up your computer to automatically send spam e-mails to your doctor’s office about how your foot hurts and it has to be The Plague.
6. You’ve worn one of those surgical masks for protection so long you forget what your face looks like without it.
7. You hire an imaginary live-in nurse and you talk to her rather than pestering your family and friends.
8. You’re so afraid of slipping and falling in your tub that you give yourself sponge baths (with the patient assistance of your imaginary live-in nurse). Lather, rinse, repeat.
9. You move next door to the hospital to reduce the travel time for your daily fake-cramp fiasco in the emergency room.
10. It’s become such a bother, you decide to complain only when you’re actually sick.
Here’s to hoping you have a happy, healthy weekend! See you guys next week!
