HYPOCONDRIA

In the face of such overwhelming statistical possibilities, hypochondria has always seemed to me to be the only rational position to take on life. Consider, by the time you hit forty, your tattered heart has already thumped out a billion and a half beats: what can the chances be of any organ doing anything a billion and a half times and never making a mistake? Your 30 trillion or so cells have each replicated themselves a few thousand times: how could it possibly not be that a few of these cells would band together in that state of cytological anarchy that leads to cancer and death?

Consider anything the body does over and over, asleep and awake, consider the peril it invites every time it gets into a car, breathes a lungful—150 million times a year, not counting the hours of panicky hyperventilation—of sour and sickly city air, eats something too fatty or not fatty enough, and you are considering impending death.

Accidents happen but illness creeps up on you. Only in retrospect do you realize that you'd been ill all along. Of course as a hypochondriac I'd always known that I'd been ill all along, but I'd assumed a symptomless illness that ground me down not with its various discomforts but with its very existence.

A hypochondriac friend once told me of a hypochondriac friend of his who told his doctor that he had a fatal disease. "Really?" said the doctor, "that's terrible. What are the symptoms?"

"That's the worst thing about it," said the friend of the friend in absolute seriousness. "There are none."

When my friend told me the story we both laughed because we knew we were meant to laugh, but it wasn't genuine laughter. It's impossible to laugh and empathize at the same time.

But just as being paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you, so being a hypochondriac doesn't mean you're not about to die.