No checking also means staying out of the mirror. No contourting and stretching to see my whole body. I will not touch my belly button over and over untill my partner tells me to stop.

Tomorrow, I will allow myself these shameful compulsive pleasures. One day soon I will be finished with them. The Internet will no longer be a mine field for anxiety. A trip to the bathroom one day will be just to go to the bathroom, not to inspect my moles, poke at my stool and spit into the sink and check the colour.

One day at a time.

In 1913 Teasdale fell in love with poet Vachel Lindsay. He wrote her daily love letters, but nevertheless she married Ernst Filsinger in 1914 when she was 30. Teasdale and Lindsay remained friends throughout their lives. In 1918, her poetry collection Love Songs won three awards: the Columbia University Poetry Society prize, the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America.

Teasdale was a hypochondriac whose preoccupation with death often appeared in her poetry. On January 29, 1933, a blood vessel in her hand ruptured. Sure that she was about to die, she took some sleeping pills, got into the bathtub, and died of an overdose.

Tests are so tempting I read about a priviate clinic in Vancouver BC that offers full body CT scans. What a reassurance. After that you would no that there was no small tumour growing in your lungs or your bones. The relief when I get a good result on a diagnostic test is liberating and wonderful. But there are several huge issues with diagnostic tests.

1. The tests themselves are not always safe. The chart below shows some of the levels of radiation that you are exposed to undergoing different kinds of tests. Note the difference in radiation exposure between CT scans and x-ray. CT scans expose patients to nearly 50 times more radiation.

Why does this matter?

The radiation people are exposed to in CTs increases their risk of getting cancer. This excerpt from an article in the New Scientist describes some of the associated risks.

“….according to some estimates, the radiation exposure a patient receives from a full-body CT scan is often 500 times that of a conventional X-ray and about the same as that received by people living 2.4 kilometres away from the centres of the World War II atomic blasts in Japan.”

2. It is only a matter of time before you receive a false postive result.

If you think you were worried before the test, examine, x-ray imagine how you will fell if you get a false positve.

3. All of the testing sends you up and down between sheer panic and redemption if the test result is ok.

**By all means if you really feel something is wrong or you have important risk factors such as family history or if you are or were a regular smoker get tested.

One of the challenges I have with hypochondria is seperating the fear from the reality. The reality is I have red hair freckles and skin damaged from the suns from vacations in Mexico and extended trips overseas. I have to be vigilant. However I go far beyond this. Like Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters I have mistaken pen marks on my legs from a leaky pen for skin cancer. How can I find a balance here?

Not being able to see my own shit provided me a  break from worrying for 10 days. 10 days not thinking that I had colon cancer.

 Now I am back, flattened stool ruining each and every movement.

Let’s begin with the title. There is a suggestion here that you doctor is wrong and the right diagnosis must be on the Internet. Does this appear strange to anyone? Yes doctors are wrong but are you really going to piece it together on the Internet. I cannot think of anything much worse for those suffering from hypochondria than a site telling them not to trust their doctor.

And then tereis there symptom checker. Enter the symptom back pain and along with muscle fatigue and slipped disc the list includes some of the following: chronic leukemia, spinal tumor, multiple myeloma, prostate carcinoma, sickle cell crisis…..and so on. Now what is a patient supposed to do with this list. How do I know it is not leukemia. When doctors diagnose patients they often start with the most probable condition but patients are not this simple they often think the worse especially if they are anxious.

Then there are the adds: do you have breast cancer? Have you been tested for Cancer? Common eye diseases.

Here is a gem I found on the site today

“Silent diseases

Learn about common diseases with no symptoms or “vague symptoms”

What the hell is someone supposed to do to be vigilant about diseases without symptoms?

Although the have a nifty disclaimer on the bottom of the site saying that this information is not intended to replace advice from your own medical team that is exactly what this site tries to do. Your doctor must be wrong; here are the answers.

For me I feel the root of my hypochondria is a fear of my lack of control over death and health. I lost my best friend when I was 18 and on a trip to Mexico. He died of a mysterious disease. I felt immortal. I remember we were late for our second class train so we ran and jumped onto the moving train immortal. Scott died and mortality hit me deeply it destroyed my new confidence. I was fragile and life was precarious.

Many years later I developed hypochondria but I know that some of the roots lie here.