Forget bird flu or anthrax or even waking up next to Dick Cheney. (Well, OK, maybe you'd better keep that one on the front burner.) Health professionals tell us that what's really terrorizing us is diabetes, high blood pressure, emphysema, and something that doesn't get any glam-media, the Klebsiella germ.Seems everyone's running around like chickens with their heads cut off, pestering hard-working doctors about whatever health scare is at the top of the Trendy Ways to Die list, when it's the run-of-the-mill stuff that's more'n likely gonna do us in.
Oh, and the Klebsiella germ that hasn't cracked the Katie Couric panic poll yet? It's a drug-resistant little bugger that runs rampant throughout hospitals - it laughs in the face of antibiotics. Ha. Ha. (Are you scared yet?)
I guess we need to turn off the TV yammering, put down the newspapers, and just get on with life. It reminds me of my favorite part of one of my favorite books, Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome. The story opens with the main character reading the label of a bottle of liver pills and having convinced himself that he, indeed, has a liver complaint that he heretofore didn't know he had. He then relates a hilarious tale of having sat down, quite by chance, with a medical book in the British Library and discovering that he has every disease in the book except one:
. . . I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee.
(I know I push this book every other month, but if you haven't read it, find a copy quick!) At any rate, I think it well points up the problem with listening to every symptom of every malady and convincing yourself that you are in the very throes of death. I mean, you probably are in the throes of death (we're all terminal, after all), but you probably won't die of one of the cool things.
However, do let me know if housemaid's knee catches up with you .
2 comments:
Like the Jerome K. Jerome character, I also am prone to coming down with whatever malady is being described at the time. A few years ago, CNN's Larry King hosted an hour-long panel on the topic of prostate cancer. One of his guests was General Schwartzkopf, who had survived it.
(Paraphrasing from memory)
King: So General, what exactly were your symptoms?
General S: Well, Larry, I didn't have any. I felt fine, and everything seemed perfectly normal.
I freaked out! My first thought was, "I don't have any symptoms, either! I feel great! I'm doomed!"
Reading can be hazardous to your health.
I responded to your hilarious anecdote yesterday, but it seems to have disappeared! Is THAT something I should worry about - in addition to all the diseases out there, I mean?
Deejay, I say we just sit back and let the birds and the microorganisms do their worst. After all, "everything seemed perfectly normal. . ."
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