Hypochondria

Recently my mother told me that she’d just been diagnosed with diabetes.  I called her, she asked me how I was doing, and about midway through the conversation, I said, “How are things with you?”

“Good,” she replied.  “Except that I went to the hospital today because my feet were so swollen and they ran some tests and found out that I have diabetes.”

The news wasn’t really all that surprising to me.  With something like sixty percent of Americans suffering from the disease, it was bound to happen to my mother at some point.  She was definitely a high risk for diabetes-she was overweight, didn’t exercise at all (she leads a very sedentary lifestyle of lying on her couch and watching home shopping channels), and she loved sugar.  Cake was sometimes dinner for her, cookies and ice cream dessert. 

I remember one day when I still lived at home.  She sat at the computer desk in front of the computer, talking to someone on one of her online Internet chat programs when she declared she was hungry, got up and went into the kitchen, and returned with a large pile of cookies and a glass of milk.  I don’t think she’d eaten at all up to that point in the day.  She looked at me and said simply, “It doesn’t matter how you get your calories as long as you get them, right?”  She dunked a cookie in her glass of milk and took a bite.

It wasn’t the diabetes that surprised me.  It was the way she announced it and the way she seemed to be handling it.  My mother is a hypochondriac and for years it seemed that there was nothing she’d love more than to finally be diagnosed with a real disease.  She’d had such a slew of imaginary diseases and she was forever consulting the two volume set of medical books on our bookshelf, practically memorizing diseases and their associated symptoms.

When I was in high school, she began to come down with these headaches that wouldn’t respond to any treatment-no medications, no amount of rest, nothing she tried seemed to alleviate them at all.  She began to go to doctor after doctor in earnest, searching for something that was wrong.  Somehow or other she convinced the doctors to prescribe her all kinds of drugs-vicodin, codeine, Prozac, and Xanax for the anxiety disorder she claimed to have.  “I can’t drive,” she’d say, or “I’m going to go lay down for a bit.  I’m on narcotics,” and she would disappear up to her room for the rest of the day, shutting herself in darkness, and sleep.

She had the doctors send her to all kinds of specialists.  When the specialists in Pittsburgh didn’t say what she wanted them to say, she insisted on being sent to Erie.  “The doctors around here don’t know what they’re doing,” she’d say.  “And neither do the doctors in Pittsburgh.  You have to go to Erie to get a good doctor.”

The doctors would stick her in an MRI or order a CAT scan and she would come home and sit us down.  “Don’t panic,” she would always preface every discussion after a doctor’s visit.  “But they’re testing me for a brain tumor.  They think that’s what’s causing my headaches.”  We never panicked because in a few weeks, after the results from her most current string of tests came back negative, we would be on to a new disease.  She had everything from lupus to multiple sclerosis to migraines to brain tumors to Lyme’s disease over the years. 

My mother’s own hypochondria and hysteria carried over into the way she treated our illnesses also.  When I was twelve I contracted mono.  I remember sitting in class one day in the sixth grade, my chin in my hand, when I noticed that there was a very sore lump in my neck right below my jaw line.  I also had a sore throat.  I came home and told my mother and she felt my swollen glands and made a doctor’s appointment.  On the way there, she asked me over and over how I was feeling.

“I’m okay,” I said.  My throat was sore but I was prone to strep throat so I was used to it and I really was okay.

“Jill,” she said, “I’m taking you to the doctor.  You can’t be feeling okay.  When we get there I want you to play it up.  Make it sound like you’re in a lot more pain than you actually are if you have to or else he won’t take it seriously.”

Over the next few months, I suffered from strep throat nearly every other week, extreme exhaustion, and a swelling of my glands that just would not go down.  When my first mono test came back negative, my mother began to panic.  “You probably have leukemia,” she said.  “Or Hodgkin’s Disease or some other cancer.”  Eventually, after I started to get better, a mono test came back positive.  I survived.

You would think that, after her experience with me and my mono, when my younger sister Carrie contracted the disease a few years later she would have been a little bit wiser.  But no.  When Carrie’s initial mono tests came back negative, she pulled her out of school entirely and somehow or other convinced the doctor to write a note saying that Carrie would need to be tutored at home.  She told everyone that Carrie probably had cancer, leukemia or bone cancer.  She convinced Carrie of that as well, and Carrie began limping around the house, mumbling over and over, “Ow, my bones, my bones, my bones.  My bones hurt.”  My mother even went so far as to write a poem about it for her poetry class (she’d gone back to college just prior to Carrie’s illness) that began, “Leukemia, lymphoma, the monster that I dread.”

When Carrie’s mono tests finally came back positive and my mother told people, “She doesn’t just have regular mono.  She has severe lymphatic mono,” I began to tell people that my mother was crazy.  “She’s nuts,” I would say.  “She’s a terrible mother.  She wants us all to be sick.  It’s some kind of crazy attention thing.”  I strove to be the exact opposite of everything she was.

So when she told me about her diabetes I sighed and braced myself for the onslaught of medical testing I just knew was coming.  I waited to hear that hers was an extra difficult case that would require three times as much monitoring as anyone else’s would and that she was going to have to be put on some strict diet where she could only eat, say, cucumbers and peppers.   But I didn’t.  She calmly told me that they’d tested her and she would find out the next day if she was going to need to give herself insulin shots.  And she left it at that.  She changed the subject and moved on to asking me about the weather in Denver.

A few days later I actually had to call her to find out what the results of her test were.  “I don’t have to take insulin,” she said.  “I just have to test my blood sugar twice a day and watch what I eat.”  I waited to hear that she’d made an appointment with a specialist in Erie to get a second opinion and some more tests but I didn’t hear that either.  The worst thing she said was, “I don’t know what I’m going to do without ice cream and cake.”  She left it at that. 

When my sister Megan called me a few days later and said sarcastically, “I’m calling to see how you’re handling the news that our mother has this terrible disease.  God knows Mom’s been searching for a real disease for years.  Finally she has one,” I pretended to laugh along with her, but really, I was kind of proud of my mother.  I’d never seen her handle anything with as much grace as she was handling the diabetes diagnosis. 

But still, I told my boyfriend Jerod, “I’m giving up sugar.  I don’t want to end up like my mother.”