Hypochondriacs R Us

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Hypochondriacs R Us
April 16, 2009
Posted by Janelle
Whatmakesmelaugh.com

I wake up to the sound of glass shattering in the kitchen. It’s 3 a.m. and I know immediately that it has to do with the cats. I try to keep them off the kitchen countertops, and they are banned when I’m cooking, but it’s kind of a futile effort when I’m not looking.

The image of a bloody cat running through broken glass runs through my brain so I yell to Doug, “Hurry!” because I can’t seem to get my body to move out of bed at all at 3 a.m.

And he hurries all right. To pee. Walking right through the area where a water glass had been bumped from the counter and shattered on the wood floor. I’m still amazed that he didn’t cut his feet.

Fortunately, there is no blood spilled by any creature, great or small. Just a scared Cocoa looking at me guiltily from the countertop. I gently moved her and Peaches to a closed room and then work on cleaning up the mess while Doug goes back to bed.

After scouring the floor for any glinting material, I climb back in bed and try to sleep. Breathe deeply, I think and then I realize that actually my breathing isn’t going very well. My chest is starting to tighten and the bell that rings in my brain to warn me of a coming asthma attack is dinging away.

Oh, but it feels so good to be back in bed and I’m tired, and maybe if I just lay here for a minute my breathing will return to normal.

Nothing doing. I knew if I let it go I’ll only have an asthma nightmare where I can’t breathe and can’t find my inhaler and end up in a worse position. So I stumble back out into the living room in my sneakers to find my overstuffed purse and search around blindly with my hand for the plastic object.

Found. I take two puffs and felt something foreign in my mouth. What is that? Stuck to the inside of my cheek is a pine needle that I gently pull out and stare at. Then I look inside the inhaler. Uh oh. My inhaler looks like it had made love to a national forest. Bits of leaves and other disgusting detritus are stuck all over the inside of it. I search my mouth for anything foresty and finding nothing I rinse the inhaler out and then go back to bed to begin my worrying.

What if I had inhaled some of the forest? An inhaler shoots a mist out fairly powerfully and I had just taken a big gulp of air. What if there was a pine needle in my lungs right now?

Then I move to contemplating paranoid headlines about my death.

Woman dies in sleep from pine needle.

Cat breaks glass, causes asthma attack, woman dies from inhaling foreign material.

Pine needle stuck in lung kills woman.

Stupid cat breaks stupid glass left out by stupid woman who inhales pine needle and dies in bed.

Spouse of woman who dies from inhaled pine needle sets up charitable foundation for pine needle victims.

I’m very worried about getting a Darwin Award for my death. You just don’t want your last act to be something so colossally dumb that people mumble for years, “I can’t believe she did that.”

My next point of mental activity is to analyze every pain in my body and wonder whether I should wake Doug up to tell him that I was worrying so that he can tell me that everything will be fine. I don’t.

Could that stinger in my side be my lung? Wait a second. I think it’s the left side. Isn’t that the one that you should be worried will give you a heart attack? No, it’s not in my shoulder. Oh, now it’s in my back. How many lung quadrants are there again? Isn’t there some connection with the lung and back pain? Didn’t I read that in my Chinese medicine book? Shouldn’t I have made the 25 pounds of raw saltless sauerkraut it suggested would reduce dampness in my body and relieve my asthma naturally? For god’s sake, the Chinese don’t even believe in drinking cold water so if I hadn’t had that glass of cold water before I went to bed then Cocoa wouldn’t have knocked it over, and Ahh!!

Alternately, I worry about the cats. I should have vacuumed the spot instead of sweeping and wiping it over with wet towels. What if I missed something? What if they got slivers in their paws while I was sleeping? What if they bled to death in the living room while I die of a pine needle in the bedroom?

Then what would Doug do? He would be entirely alone in this world.

Except for the life insurance. At least he has the life insurance. Now back to sleep.