You Weren’t Always a Hypochondriac

A. G. Maxwell

Separation. Edvard Munch. 1896.

It is like this: Your head hurts and your throat feels tight but there’s a lot of pollen out there and you haven’t slept well but then your stomach is twisted up but there was just probably something in that salad that disagreed with you, like raw Brussels sprouts, but what if it’s something more serious, like your liver is having trouble, which, of course, is entirely unrelated to the virus that sent you spiraling in the first place.

You weren’t always a hypochondriac.

Your late twenties have been a slow education in the frailty of the body. Before, the only time you really focused on your vessel was in quick pleasure or acute pain. Get hurt, a cut or the flu or whatever, it’ll be fine in a couple of days with some rest. A hangover tomorrow is worth a night with friends now, that sort of thing.

But parts started to break down, almost imperceptibly at first. An old sports injury means your hip hurts if you sleep on it funny. Your allergies got worse when you moved to a new city with hot, dry summers, then an ankle sprain from a few years back builds into an almost imperceptible limp. Teaching in a high school classroom every day meant you were sick for months at a time – new city, new germs – creating weird sinus pressure that you don’t understand. It starts to become clear that instead of a well-oiled machine, the human body is held together with cloudy scotch tape and wrapping paper, a gift that you forgot to give a friend for Christmas that sits by the front door looking shabbier and shabbier going into June.

And then a pandemic.

One of your last days of work was at the first school in the state to have a faculty member test positive right before they all shut down. Your partner, a nurse practitioner at a county clinic, takes her temperature every morning and evening. The Panic of the early days, when it only hospitalizes the elderly became people just like us are dying.

Half of the United States is afflicted with at least one of the comorbidities associated with the progression to pneumonia, including you. Thus the Panic of uncertainty has given way to a small-p internalized panic of knowing the worst-case scenario, a constant level of anxiety that destabilizes an already shaky ground; all this despite knowing, on an intellectual level, that you’re statistically likely to be mostly alright whether you get it or not.

You ask your partner, do you think I’m sick,  and she puts on her level work face and gives you a reasonable answer about waiting a couple of days,  but instead of relieving your anxiety you just worry because you’re bothering her and you might, or then again might not, be sick. Though you did have to get uncomfortably close to that man to grab a can of skinned whole tomatoes last Tuesday.

You look up your symptoms online even though you know that’s stupid because it always says it’s either nothing or fatal and indeed it’s either nothing or fatal. Then you worry because maybe, in fact, you’re causing your own body to exhibit symptoms like headaches and a minute fever because you’re anxious, almost like subconsciously you want to be sick, because at least then it’s happened and you’re on the path toward it being over.

You sit there, or walk your dog, or mow the lawn. There are no answers one way or another. Maybe everything is falling apart and you might honest-to-god die, or, alternatively, everything is mostly fine, which is really what life is all the time, anyway, and so you hum along like electricity on a wire.

A.G. Maxwell is a writer and educator living in Portland, Oregon. His short story, A Tree, was featured in Jenny magazine. twitter: @a_g_maxwell / IG: agmaxwell