Remember that Time I Bled to Death in My Sleep?

If the people who know me best described me using only ten words, “hypochondriac” would appear on most of their lists. I spend entirely too much time in (obsessive) self-reflection to deny these charges. I am unable to watch shows like House, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, ER on syndication, etc because within minutes from the rolling credits, I am checking for swollen glands, signs of MRSA, going through my files to check my last tetanus booster, or Googling the symptoms of flesh eating bacteria (don’t ever click the images tab if you do this, by the way). I have come to the realization that I am, in fact, a hypochondriac.

In my defense, it is not entirely my fault. In college alone I had my share of ailments. My freshmen and sophomore year I was plagued with a lingering case of mono thanks to the gross intimacy of dorm-life. Despite the blisters on the back of my throat, the 102 degree fever that I had for weeks, and an immune system that still limps a little, mono wasn’t so bad in the long run. I caught up on my reading, watched every single episode of The Golden Girls, and lost a lot of weight.

My junior year was much more exciting…and exotic. In the winter, a gland swelled to the size of a golf-ball. I was entirely convinced that I had stage four lymphoma. I quit sleeping and started thinking of all of the countries I would never visit, all of the books I would never read, and all of the songs I would never hear. When all of the(incredibly painful) tests came back negative, my doctor asked me if I had any cats. As a matter of fact, I was spending a lot of time with a boy who had just adopted a kitten, but I didn’t understand the connection. They tested me for Cat Scratch Fever (which I still cannot say without subconsciously singing it) and that came back positive. I spent the rest of my school year having Ted Nugent sung at me by my closest friends.

After I got over the initial shock that Cat Scratch Fever was a real ailment that real people actually contracted from cats, I noticed that I had a strange rash on my back. At first I thought it was an allergic reaction to my shampoo (which I was admittedly using less frequently than I should at that point in my life). Then the rash started to spread and got very painful. Of course, everything I Googled on WebMD told me I was dying from AIDs that I had contracted by a blood transfusion in my infancy, or that I had a rare blood disorder that would cause my body to spontaneously combust if my heart rate dropped below a certain number (I think that last part is actually the plot of Speed, so I might have had WebMD and IMDB windows open at the same time). Turned out I had the shingles, probably brought on by stress. Apparently staying up all night to write my Cat Scratch Fever induced bucket list, while maintaining my GPA during an 18 hour semester, had knocked the feet out from under my mono-weakened immune system thus allowing the chicken pox virus to strike again in the form of shingles.

(For some reason, I always think that every sickness that begins with the letter s is scurvy. I thought for a few moments that shingles were somehow related to the disease that pirates got that made them lose their teeth, and my panic in that moment probably helped my shingles spread to an entirely new dermatome).

So, my fears aren’t always phantom thank you very much. But this morning I had my worst hypochondriatic episode yet. I woke up warm and cozy in my bed, the book I was reading when I fell asleep still lying right beside me and I couldn’t wait to pick back up with the characters that had guided me into unconsciousness. I climbed out of my bed only to open the blinds so that the morning light could stream in and increase the coziness exponentially. It was when I was getting back into the bed that I noticed the enormous red blood stain on my covers, up at the top of my bed where my upper-torso would have been.



I immediately went into panic mode. At some point in the night, something had happened to make me bleed copiously, and based on where the stain was, it was from something important. Like from my lungs…or my heart. Was I dead? Was I having an out-of-body experience? I hoped this wasn’t heaven because my closet was still an absolute mess. I ran into the bathroom and started looking around for the source of the carnage. Had someone snuck into my house and stabbed me last night? My neighbor did just recently return home from jail…I couldn’t find anything though that would have caused that much blood. I considered the possibility that maybe I had a nocturnal nosebleed after doing some major tossing and turning that put my head further down than usual. Maybe I was still getting over the Swedish meatball debacle at IKEA from a few days before and I had thrown up blood. Or maybe I had Ebola. I remember the day my high school biology teacher told us about Ebola because it sounded like the absolute worst way to die. Maybe I had Ebola and I would spend the day violently vomiting up all of my bloody, liquefied internal organs. I mean, it was possible right?

I was feeling kind of woozy (which convinced me even more that I was internally bleeding and sure to be dead within the hour) so I decided to lie back down to regroup. I stretched my feet down to the bottom of my bed to make sure I didn’t have some weird spinal injury that could have contributed to the mysterious massacre, and my toes caught something strange and foreign near my footboard. I threw my sheets back and found one of my favorite ink pens (The OptiFlow by Staples—wonderful wonderful pen, perfect tip width and the ink flow is smooth as butter—sorry I get a little hot and bothered about a good ink pen). I remembered using it the night before to annotate the book I was falling asleep with. The lid was off and it was completely out of red ink…

So the good news is I’m not dying of Ebola. The bad news is I need a new set of sheets, and a new pen. And I think the stress of my morning panic attack might have allowed my shingles to come back.