Becoming a Hypochondriac at Almost Eighty-Five

Joyce Greenberg Lott

All my life I’ve been a glass half-full person.  “Smile, Joycie,” my father would say to me again and again.  “You look so pretty when you smile.”

My mother thrived on life’s woes.  She sat by the telephone waiting, as my husband would later say, “for disaster to happen.”

She didn’t allow me into her space.  “You have it too good,” she told me.  “Why should you be sad?”  When I fell down, scraped my knee and blood streamed down my leg, my mother shushed my cries with mercurochrome and band-aids.

If I felt lonely and friendless, my mother told me to ride my bike to The Children’s Seashore Home, where the kids who had been disabled by polio stayed to recuperate.  I could see them on their crutches in the Home’s yard and watch them in their hospital beds through the Home’s windows.  “They have something to be sad about, not you,” my mother said.

I grew up silencing my own pain.  I smiled into the mirror and out into the world.  After all, my name was Joyce.  I looked pretty when I smiled.  I had nothing to be sad about.  This remained true through my divorce from my wrong first husband, the terrible death from cancer of my second husband, and through my own trial with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

I barely complained.  I saw my life in comparison to the poor children who’d suffered from polio.  I didn’t tell anyone about my symptoms of non-Hodgkins lymphoma until I couldn’t eat anything, even a spoonful of the yogurt I don’t know how I drove to the market to get.

But now at almost 85, I feel like a glass half-empty person — or the kind of person my mother thrived on.  I keep checking my health, thinking about what’s going to kill me.  A lot.

Living alone contributes to this.  I have lots of time.  On a day-to-day basis, I don’t take care of anyone but myself.  Even when I talk to my friends, their lives no longer sound interesting or complicated.  They’re dying, too — the ones who haven’t already — and they talk about the same stuff, blurry vision or hearing problems or living conditions.

Sometimes their conversations make me terribly sad, especially the ones who are losing their minds along with their bodies.  I want to help them but I can’t.  Whatever coping hints I offer make me sound superior.  And they certainly don’t want to hear about my aches and pains.    

I don’t tell anyone, even my young doctor, how I track my bowel movements, how low and self-centered I’ve become.  I worry when I’m constipated or my stomach aches. Is it on the right side or the left?  Lower stomach or upper?  

I don’t complain to anyone — except myself — how much the arthritis in my hips and knees hurts.  As I walk behind my walker, I think about how long my legs will hold out, if I’ll need to use a wheelchair before I die.  

To slow down my deterioration, I eat bran, drink water regularly, exercise daily and watch my weight.  After exercise, my quads ache or I’m fatigued, so I have even more to worry about then.

My self-care is my top priority.  I’m a New Age almost 85-year-old woman.  I tell myself that I take good care of myself because I don’t want to be a burden to my children.  This statement is true — but not entirely.

Recently, my arthritic gout flared up, causing awful pain.  So, I stopped eating meat and shellfish, gave up my special out-for-dinner martini with cheese-stuffed olives on the side and my at-home glass of chardonnay.  I don’t really miss all that good stuff, the way I miss people I’ve loved who have died, but these omissions from my diet give me even more time and space to worry about my dying body.

I try to escape my new obsession with my deteriorating body, but I can’t do that easily. Since I walk with a walker and no longer drive, I need to make special plans with others to escape myself, along with the place where I live alone and tract the regularity or irregularity of my eating, sleeping, and eliminating processes. Not to mention that I also need to escape my profound interest in my body temperature, whether I’m hot or cold, and how the rhythm of my beating heart ticks.  

The internet doesn’t help either — going on it augments my problem.  Since the doctor put me on medication for gout and is thinking about putting me on statins, I google the side effects of medications compulsively to see which symptoms I’m presently feeling. Nausea? Dizziness? Or, how my conditions and medications will affect my long-term health and, of course, my eventual demise.

I recognized last night, as I sat eating my vegetables alone and listening to my heartbeat, that I’ve actually become a blooming hypochondriac. Thinking about my friends, the octogenarians and nonagenarians I know who are still alive, I measured my concerns against theirs — their bladders and digestive systems and eyesight — and sadly realized hypochondria may come with the territory.  If we know we are going to die, accept that fact but still would rather live, hypochondria may be our next to the last step.