Fred's Book Club: I've Seen Better Days.

Welcome to our Wednesday Humpback Writers feature, where the writers don't actually suffer from severe kyphosis. However, today's book is for people who might think they are coming down with kyphosis, COVID-19, leprosy, or anything else: The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death. by Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten.

"Gene is the perfect person to write this book," says his friend Dave Barry in the introduction. "He is not some Johnny-come-lately who is just now adopting hypochondria as a way to sell books. Gene is the most sincere, most dedicated, hardest-working hypochondriac it has ever been my privilege to know. When he tells you all the really awful things that can happen to your body -- that could be happening to your body right now! -- he's not just spewing empty words. He's spewing words about problems that he has spent countless hours convincing himself that he, personally, is suffering from."

Weingarten's political writing aside, he is a hilarious writer in his own right who is not afraid to work blue, as the comedians say. We'll stick to PG quotes here. Such as the justification, right off the bat:

Do you suffer from hypochondria? We are all susceptible to it -- it is part of our survival instinct, imprinted on our brains from infancy. We are in our crib and our diaper is wet, so we howl and thrash and whimper, and pretty soon someone comes to help us. It is our mom. She coos to us sympathetically and slathers our behind with products that make us smell like the sitting room of a nineteenth-century San Francisco bordello. An important behavioral arc has been established: Complaint brings attention; attention brings relief.

From there, Weingarten takes us through a tour of all the amazing and wonderful diseases that can kill and cripple us; his hypochondria has led him to be an excellent researcher on the topic. He has some charts that list symptom, most likely diagnosis, and most terrifying diagnosis, such as:

Symptom: Drooping eyelid, called "ptosis"
Most likely diagnosis: You have a minor eyelid infection.
Most terrifying diagnosis: You have myasthenia gravis. It can turn you into flaccid goop.

And if you think I was joking about hypochondriacs thinking they can come down with kyphosis (hunchback), think again:

Take a deep breath, and then start counting rapidly out loud. If your lungs are functioning normally, you should be able to count to 70 or so before you need to take a breath. If you don't get near that, your lungs may be showing diminished volume, which could indicate restrictive lung disease. This would be anything that makes it hard to take deep, full breaths, including an array of lung diseases and infections ranging from pneumonia to lung cancer to kyphoscoliosis, a malformation of the spine sometimes associated with heart disease. 

But it must be said that Weingarten does some good reporting here beyond looking at symptoms of cancer and other deadly diseases that are probably nothing. For example, he notes that even the best of hypochondriacs, with hysterical symptoms, can be detected by medical professionals:

The symptoms of strokes and tumors that they fear are far more common: paralysis on one side of the body, muscle weakness, inability to talk. Sometimes they fear these things so desperately that they develop the symptoms, a form of hysteria. Emergency room doctors in particular are adept at weeding out the nuts, or "gomers," from the real disease victims: When a patient says he can't talk, doctors will sometimes ask him to whisper. If you can whisper, there is nothing wrong with the speech center in your brain. When a patient claims complete paralysis in an arm or appears unconscious, doctors will sometimes lay him in a bed, hold his hand above his face, and let go. If a patient is faking or imagining paralysis, he generally won't let his hand bash his face; it will fall to the side.

"Gomer," he informs us, means "Get Out of My Emergency Room."

Believe it or not, this is a fun and funny book, although if you are prone to hypochondria you may develop a thousand new symptoms while reading it. But don't fret; late in the book, Weingarten shares a cure for hypochondria! Yes, in 1991 he was instantly cured, according to his account. And that cure was: hepatitis C. Having a real diagnosis of a genuinely dangerous disease took him out of the insanity of imagined illness and put him squarely in the realm of actual illness.

Hepatitis C is a cool disease. Lots of famous people have had it. Mickey Mantle, for example. King Farouk. Many of these people are currently dead. My point is that I had something serious, which I discovered to be a fantastic cure for my hypochondria. 

I'm not sure if that's useful knowledge for the hypochondriac out there, the one reading this who has been convinced since January that every cough and sneeze is COVID-19, even though he lives alone and has not traveled farther than the refrigerator since Martin Luther King Day. After all, a real disease may cure hypochondria, but in this case the cure may really be worse than the disease.

Believe me when I say I sympathize with the hypochondriac quarantined at home, time on his hands to think, at risk of driving loved ones and overworked health professionals crazy with the awful fears that lurk in a period when the whole planet is scared of a virus. But he could do worse than read Weingarten's book. Hey, we all gotta die one day; maybe we can at least die laughing.