Ask A Genius 896: Hypochondria
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/08
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: This topic could be more interesting.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I might disagree.
Rosner: Okay. If I stack up enough physical complaints and irritations simultaneously happening in me, then I get flu-like symptoms that subside if I take a pain pill. So, I assume it’s like fibromyalgia light or something like that where my feet hurt slightly. Older people get physics. The Bersa is the sack your muscles and tendons come in; if you irritate the sack, that can get achy. So, I got a little of that, and then it was cold, and then since it’s winter, there’s less moisture in the air, so I got dry mouth while I was trying to sleep. So, all those little complaints, if I stack enough of them up, my body flips into some hyper-sensitive mode and gets achy and shaky overall. I get a little shaky. I get the chills, and then it goes away if I take a pain pill or two.
[Recording End]
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum to last session.
Rick Rosner: This is where it’s helpful to a) be a hypochondriac and b) be able to look up shit on the internet. I knew from Reading Oliver Sacks’ book that visual aura means you’re about to get a migraine. That’s when you get what is called scintillating scotomas in your eyes, and it’s like a little checkerboard that starts flashing across your vision; it begins at the center of your vision, and then it turns into a bit of flashing checkerboard-y ring that gets bigger and bigger. I’ve never had a full-on migraine; I figured that when that starts happening and when the ring gets big enough, it’s probably going to kick into a migraine, and I managed. That’s happened to me half a dozen times, and if I can get home and steal some of my wife’s migraine medicine because she gets pretty regular migraines, I can head it off before it turns into pain. That’s a nice thing about being reasonably widely read.
I caught the kidney tumour early because I realized that gut cancers, by the time they cause symptoms they’re dangerous and often not curable, but if you can have them take a look at your gut, like when you have no symptoms, there might be some shit growing in there, and they found a stage 1A kidney tumour. They also found a little cyst at the end of my pancreas, which has a very low probability of turning sour, but at least they know about it and keep looking at it once a year. So, that’s in favour of trying to figure out what your shit is. Don’t always rely on doctors because doctors know their own stuff, if that; like the doctors I have now through UCLA Blue Cross Writers Guild, they’re all pretty good, but when we were on a different insurance plan 30 years ago, we got some shitty doctors. If a doctor’s waiting room is filled with pictures of him and his little Cessna, then maybe that guy is not so focused on being a doctor; he’s more focused on flying his plane.
This guy told my wife that she had scabies. Scabies are teeny little bugs less than a millimetre, maybe half a millimetre long, that burrow under your skin and make you itch, and he didn’t even take out a magnifying glass to take a look to verify his diagnosis. So, he says you got scabies; you probably all have scabies in the family. It would help if you all rubbed this lotion all over you to kill the scabies. So, I got home and took out a jeweller’s loop, which is 10-time magnification. I looked at where the scabies was supposed to be, and I didn’t see any freaking bugs, but I still put that stuff on all over me. I usually jerk off dry, so when the lotion got wet, I had to hit my junk like it was an unexpected treat. I mean, that was the one good thing out of going to that shitty doctor, but you got to be your doctor halfway.
It’s also been bad for me where, in between jobs, I volunteer to be a guinea pig. I’d sign up for medical studies, and you can imagine how shitty the doctors who screen you for those are. This guy stuck his finger up my butt, and he must have nicked my prostate with his fingernail or some shit because my pee came out brown I looked that up on the early internet because this was well before Google, I think and got a lot of like terrible like medical news, and I freaked out. I went to get a CT scan, and this was a bad idea because back then, a CT scan had the radiation of 500 chest x-rays, and I said this machine looks like it’ll cook the shit out of me and they’re like, no, it’s only five chest x-rays. That tech guy lied to me or didn’t know about his job. So, being my doctor, I should have done a little more thinking. I was like; I had a thumb up my ass; it probably doesn’t mean anything wrong, but brown is probably old blood from when he nicked my prostate. So, if you can avoid getting a CT scan, especially in your younger years, ask for an MRI or an ultrasound.
[Recording End]
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