I don’t know where and when in my life it physically took over but as of last night its power has returned dominating the walls of my within like a violent earthquake shaking the state of California.
Being an open and admitted hypochondriac has its payoffs—when you’re right, the image staring back at you in the mirror shakes its head up and down like a stern parent witnessing its child perform an act of something finally being listened to and acted upon without there being consequences.
Face it…five months ago today I didn’t heed the warning signs of cardiac arrest—it took four days of painful throat throbbing to convince me to hit the Urgent Care to ask doctors about possibly having strep throat. Nobody was more shocked about the aftermath than me. Assuming I had beaten my hypochondriac beast, it didn’t seem important enough to drop a scheduled three hour lecture at a university to chase down the purpose behind an unusual stress in the vocal maker.
Nor was I paranoid by the body’s decision to lapse into long deep sleeps before Tae Kwon Do or nearly passing out while driving home from class…calling Master Harris on the phone to talk to me until I regained the strength to start the car. According to the rivers that run through my valley…it wasn’t anything more than exhaustion which can be beat with a positive attitude. I was out to be beat my addiction to being a hypochondriac and that meant not listening to “me” period.
I’ll never forget the Tae Kwon Do class where I could barely do three pushups. We’re talking about a guy whose 2nd and 3rd degree tests were based on shattering bricks from a pushup position, a man who does 100 or more pushups a day and that night I couldn’t do three. I was exhausted right? The weaker I got in class the more I wanted to hide, so I went against school rules and stood behind the class so people couldn’t watch me melting…never once realizing…I really was.
It’s that one time you’re right that changes the entire sunset.
I’ve spent the past five months studying cardio nightmares, how to survive just as much prevent situations that rob the system of what keeps it pumped up and moving forward. I’ve written hundreds of pages based on learning and identifying the multitude of languages your mind, body and soul invent daily in its effort to communicate with a self aimed at the horizon but has no clue how to get there.
If you ignore it, “You know the consequences.”
So what really happened yesterday? Were the channels connected to its delivery an out of control presentation of a single performance on a stage nicknamed hypochondriac? For four days my wife has been struck down by unexpected and totally unexplained pains on the left side of her back—ok…a pinched nerve. The blood pressure on the third day shoots near 200 and she’s become extremely dizzy unable to keep her head up. My mind was freaking out. In everything I have studied about cardiac arrest, the silent killer was knocking on the gates leading to her reasons and purpose of there being. I couldn’t convince her to seek medical help. My hypochondriac addiction was shooting into overload.
Then it happened…while watching the E Entertainment network the scroll of lettering at the bottom of the screen read, “32 year old actress Britney Murphy has passed away in Los Angeles, the cause of death cardiac arrest.”
Twenty two minutes later we were racing through the large glass doors of the nearest Urgent Care, “My wife is having a heart attack!”
Five rules you need to follow when confronted with a body crashing: Locate an Emergency Room not an Urgent Care. There was nothing they could do for her except say, “You need to go to the hospital now.” We wasted a tremendous amount of time to hear a professional tell us, “Opps we don’t do that.”
Pretty dang weird…five months to the day earlier…she was the one doing the driving and I was on the cell phone calling coworkers trying to explain that I wouldn’t be making it into work the next day…now it was my turn to play Captain Cool which meant telling a lot of jokes and I’m just not that good in that department. So I begged for a courtesy golf clap.
Rule number two: The Emergency Room doesn’t talk to you about money owed until you are placed in a room. Insurance or not…they want their chunk of the buck but only after your vital signs are taken. If you want to leave now, that’s fine but you owe us this amount of money right now.
Rule number three: Doctors and nurses in ER don’t want to hear about President Obama’s health plan and reasons behind it.
Rule number four: If the magazine you unknowingly picked up along the way through the long bright white hallways features two or more different pictures of the same person, immediately tell yourself that its going to be ok and your mind isn’t playing games, Martha Stewart has her own magazine and the items inside are extremely cheaper than the doctor spending 33.2 seconds with you.
Rule number five: No matter how stupid you might feel when the highly overpaid professionals whose handwriting you can’t read look at you and laugh at your hypochondriac way of living…you’ll get good night sleep knowing the dangerously high blood pressure and dizziness has nothing to with the ticker tocker or the waves leading toward your thinker.
Television personality and late night infomercial king Billy Mays ignored the symptoms of his heart attack. David Letterman wasted no time checking out the rhythms of the beats going wrong. The ultimate lesson learned here is I’m an advocate for hypochondria—a scout that leaves his circle of covered wagons to search what doesn’t look, feel, smell and taste right. If you have dinner with me, you’ll feel uneasy knowing I’m watching life like a hawk. It’s who I am. I’m not a germ-a-phobe but I’ll immediately think it’s the end of the world when a sliver of unexpected blue falls from the sky bringing with it the fingerprints of an innocent cloud.
Whether I was right or wrong…I listened to the song—the chorus sang, “Don’t ever ignore the signs. Doctors will still get a dime. You can be wrong all night, but that’s ok, you ain’t living life until you begin to communicate with everything that creates fright.”
I’m not asking you to steal my hypochondriac art…just never stop listening to your heart.
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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