I hope my gravestone doesn’t one day read: “Should have gone to the doctor. Might have saved him, if not for his stubbornness. Now he’s dead … and eternally stubborn.”
It would be the greatest shame of my life.
I guess I should clarify: I’m not dying. Not that I know of. And at no point did I think I was dying. But I did spend a couple weeks in sickness, lurching from one ailment to the next — first the common cold, then a sinus-something-or-other followed by what could be described as “bronchial bazooka,” and finally general hacking coupled with all the hair on the left side of my body falling out. You know, normal stuff!
While it dragged on and on, I refused to go to the doctor, thinking all the time that I was finally punching through to better health, and that a visit would be a waste of time.
It’s never the case, is it? I don’t know why we don’t just go to the doctor.
Maybe it’s that we diagnose ourselves on the Internet too much. “Honey, look! I don’t have bronchitis, like you said. It’s actually the Hungarian whooping cough, which only turns your toenails blue and causes you to forget to water the houseplants.”
Funny how the Internet causes one extreme or the other when researching illnesses: It either reassures us (“Honey, I’m good! I’m fine! This post says it only causes death in 1-in-10 of those afflicted”) or sends us into an absolute panic (“Holy jalapenos! ‘Weak and tired’ is a symptom of Ebola! I THINK I’VE GOT EBOLA!”)
Yet, that still isn’t enough to get me to the doctor.
I don’t know what it is. Why I don’t go.
Is it an eternal optimism? I always tell me wife, “I’m getting better. Listen. My lungs don’t sound like a cat stuck in an accordion anymore.” Or that we’re just too busy? Afraid of what we might find out? “Sir, this test says you’re actually a marsupial.” Sometimes I worry that I will recover miraculously while sitting in the waiting room and the doctor will just think I’m a hypochondriac in desperate need of attention. “No really, doc. Just like 5 minutes ago I was bleeding from the eyes and one of my lungs popped out and hopped away!”
And when it comes down to it, I always figure I can self-medicate with home remedies and the expired contents of my kitchen cupboard. Like when I made a ghastly tea with apple cider vinegar that was supposed to be good for sinus problems. (Only thing was the apple cider vinegar was about 11 years old and had become so noxious that it threatened to shut-down my liver.)
Wouldn’t that be a headstone: “Vinegar killed him dead; should have seen the doc instead.”
So maybe that’s what I’ll do … next time … when those Ebola symptoms come back again.