A Cautionary Tale for Hypochondriacs


From time to time there mysteriously appears from God knows where a new 'symptom', which due to its sheer novelty and strangeness, remains largely unrecognized and unlabelled by the medical fraternities or, indeed, sisterhoods. Therefore, it must sojourn in relative obscurity in those suffering bodies whose protests are but vain crowings in the Stoic face of the scions of science, before a wall of official disbelief. Yours truly is familiar with such cases and indeed his one joy in life is to pursue them almost to the borders of obsessive zeal.
It has long become a custom of mine in the extended hours between the tiffins, until the hour when slumber's blankets find employment, to go in search of those strange symptoms which the human mind and torso is prone to manifest or exhibit. Thus, as the clouds precipitate their transparent wines upon the winter windows and gables of my heavily mortgaged turrets, I am wont to make silent expeditions through the leaves of the dusty moth chewings of rare tomes of the medical vintages. I read on till the hour when the oil of day is spent and the wick and ghost of slumber beckon me on to dreams. Thus I endure, with drooping eyelids, long after midnight's dark passages of silent mystery. Each evening, without fail, I rub the various fungi from dusty covers, to pluck the mouldy penicillin off title pages. Here I gain entry into doors of knowledge known to few, and believed by even fewer. I enter a realm of the esoteric and exotic populated by 'singing bowel movements', 'rising damp of the shanks', 'coastal erosion of the liver', and all the other manifestations of the torrid thermals, that rest like scorpions in the hypochondriacal black continents of minds.
Now, a certain woman of more than passing acquaintance lives, nay...exists, in great fear of such books and tomes. She vainly endeavours to avoid my little mortgaged turret as if a most vicious plague resided therein. Yet, she is strangely drawn to descry the interior of these selective morbidites contained within certain tomes. She is wont to seek me out in the oddest places with a need of great urgency. Indeed, not even the fact of body, soul and tooth lying prone and nervous beneath the dentist's dementing drill is apt to deter her severe curiousity. Thus she stands before me, oblivious to my tooth surgeon's irritation, demanding in a high pitched wail that I divulge what it is I know of such things as we mentioned previously. Her strange mixture of fear and curiousity is a most insistent customer. Of late, my reluctance to relate to this lady the details of my small research has increased, for she is like metal to a magnet where the rarer symptoms and more morbid syndromes are concerned. The lady is likely to convince herself that some mystery has invaded her body, though the symptom be but a chimera of her more vapid notions.
Heartburn was for a time my predilection discovery. I journeyed on deep expeditions into the complicated and nasty jungles of the oesophageal tract in search of its original dens. The evenings wore out the heat of summer and the dog snored pig-like at my feet wholly captivated by sanguine reveries of coveted steak bones as I ventured on in this matter. I gained a peerless insight into that affliction whose infernos are surely a torment to the unlucky vagabond abroad on the torrid road to the stomach. In a moment of sublime folly, I divulged my full store of facts to the lady and this, subsequently, proved to be a most unfortunate situation. For half a month or more she ploughed a deep furrow betwixt the physician's pathway and the apothecary with pills and potions of such variety and hue in a futile effort to allay the hellish fires in her digestive tract. It seemed that such was her distress, that were the combined units of the fire brigade and those of nearby hamlets also to hose her burning, it would yet be nigh on unquenchable.
It was, no doubt, a severe case of mental self-mesmerism whose roots would require the hoses of the most powerful incantational psychology and ju-ju to douse such volcanic symptoms. The lady resorted to my wise wisdom and implored me, most painfully, to intervene as the lava flow had reached its zenith in volume and hotness. I informed the lady that on matters of import such as these that Sigismund was but a fop to me, Jung no more that a mere stripling and, as for Mc Ginty and Gaffney, why, they could not even read my prescribings! Having at length gained her absolute trust in my undiluted abilities to cure, I succeeded, after a brief time, in quenching her infernal furnances. Thus, I pronounced to the lady in no uncertain terms the complete and utter cure of her malady. There was nought for it now but to imbibe good brandy and post haste the cheque.
Pride, according to the Greeks, must surely come before a fall, and after the fall - the law. Within the ambit of the following full moon a great shout came from without. The lady, it seemed, from what I could ascertain, demanded entry into my abode to consult her hitherto infallible oracle, namely Yours Truly. Strange tales are told at unearthly hours and the lady related that loud and distressing music was emanating from her abdominal quarters in a continuing cacophony. At first I was taken aback by this, but on recovering my wit, quickly realized that the volcanic cure had sublimated itself into some sort of visceral music pouring forth at that very moment from her torso. I hastily suggested to the lady a pair of ear plugs, made of finest cotton and magenta in colour for ornamental and vanity purposes. She protested most vehemently that this would mean the aural equivalent of a permanent silence and rejected my advice in summary fashion. The lady requested of my knowledge as to 'the efficacy of the fruit of the fig plant' and suggested that it might relieve the 'costiveness of the heavier tones'. This solution I despatched as wholly unsuitable in a case such as was presented before me. As I was wholly unaware of another approach to the relief of this malady, I inquired of the good lady if she might concentrate her senses into regulating and thus diminishing the volume of the melody. It seemed that the music being entirely of the sort known as the Country and Western kind, which my lady thoroughly loathed, that no level or decibel was acceptable to her - under any circumstances. Quoth she, 'It would not be so bad sir, but I just loathe them ballads and them sawing fiddles and those twanging guitars and drummmings. Now if t'were only Mister Chopin with his grand piano tinkle, I fain could endure it.' 'Look on the bright side' I replied, trying to laugh off the woman's absurdity, suggesting that she now had the 'perfect built-in rhythm method'. Alas and alack however, I perhaps made too much jollity of the lady's distress. Thus she took umbrage at my suggestion that a 'country band at four in the morning made for a lively night'. She then forthwith threatened a 'paranormal medical malpractice suit' that would beat the band for largeness and largesse. I stood now as a rare desert orchid before the imminent tramplings of a camel train and my plight reigned alone with no consort to accompany its aloneness. Her indignation knew no bounds at this juncture with Hell's old fury being ever female. Being a stalwart member of her church, she now regarded me as an 'immoral practitioner of the black arts' and declared she was intent on having me burnt at the stake as a 'warlock of unseemly character and demeanour'. Here I must endeavour to shorten a long tale since time is pressing heavily on my busy calendar and duty is calling ever stoutly.
The consultation fees were mounting with my legal team and my income was rapidly diminishing due to the adversity of public opinion. I was indeed a worried man. However, my chief barrister had a very rare and unusual symptom which medical treatment had failed to shift. Most fortunately, I was, and still am, a great authority on its practitional cure. In exchange for his free legal representation, I paid my legal practitioner through a type of bartering scheme and am glad to report that his hitherto incurable symptom of 'rising damp of the shanks', is now diminishing with a steady gait. Furthermore, my new non-fiction paperback on this topic has been offered a good advance by a notable publishing house. There is even talk of a further book for the popular Christmas market on my old favourite symptom of 'coastal liver erosion' which these days might make me a millionaire before the year bows out and the new crawls in with January's tearfall and frosty looks. One danger exists, however. According to the Theory of Practitioning, it could happen that the rising damp of the shanks might sublimate a symptom known as 'smoking chimney of the cerebellum' - at the next full moon. So, meanwhile, as I wait in dread, I must have my worries and they, alas, must have me.
For, should my legal eagle's symptom shift and sublimate to his chimney stack, the ship of my fortunes would enter a deep trough. There the winds of fate would reach gale force proportions and there exits no safe harbour when one upsets a professional. My great apprehension is that all would close rank against mine own self and an afflicted I would be cast upon the uncertain vagaries of the court. My sole recourse would then be a plea of hopeless insanity and I would be left to the good pleasure of the authorities - and the purloined vanities of professionals. In brief, it seems to me that the world is ever prey to the ague of happenstance and the dropsy of money, for which the only remedy is to endure with a kind of restive resignation.
Ah! But, I am hatching a most cunning plan, which will forestall all litigation against mine own self. I have composed a most elegant missive to the lady in which I convince her that she has contracted a rare and esoteric malady known to Yours Truly as 'shivering brogues of the ankles'. And since this 'symptom' is a mystery unknown to orthodoxy I shall soon have the lady within the clutches of my power and knowledge.
Then, all views to litigaton will cease and like a candle whose wick is spent and done I may continue in my felicity as before. Foresooth I shall be clear of all my adversaries yet. Adieu.

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