I've been confident I'm a hypochondriac since my junior year of high school, a year I spent fully certain I was pregnant despite the fact I had never had sex.
This was absurd, obviously, but my habit of putting any slight symptom into WebMD, then scouring the site's probable causes would usually leave me convinced I was either pregnant or had cancer. (According to my vast WebMD research, anything from a headache to a twinge in the right arm is likely either pregnancy or cancer). My obsessive searching combined with the fact I'd met my then-boyfriend at church camp outweighed all logic and I secretly became convinced I was the next Virgin Mary -- or, like, at least the OG Jane the Virgin.
Eight years later not much has changed with my WebMD habits, though now paired along with my hypochondria is my unnatural not fear, but distaste for going to the doctor. I live in Manhattan with a severe inability to understand directional signals, so it takes me an incredible amount of time to navigate myself to places when I'm healthy, let alone trying to deal with public transportation or taxi traffic when I'm ill. To me, the trip to a doctor to fix something that will probably/maybe/hopefully go away on it's own is just simply not worth it.
In fact, I can count on one hand the amount of times I've actually gone to see a licensed medical professional in my years living in New York. There was, of course, the time my ovary exploded and I limped my way through the excruciating pain to the ER, refusing to take a $12 Uber four blocks during rush hour because I am cheap even though I thought I was maybe going to die. There was the time I had to get a mammogram after finding a lump in my breast and was entirely adult during the whole procedure, right up until the moment it was over and asked if I could keep the sticky things they put on your nipples because I wanted to hang them on my art wall. (The UES technicians were not amused, but thinking I could possibly have breast cancer, relented. I did not have breast cancer, but the metallic stickers are still proudly hanging from my installation like the real weirdo I am). And, there was also the time I went to a gynecologist in what could only be described as a straight panic because Zach Groth convinced me I had a STD, again not from sex, but because I'd told him the guy I was seeing had admitted to once wiping a booger on me while I was sleeping and, while I told him I'm pretty sure that's not how STD's work, ZG fully believed exposure to any type of bodily fluids of someone that disgusting was bound to result in a gross disease.
(I did not have an STD, though solely based on the above story, my gynecologist as well as all my friends strongly, strongly recommended I should not see this guy anymore. Because I'm an idiot, I stuck around for three more months.)
If you look closely, you can find the metallic nipple coverings AND the glasses of the guy who blew his nose on me.
Anyway, it was things like this -- bodily explosions and exposures to boogers and pre-cancer risks -- that seemed important enough reasons to actually drag myself to a doctor. But, when other, less time-sensitive or gross things are wrong with my body, I usually try to fix them on my own. When I stress fractured my leg from walking too much in order to win the TIME FitBit Challenge, I spent every night icing my shins with frozen string beans while simultaneously basking in the glory of knowing I'd taken more steps than my co-workers. When my wisdom tooth -- a tooth a dentist would later tell me should have been extracted around the same time I thought I was the second Virgin Mary -- would hurt so bad it'd become impossible to chew any food without tears streaming down my face, I only ate expensive AF smoothies from Juice Press "like I was a goddamn Rockefeller" as my roommate, Serria, says.
All these ailments were annoying, yes, but were they worth taking time off work and attempting to schedule an appointment with a strange professional who maybe has an opening and taking a train to a weird part of the city because the only place with an opening would obviously be somewhere inconvenient and sketchy and honestly probably deep, deep into Brooklyn and then making sure the creepy office would take my Massachusetts insurance since I'm still on my parents plan (thanks, Obama) and then still having to pay an incredible amount of money at the end because I have little-to-no idea how a deductible actually works?
Absolutely not.
Instead, most of my medical needs have been cleared up through FaceTime with Serria's mom.
Serria and I FaceTime her parents constantly and for everything. Right after I moved in, when we were trying to set up our Internet, we FaceTimed her dad so he could tell us which of the wires I'd brought from my Upper East Side apartment to our Chelsea place were necessary for us to plug in. (Naturally, I took all the wrong cords, so most of our conversation was him shaking his head and announcing they had to be taken back to my old place of residence, a thing we never did). When Congress was voting to repeal Obamacare, we FaceTimed her parents immediately, asking if I was going to lose my insurance, like, tomorrow or if it wouldn't take effect until after I was 26 and the need to become a real adult would already be far more immediate. And, after I almost burnt our apartment down twice in a week -- once because I am bad at cooking and once due to an exploding Anthropolgie candle (I can't make this up) -- we video chatted her firefighter father to figure out why our smoke alarm didn't go off either time. (It would appear this is because our landlord doesn't believe in batteries, leading to what could only be described as sounds of panicked laughter coming from both ends of the call).
While I talk to my parents every day, Serria and I rarely FaceTime them for advice. In fact, we rarely FaceTime my parents at all, mostly because my parents aren't great at it as you can see from the following photo:
This is why we call Serria's mom instead of them for any emergency that requires eye sight.
Plus, Serria's mom is actually in the medical field, whereas my mother, bless her, once made a literal stranger clean up my brother's bloody nose because she couldn't handle the mess without getting nauseous.
Anyway, one day I was walking when I had a searing lower back pain that stopped me in my tracks, yet strangely receded almost as immediately as it had arrived. It was a pain I felt deep in my body, as if there were a needle burrowed underneath my muscle. Throughout the day, it happened a few more times but, because the pain kept disappearing almost as soon as it would arrive, I did what I always do and ignored it, hoping it would probably/maybe/hopefully go away.
It did not.
After a month of this, I was certain there was something stabbing my kidney, a body part I know the name and location of because, again, I am very adept at WebMD. And, so, on a Sunday morning, when I was laying on the floor clutching my side and moaning, Serria made the executive decision to FaceTime her mom for medical advice.
From the floor, I explained all my symptoms to her mother, even offering up my own Internet take as to what was wrong with me while writhing in pain. (I'd settled on kidney stones or cancer, bypassing the usual pregnancy conviction considering I hadn't gone a real, proper date since the time I got a bloody nose on a guy during adult activities in January and, in the years that followed high school, have become more than confident I'm not the Virgin Mary. This made having a baby an easier ailment to rule out).
Serria's mom told me while it was not likely I had a kidney stone, having a kidney stone would be more likely than my other WebMD fears, specifically the cancer one. She prescribed me to drink more liquid, making sure to add the phrase "And, not just alcohol!" which was fair because when Serria decided we needed to call her mother for medical attention, the two of us were severely hungover and had just come back from brunch...
...Although, to be honest, brunch is a very, very loose term.
When people come to visit us in New York City, they always talk about wanting to get brunch. To them, it seems like an elegant affair with endless mimosas and platters of pancakes with beautiful fruit stacked just so. And, sometimes, this is accurate.
But, more often for Serria and I, this is not the case. When we "brunch," it's more of a dire life-or-death eating situation where we're both wearing sweatpants with last night's mascara still imprinted across our faces and eating chicken fingers while splitting mozzarella sticks at 10 a.m. from the diner down the street, a diner that inexplicably serves a lobster meal for under $10 at any time of day or night and has a bathroom so small, Zach Groth once got stuck in it.
Understandably, we only go there when we are very, very hungover and somewhat on the brink of dying, as I'm sure our faces accurately reflected via this FaceTime call, so the assumption I was getting most of my liquid from an alcohol-based diet is fair.
After I assured Serria's mom I would drink more water and less beer, she asked me to point at the pain again. When I did, she confirmed once more that it could be my kidney.
"Well, it's that," she said. "Or, you could just be being a little bitch," which is my favorite thing anyone in the medical profession has ever said to me and I went to a pediatrian who pretended with genuine enthusiasm that he saw panda bears up my nose until I was eighteen.
Still, I was pretty sure I wasn't being a little bitch because I have an extremely high pain tolerance. When I broke my elbow in the eighth grade by skiing off a cliff and landing in a pond, I kept going for the rest of the day, only stopping when my helmet, which had been cracked on a rock during the accident, all but completely fell apart. When I tore all the ligaments in my ankle falling off the stage at Dance Team State my freshman year of high school, I took two Advil and kept competing (then, in the future, attended physical therapy for a very, very long time). And, also, when I finally got that wisdom tooth removed because I am not a Rockefeller and Juice Press smoothies were getting far too expensive, I was front row at The 1975's Madison Square Garden concert exactly eight hours later, singing along as best as I could with a mouth full of gauze and blood.
So, yeah -- a little bitch I am not.
This was far too close to be to Matty while aggressively bleeding from the mouth.
But, when that burrowing pain stabbed me in the back so hard during yoga that I physically cried out, attracting attention and ruining everyone else's zen, I decided it was maybe time to make an appointment with a professional.
I went with not the first, but the second available doctor on Zoc Doc with the understanding there’s probably a justifiable reason if a doctor in a place as busy as Manhattan has so many vacancies. Also, the guy I bloody-nosed all over had once told me about the time he’d gone to the first available doctor on Zoc Doc when he was sick and had been sequestered in a room on Mott Street with a needle where he was basically asked to take his own blood sample.
So, yeah, the second available doctor it was.
The second available doctor on Zoc Doc ended up being close to my office -- a plus -- and his place looked like the type of professional building where they would have a strict “No Patients Handling the Medical Tools” policy, which, really, is I guess all I’m looking for in a doctor.
Upon arriving, a nurse immediately led me to a room, skipping the usual uncomfortable formalities of getting my height (too short) and weight (too much) and blood pressure (too high). This made me pre-maturely rank the office staff as my favorite among Manhattan, even putting them over my 70-year-old gynecologist with cat eye glasses who merely nodded when I visited her in a panic about the booger incident, then went on an unrelated tangent about how God made women’s left breasts larger "only because most men are right-handed."
And, then I noticed the decor.
As soon as I was left to myself, my eyes started traveling throughout the room, noticing the model airplanes and tiny cars and subway maps and railroad tracks and posters that littered the room with a theme I’d be more comfortable associating with a six-year-old’s bedroom with a race-car bed than a doctor’s office. The walls were so plastered in paraphernalia that when the doctor finally walked in, I was so nervous he’d be in a train conductor’s uniform instead of the expected lab coat that I genuinely laughed out loud at the normalcy of his appearance. After our introductions, I assumed he would be taking the vitals the nurse so lovingly skipped, but no. Instead of asking me to get on a scale, he wordlessly handed me a pin.
Nervous I was about to be asked to take my own blood with an office supply, I started scooting slowly, but anxiously toward the door. Luckily, the next words out of his mouth had nothing to do with me puncturing my skin, but instead, he asked me to put it in the large map behind me in the location of where I grew up.
With all the other transportation-related material in the room, I hadn’t noticed the huge world map, stuck all over with colorful pins not unlike the one I was currently holding. Visibly relieved, I put the pin in Sandpoint, sparking a 20 minute discussion about Idaho's preferred method of transportation (which for the record is not, contrary to this doctor's belief, tractors).
Eventually, we started talking about my back pain -- you know, the reason why I was there -- and the burrowing needle feeling and how I thought it was my kidney, citing my sometimes high blood pressure as a symptom of kidney stones, showing off my WebMd knowledge and, I’m sure, really wowing the guy who spent the better part of his life in med school with my Googling skills.
“Alright, alright,” the doctor told me, positioning himself behind me after I’d all but exhausted him with my vast stream of kidney and cancer knowledge. “I’m going to check your kidneys.”
By this point, I was annoyed we’d spent so long discussing transportation and so little about my real life medical pain, but then, he really upped his game.
Because he punched me full force in the back.
"Did that hurt?," he asked, as I looked up -- horrified -- at him from across the room, literal feel away from where I had previously been sitting.
“I mean, yeah,” I sputtered, still so taken aback as to what had just occurred. “You just punched me. In the back. As hard as you possibly could."
The doctor looked at me curiously, basking in my bewilderment.
“Well,” he finally said, after moments of uncomfortable silence. “If you had kidney stones, the pain of me punching you would have been so severe, you would have vomited on yourself.”
Although probably accurate, this weirdly enough did not make me feel like I was in the best medical care possible.
“So,” he continued, as if he didn’t just physically move me across the room and, also, scare me off of doctors for, I don’t know, maybe forever, “I have no idea what’s wrong with you... but I can give you some muscle relaxers as a band-aid fix.”
Without accepting the drugs, I walked out, rubbing my now-bruised back.
"How'd it go?," Serria said later when she got home, turning around to see me laying on our couch, icing my back with what was probably the same bag of now inedible frozen string beans I'd used on my splintered shins months earlier.
"I don't know," I told her, as she took a true assessment of my situation and immediately started FaceTiming her mom. "I might just be a little bitch."