Travels with my Hypochondriac
A. K. A. My Husband
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It’s a well-known fact that when you go on holiday, your normal defences lower. Unless you are touring Los Cabos in Mexico — which in 2020 had the highest murder rate of any city in the world — you assume your new surroundings are safe and congenial. Yes, you will probably be on guard for pick-pockets and cars, if they drive on the opposite side of the road, but on the whole holidays are an opportunity to lower our natural defences.
However, few people know or have the chance to observe, as I have, that it’s the same with hypochondria. I know this because whenever we go on holiday, my husband leaves his hypochondriacal tendencies at home.
The realisation of this dawned on me a few years back when we went to Northern Italy — the area known as Trentino — for a cycling holiday.
My husband is healthy and fit, except of course that he suffers all ailments worse than anyone ever has or ever will suffer. This is born out in ways beyond the obvious. For example, he has a tendency to skulk around the drawer in the kitchen that houses our first aid supplies. Soon there comes a rustling sound as he peels the foil off two Nurofen or acetaminophen (What a word, six syllables, guaranteed to lift the spirits of any hypochondriac). Frustratingly, whenever I have a headache — rare for me — there are never any painkillers, only empty blister packs.
In the past, he has had several illnesses he has almost died from and several that he has actually died from, including a nasty bout of Trachycarpus fortunei.
‘Did you go green and spikey?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘Now you come to mention it, those were the major symptoms.’ (He’s scrupulous with symptoms, Googles them to ensure he has the right ones.)
So rapt is he with his ailments — exotic and pedestrian — that you can lob all kinds of irony and sarcasm and he remains impervious in his carapace of hypochondria.
But, as I say, on holiday he forgets to bring his ailments. He doesn’t even put acetaminophen in his wash bag. He enjoys a week or two without recourse to a headache or reference to his ‘screwed up system’ which has something to do with his stomach, and forgoes lying down in damp rooms…
