Reading is bad for you

Cecil, in the library, with the medical encyclopedia.  I must've been about five years old, and still in a state of wide-eyed innocence concerning the realism of my own mortality.  But there, in that dark, unfriendly library that smelt of urine and tragedy, this naivety was swiftly and mercilessly killed.  By some stroke of incredible misfortune, I opened the book straight onto the page about brain tumours, and history was made.  I became fixated on the idea that it was now inevitable that I would contract one, and that my head would likely have exploded by the end of the month.

I'm told I wouldn't sleep on my own for the rest of the week, and that I cried until I got so dehydrated I fell off a swing.  I'm sure they put me on the swing to cheer me up, but I was still crying while swinging and I probably slipped off on my own tears.  All this resulted in was a slightly lacerated arse, but that at least had the happy effect of distracting me from brain tumours.  I managed to stop crying for quite frequent intervals, and as more time went by without my cranium having gone Super Saiyan, I relaxed a little.

While my head still hasn't exploded, and the most serious illness I have suffered from was a short bout of rubella, I am still dogged by irrational terrors that said head might pop.  Each time there's a pain on one side of my skull I think I must be having a stroke.  A twinge in my chest is probably an embolism.  I know it almost certainly isn't an embolism, but I am convinced at the time that it is.  It is a strange thing.

All this came to a bit of a head last year, when I convinced myself that I was having my third heart attack (my first two having been dismissed as indigestion), and burst into A&E claiming my demise was imminent and I must have an electric shock before I shuffle off this mortal coil, all the while crying, again.  But, ten blood tests and five ECGs and two chest x-rays and one twenty-four hour heart monitor later, I was told I was not suffering from a heart problem, and I was not about to die and please stop coming in, Mr Cavender, you are wasting NHS resources.

But even if the symptoms were psychosomatic, they were still there.  So instead of a heart attack, the diagnosis became anxiety, and then depression, and then all the sorts of things I had never, ironically, worried about getting.  But now they're here and as real as a brain tumour, and if reading got me into this then perhaps writing can get me out.  Maybe it might make all the talk of medication and therapy a little less terrifying.

This has to be more common than it feels.

A real, medical example of a severely distended cranium.