Nightmares

Dear Friend,

Do you have nightmares? Those ones that fill you with absolute horror and fear and you wake up crying after? If you don't, then you're a pathetic excuse for a human being. If I have those nightmares so should you and so should everyone else. What's one of your worst nightmares? I have a few:


One is that I have a range of strange and unexplained symptoms. They all seem really silly things, so I ignore them for quite a long time: weeks, months. It might start out with a lump on the top of my mouth that I think's silly and ignore completely as normal; then a fever and swollen lymph nodes, that I pass off as tonsilitis; then a fever and swollen lymph nodes again, that I pass off at more tonsilitis; then a fever and swollen lymph nodes that I pass off as tonsilitis yet again irritatedly, ignoring the fact I *never* get tonsilitis; then swollen lymph nodes under my arms, that I pass off as maybe upcoming abscesses that never materialise, even though I never get abscesses; then swollen lymph nodes under my arms again that I pass off as perhaps whatever "that was" before; then more swollen lymph nodes that I pass off as tonsilitis; then the lymph nodes continue swollen even when not painful; then my back aches, which I pass off as bad posture; then I get a cough that I pass off as just a smokers' cough; then I lose 2 stone in a couple of months, that I attribute to moving to university, even though with a few days here and there, I have been eating exactly the same as I did over my gap year and have been exercising maybe even less than before; then I get night sweats where I wake up drenched in sweat, that I attribute to my night terrors; then I have absolutely no energy at all, which I attribute to everything going on in my life socially; and then and only then do I go to the doctor.

Before I go to the doctor, I look up my symptoms in a medical textbook and start to scare myself, so I put the textbook away. When I go to the doctor, I expect her to diagnose me with anaemia again or some sort of chest infection and send me away with antibiotics; but she does the examinations instantly they mentioned in the medical textbook. I start to get scared as she examines all of my lymph nodes, pointing out concern with quite a few, making concerned faces while examining several organs which I didn't know were tender, and then even more so when she starts questioning my family history of cancers. She then tells me she would like to do certain blood tests (ones that would be initial tests for what I saw in the medical textbook) then come back to see her in 3 days to discuss the results and "go for a chest x-ray, be referred to haematology and 'perhaps something else too, but we'll not worry about that just now, we'll talk about it on Friday'" and then the nurse taking the blood looks and looks me up and down after seeing what she's needing to take and sighs.

Then I go home and cry.

Nightmare are nightmares. We wake up and laugh at ourselves for believing them.

But, sometimes, when you wake up, you wake up to your worst nightmare. Do you know how that feels? Awful, I'd say.



xxx