I’m really not good at being sick. In part it’s because I’m always operating off a mental schedule that leaves no room for inefficiency or incapacitation.
Take yesterday morning. I love my Sundays — I typically get up early and clean, then walk to the farmer’s market and load up on produce. I’ll hit a few yoga classes, walk to the library, run some errands, cook meals for the week and have an awesome sense of accomplishment when evening rolls around.
Instead, I woke up at 6am with a raspy sore throat and headache. I tried to rally but ended up spending most of the day in bed, hoping that the rest would force this bug to leave my system. At some point I started to feel sorry for myself (probably when I realized I’d missed the last option for yoga) so I went to WebMD to diagnose myself.
I know, you’re not supposed to practice “internet medicine” because you’ll end up believing you have a rare disease with only two weeks to live. But really, I was just trying to remember if the adage was “starve a cold” or “feed a cold” because I couldn’t decide if it was wise to inhale the pepperoni pizza in my freezer. Don’t ask why I thought WebMD would offer Mother Goose-like guidance; clearly I was sick and not thinking clearly.
Anyway, WebMD has this application called “Symptom Checker” where you can select the symptoms you’re experiencing and it will whittle down a list of possible conditions you may have. When I saw the options of symptoms, I quickly abandoned my own diagnosis and started trying to construct the oddest line-up of issues I could imagine, just to see if I could stump the system.
Here’s what I came up with:
pithypants 