Opinion/ News

‘The End’ taken literally

I’m propped up in bed, adding some final
touches to my latest manuscript, when my
husband arrives home with a book. It’s one I
ordered months ago when I was feeling suspi-
ciously healthy — “Symptoms: The book that
answers the questions: Am I sick? Is it serious?
Should I call my doctor?”

My husband thinks I’m sick because I have
finished another column. Every time I write THE
END, he says, I take it literally. “Why don’t you
start a new column right away,” he advises me, as
I sketch a headstone around my name on the most
recent one.

When he leaves me to rest in peace, I examine
my new “easy-to-use home medical reference.” It
promises to interpret my body’s warning signs
and put them in perspective. Each symptom is
followed by a multiple-choice of ills. My “Head-
ache”, for instance, can mean “Stress, Hangover
or Brain Tumor.” The “Chest Pains” I’ve been

~ having could be “Heartburn or Heart Attack” and
where my “‘Loss of Appetite” could be some-
thing as trivial as a cold, it might as easily be
life-threatening — AIDS or cancer.

Then there’s the numbness in my elbow I’ve
been ignoring. I scan the index and find numbness
under ‘‘Lack of Feeling.” In the case of another
woman of my age who ignored the same symptom

_ for too long, an X-ray revealed a tiny malignant
tumor that had settled in her elbow bone. Within
weeks the cancer had consumed her brain, liver,
and lungs. She died before she could blow the
candles out on her 39th birthday cake.

For my “Sore Throat” the diagnosis was more
difficult. A sore throat could mean “any number
of things from tonsillitis and gonorrhea, to fish or
chicken bone.” I hadn’t eaten fish or chicken due
to my “Loss of Appetite” and I’d had my tonsils
out when I was five. That left gonorrhea or “any
number of things.”

By the time I’d finished looking up the
symptoms for any number of things I had
developed ‘“‘Irregular Heartbeat.” I called my
doctor for an appointment.

“How do you feel?” she asked, after a quick
check for vital signs. She had my medical history,
as thick as both volumes of The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire open-on
her desk.

“Fine.” And then I told her about my lack of
feeling.

Interpreting symptoms is no easy task, says the
author of Symptoms, because most people don’t
know what they mean or how to describe them. To
prove his point he conducted a quiz in his office.
After the initial pro forma “How do you feel?”’,
he invented a symptom, asking several of his
patients, “Do you have any gribbling?”

“Only when I walk uphill in the cold weather,”
said one patient.” (He had angina pectoris.) “I
used to gribble, but not since I had my prostrate
fixed,” said another. ““My husband gribbles, I
don’t.” (She turned out to be perfectly healthy.)

While waiting for my own doctor to put my.
symptoms in perspective (she was re-reading the
history of my decline) I thumbed through the Ms
magazine I’d picked up in the waiting room.
“There are times when you want to have a
disease,” Barbara Ehrenreich writes, in an article
entitled Sick Chic. “You have symptoms, but you
need a label for your ills.”

Enrenreich had symptoms — headache, chest
pains, loss of appetite, numbness — but, for the
longest time, no label. She’d developed PMVS, a
disease where one of the valves in the heart
doesn’t close properly, though not until the
medical profession found a name for it did they
begin to take it seriously.

That is, they began to look for it. “And they
found it: mostly in women who are thin and fair,
and — this is the sad part — mostly in people
who did not have any symptoms at all.”

I’m fair, and fairly thin, but when I suggested to
my doctor that I ought to have a test for Prolapsed

Mitral Valve System, she pried the magazine out ~

of my hands. I had a cold, she said, and the elbow
numbness was a symptom of writer’s cramp. Both
were temporary conditions.

As I left her office I felt my heart beating harder
than ever (this, too, I told myself, was only
temporary). For the article in Ms had given me a
new terror to make myself sick over — the
diseases I didn’t even have symptomis for ... yet.

In nine days — if I make it — I'll be 39. Not
that I’ll have made it in any final sense. As George
Bums says you only have it made if you live to be
a hundred, because very few people die past that
age.

TheReview Wednesday, November 21,1990 — A18

New heart lab in New West * |

Health Minister John Jansen last
week opened a new cardiac cather-
ization laboratory at Royal Colum-
bian Hospital in New Westminster.

The new lab is part of an open
heart surgery and balloon angiop-
lasty program being developed at
the hospital.

The lab provides diagnostic ser-
vices for heart patients who may

be considered for balloon angiop-
lasty, laser treatments or open
heart surgery:

The complete cardiovascular #

program at Royal Columbian,
which includes angioplasty and
open heart surgery facilities, is
expected to be in operation in
January 1991.

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Board president Donna Curtis
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