“Healthy”

The other day my coworker Rachel was blogging about hypochondria, which is also one of my favorite pastimes (hypochondria, not blogging, although blogging comes close). Many of us in the office are falling prey to what might be called the Dulcinea Virus, which is not just a single virus, and has nothing to do with viral marketing. It’s just that typical problem that offices have––germs spread. Rachel is online a lot, as most of us are. So researching a health problem, or potential problem, online is only a natural outpouring of her/our addiction to the Web. We pride ourselves on being able to do it better than the average citizen. Buuuuut, if you’re a hypochondriac, the situation becomes a little more complex. Being a hypochondriac ups the ante on a researcher’s ability to find credible information. One of the sieves on the way to getting the answer is, “Are you allowing this information to make you think you have such-and-such terminal illness/exceedingly rare fingernail condition?” If you answer yes, well, at least you get educated on something interesting. If you answer no, you’re closer to your enlightenment, and maybe even a self-diagnosis.

People are always the best remedy to health confusion, next to actual medicine or surgery. And as RB mentioned in another blog post on our site, we are real people behind our insights and link choices. In-sight. In-sight. Computers can’t see, you will recall, which is why you have to type in those strange jargon utterances when you sign in or sign up to a site (“Are you human? Sorry, we have to ask” – Digg). And when I first suspected I had Celiac disease––an autoimmune disease requiring a terminal avoidance of wheat––it was a person, another coworker, actually, who planted the seed in my brain. Yes, I certainly thought I was being a hypochondriac. But after hours and hours of fascinating research on the Web, which began with our Health Guide and ended on Tuesday with my gastroenterologist sticking a tube with a camera on the end of it down my esophagus, I learned that no, my gut (the poor thing) had been right; no more pre-race pasta dinners for me.

One of the first light bulb moments I had was on Columbia University’s Celiac Center site, where I learned that those with other autoimmune diseases (in my case, silent thyroiditis (sounds like a submarine movie)), are prone to a second autoimmune disease. Not only that, but Celiac disease can also be silent––symptom-less––for years; the thyroid condition, or whatever it is, is usually diagnosed first. That’s exactly what happened to me. The good news? A well-managed Celiac patient can also gain much improvement in the thyroid department. I’d prefer not to have my thyroid radioactively zapped, which is the other treatment for an ornery gland. So we’ll see how this rice- and veggie- and strange-grain-filled diet works out for every body part involved.

The irony (in the sense that it’s triumphantly funny) is that I haven’t been “sick” since November (knock on whatever this desk is made of). The work “sick,” to me, is an onomatopoeia of the common cold. Hearing it now in my echoic memory, it is being uttered by someone with a stuffy nose and puffy red eyes. It has nothing whatever to do with Celiac, thyroids, or more serious conditions. I have conditions, but I am not sick. In October, before I did get a fairly bad cold, I invested one time in those silly Dannon Activia yogurts that claim, in their TV ads, to boost the immune system. Dannon is now being sued for allegedly duping consumers, and I can attest that those drinks are absolutely useless. But the live cultures in yogurt do work. It’s just unnecessary to buy some fancy, fruity, tiny, expensive thing with a lot of additives in it to get the benefits. I’ve eaten a cheap, bland, fat-free yogurt every day for breakfast since Jan 2 (I was told to by the detox author). I also drink about 6 cups of Yogi tea a day. I’m just saying. Anyone in our office should try to reap the benefits of that Yogi genius. I believe in the power of the Kombucha mushroom to keep that Dulcinea Virus at bay. The other reading of my otherwise-healthiness: my immune system just feels really bad for me. And for that, I thank it.

The other joy of researching health conditions online is, you realize that, OK, I’m probably self-involved and just want to know how I’m supposed to eat for the next 60 years so I can get pregnant, have healthy children, and not die of bowel cancer when I’m 35 (sorry). But I also am just generally fascinated by the body, and have been since middle school. I used to be really good at science, and then science started getting hard, and I started writing poems and doing my best impression of Edith Piaf. But when my small intestine got its fifteen minutes of fame the other day thanks to Dr. Jonathan Cohen’s nationally acclaimed camera work, I asked him if I could see the images. He was either going to roll his eyes and say, “Looky here, we’ve got a pseudo doctor who’s really up on her condition,” or he was going to think that in his head, and let me look at them. He did the latter, and I began to think about the possibility of med school.

For more on the Dannon story and what live cultures can do for you downstairs, check out this article on the Well Blog.