The problem with self-diagnosis is that awful chance you might be getting it right. I spent the night before I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's trolling WebMD, first terrified to think I might have mono (not mono!) and then resigned to the idea that I had lymphoma. Late in the night I had my mom call my pediatrician. "Should I go up there?" she asked. "You should go up there and take her computer away!" he said.
A few weeks ago my brother Charlie sent me an email with the subject "Crooked Smile." He was worried because his face seemed to be drooping in the mirror, and asked if I agreed that he could have Bell's Palsy, a form of facial paralysis resulting from nerve damage. I rolled my eyes reading the message (complete with photos of Charlie alongside the man below), but the last, chilling line of his email read "take this seriously." On Thursday Charlie hijacked my doctor's appointment, asking the oncologists to weigh in. "You do have a crooked smile," they said, smirking.
As Charlie and I sat in traffic Sunday on the drive back to Boston from the cape, I felt what I determined to be a swollen lymph node below my ear and promptly panicked. I compared right nodes to left, and right were definitely larger. When I called my doctor this morning he said, "it's nothing", and then "are you worried?" He explained that the scans had been unambiguous, that lymph nodes are supposed to swell if you're fighting a cold, that I didn't have any external symptoms.
Well, I was still worried, enough to go to the office and have the doctors give what turned out to be my sternocleidomastoid muscle a good examination. I felt silly, but giddy with relief, and when the doctor said I'd been spending too much time around Charlie we were all able to share a laugh at his expense. Never trust a man with a crooked smile!
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