Every morning before I open my eyes to the rest of the world, I convince myself this is the day I’m going to die. It has to be. Anyone who’s lived as crappy a life as I have is bound to be suffering from something that will fast track them to the pearly gates. But to get a better handle on my diminishing health, I need to diagnose everything that’s wrong with me, its severity, and compute exactly how long I have left to live.
My last episode began with an innocuous pain on the inside of my cheek. By running the tip of my tongue over the affected area, I began to manufacture enough symptoms to warrant researching the malady on WebMD. I’m not only interested in what it is, but also what it could be.
Pin-pointing a diagnosis
WebMD has a handy symptom checker that lets me catalog all of my daily aches and pains, saving them in my Facebook profile, so I can share them with my friends. If anyone asks me, “How are you today?” I can text them a hyperlink to a complete inventory of my afflictions, alphabetized, and in order of frequency and severity.
Next, I clicked on the site’s body map. After zeroing in on the face — they didn’t ask if it was inside or outside — they presented me with a number of symptoms: pain and discomfort, abnormal head shape, uncontrolled twitching, excessive drooling, and rampant halitosis. Any one of these could indicate craniofacial anomalies like cleft palate, Kleeblattschadel syndrome, encephalocele, torticollis, hemifacial microsomia, Crouzon syndrome, or deformational plagiocephaly.
The worst symptom that matched mine was pain and discomfort. Then I had to identify it as dull, achy, burning, stinging, throbbing or none of the above. It was early in the diagnostic process and impossible to guess what it might eventually evolve into, so I chose them all.
A diagnosis I can live with
After additional refining of my symptoms, it suggested I might have leprosy, three types of cancer, a salivary duct abscess, trigeminal neuralgia, osteomyelitis, fractured eye socket, or a number of other lesser problems like sinusitis or toothache. I immediately ruled out the latter as being too simple.
After some additional probing with a pair of French fry tongs, I decided to settle on trigeminal neuralgia. It had a nice ring to it and had the most potential for gathering sympathy from my friends and getting prescriptions for powerful painkillers and sedatives from an online pharmacy I found in Pakistan. It would also sound better in my obituary than:
“He passed away unexpectedly after losing a long battle with abnormal head shape and excessive drooling.”
Now that I had pinpointed exactly what the pain was, I needed to start planning how my TN was going to impact the rest of my life. Nothing I read said anything about how long I could expect to live with this life-threatening condition, so I decided to assume the worst: I only had a few months to live. That being the case, I started to get my house in order.
I went into Microsoft Outlook and created a new email distribution group: Friends to Receive My Death Announcement. That way, I could mass email the bad news to all of the people who still owed me money while I was still alive to enjoy it.
I thought I’d better get a haircut. It makes it so much easier for the mortician should you drop dead unexpectedly. And, given that it was likely to be a closed casket service, I canceled my gym membership. There’s no sense worrying about losing weight anymore. I also sold my car, skis, golf clubs, furniture and gave away all of my clothes except for a few hospital gowns I had leftover from my last knee surgery. They would come in handy when I became bedridden at the end.
Preparing to leave this life
I also canceled all my memberships to Date-A-Felon.com, Jenny Craig, the Cheese of the Month Club, The National Air Rifle Association and submitted my three-month notice for termination of service for my utilities, internet provider, cell phone service, and NetFlix. Even if I ended up hanging around longer than expected, they sometimes offer terminal patients discounts in their final hours, so it was well worth the risk.
The next day, my symptoms seemed to subside a bit, so I hit my cheek repeatedly with a ball-peen hammer until they returned. I found if I pressed hard enough, I could even cause some wicked discoloration that would look horrendous and confuse the dickens out of the medical examiner during my autopsy.
Over the next month, I struggled with my TN; no matter what I did, it seemed to get better. So, I started chewing on beer cans and sleeping with a rolled-up sock inside my mouth to try to recoup my symptoms. Unfortunately, the pain began to subside. By the end of the week, they were completely gone.
It’s been a while since I’ve woken up with any new complaints and haven’t had time to look for more. Because of my struggle with TN, I lost my job, home and maxed out my medical insurance, so I’m restricted to using the computers at the library to communicate with my therapist and access my WebMD account.
As a matter of fact, I think I’m beginning to feel a new lump on the back of my neck.
