A friend of mine recently went to the doctor for an upper G.I. 

Now, think about what I just said, and you know all sorts of stuff about me.  First of all, the fact that I have a friend who had one of those means I must be getting pretty old, relatively speaking.  Very few young people have upper G.I.’s.

Heck, most younger people don’t even know what an “upper G.I.” is.  Ask a 20-year-old, and you’ll get a “Huh?”  Ask a ten-year-old, and you’ll get a description of GI Joe jumping out of a helicopter.

Yes, we’re at the age where we are learning all sorts of new words.  We’re getting to know a multitude of symptoms, treatments, medications, and therapies from listening to all our friends discuss theirs.  And we worry.

So anyway, the doctor told my friend that he would call her in two to three days with the results.  Imagine her trepidation when she got home that afternoon and her husband told her the doctor’s office had already called.  She called his office back and they were already closed for the day.  She went to bed that night with a pit in her stomach … I mean why would the doctor have called her that day if something REALLY bad wasn’t wrong?

She didn’t sleep well.  By the next morning she was pretty sure she had cancer.  She reluctantly called the doctor’s office. 

The nurse told her everything on the test was fine.  No, she didn’t have cancer.  Yes, really.

You see, so many of our friends are getting weird diseases and we let our imaginations get the best of us.  Before we know it, we convince ourselves that we must be sick, too.  I always wondered where the hypochondriacs of the world came from … the only difference between them and me is they talk openly about their fears.  I don’t tell people when I think I’m gonna die.

One of my friends was running into a lot of tables and doors.  Some thought she had taken to the bottle, but it turns out she had a brain tumor that was affecting her balance.

So the next time I ran into a door, I immediately thought, “Brain tumor.”

Another person got a constant twitch in his finger and it developed into Parkinson’s.  My eye twitched for a week solid, and I was pretty sure I had Parkinson’s.

I overdosed on Italian food and got some serious heartburn.  I thought I was having a heart attack.

I’m learning a bunch of new words now about the pituitary gland and the adrenal gland.  I’ll probably have those diseases next.

But right now, I’m getting some little fluttering feelings in my belly that feel a whole lot like a baby kicking.  I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant.

Never mind that it is impossible.  I mean, I had all my plumbing removed years ago.

Okay, so maybe I’m not.  It’s probably just my pituitary gland acting up.