diary of a hypochondriac

2,000 or so words about having a summer cold

Friday
I wake up feeling a little stuffy and take a Covid test as a precaution. Any time I think I feel even the slightest tickle in my throat, I pull out a swab to scrape the inside of my brain out of an abundance of caution; it is quite possible that I’m the last person keeping BinaxNow in business. I am still one of those people who consistently masks on public transportation (I’m sorry but you will never see me raw dog subway air ever again) and in stores and any sort of large venue with lots of people like the theater, the movies, and concerts. But I am not one of those people like the ones I see in the Still Coviding group I joined on Facebook years ago, back when booking a vaccination was like trying to cop a hot sneaker drop. I scroll their agoraphobic posts with morbid curiosity until I get so anxious I ultimately snooze the group for 30 days until I do this all over again. Because I am not perfect about masking and have resumed a mostly normal life of going out to eat and drink and work, I am constantly retracing my steps asking myself where I could have caught the dreaded ‘vid. While I am doing all of this, the test comes up negative and suddenly I feel better. Like all the stuffiness was just in my head, not as bad as I thought it was, and now I have confirmation that I will live. This is, of course, a classic example of the OCD reassurance cycle.

My friend Alyssa and I have girl dinner (snacks) in the park. We split a weed beverage instead of wine because we are in our 30s now, which means we each had two drinks at some point earlier in the week and are still recovering. I feel the slight buzz kick in as I watch a toddler run around in the grass. She’s chasing other people’s dogs, picking up sticks, twirling her full skirt. She is so unbearably cute but I pull my attention away out of fear that I look like a creep instead of what I actually am: just a girl of childbearing age about to get her period.

“I want to play with a baby,” I sigh, before I clarify that I don’t want to have a baby.
“You don’t want to have a baby in your studio apartment?” Alyssa jokes. One of my favorite recurring bits my friends and I do is when we say things like “I could never have a baby right now; I would be a teen mother!” as if we are not quickly approaching the age in which our pregnancies would actually be classified as geriatric.

I have made my stance on where I’ve landed on the ethics of having a child in this dying world that has about a decade left, tops, before total climate collapse clear so much that people start to roll their eyes and stop me before I even start, but in this case I launch into another reason I could not have a child even if I want to: “I’ve come to realize I can never have a baby because I’m just not mentally fit to be pregnant,” I say. “The older I get the more I learn about how dangerous it can be. My hypochondriac ass could not handle it. I would be in the ER every other week thinking something’s wrong.” I have decided that it’s maturity, actually, to recognize that I will never be a girl who would love the experience of being pregnant. I would be rattled by the body horror of it all—like the girl on TikTok who has the running list of all the terrifying shit that can happen, like your teeth falling out and your brain swelling—and even more shaken by the thought of how it all eventually ends. The idea of getting it out of me would send me into a panic the same way the prospect of getting on a plane does. I would be sick with dread for weeks knowing what’s coming, how my only options are major surgery or body blowout, and how wrong either could go. I could straight up DIE, which I don’t want to do, and I couldn’t even take a Xanax! I say all of this as if this isn’t simply all a hypothetical situation at the moment. “You definitely are not the kind of person who should have a baby on your own,” she says, agreeing with me.

I search for the feeling to describe what it’s like to have a friend listen to you be crazy and verify that you are, in fact, a little crazy. Someone who tells you the truth when the opportunity to rush in and coo some sort of reassurance like no no no that’s not trueeee you’re so competent and capable don’t say that about yourself omg what are you talking about!!!! is right there. It’s comforting, actually, to be seen, even at your most insane.

Saturday
My throat hurts in a way it hasn’t since elementary school and I immediately rush for the drawer in which my Covid tests live. Negative again, and I remind myself—something I probably should have done before I wasted one whole test and 15 minutes of my life—that it’s probably just because I gave a presentation where I talked for an hour straight in my Work Voice™ yesterday, then hung out and yapped all evening with Alyssa. I simply am not used to talking aloud that much anymore, and now my vocal chords are angry with me. You should leave your apartment more, I can feel them say. Or at least just talk to yourself more. No wait not like that—

I go to my bootcamp class and push it and—you guessed it! I don’t feel so good after. By the time that afternoon that I’m finally even sort of recovered, I decide that as lousy as I feel, I’d feel even worse if I backed out of the one firm plan I made with myself the night before. Today will be the day I go to the Pottery Barn outlet in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Today, if all goes well, I will finally buy a new couch.

What you have to understand is that I have been looking for a new couch—scouring Reddit, reading every Strategist list possible, looking up customer service complaints on Twitter, going to show rooms and flopping, measuring my apartment space and remeasuring, buying a slip cover to see if I’m grown up and responsible enough to have white furniture (I’m not), going back to show rooms and flopping more—for the better part of two years. Possibly three. This is a grown-up investment, and I have to make the wisest choice possible. When I first moved into my apartment four years ago, I bought a dusty rose faux-velvet mid century modern love seat off Wayfair that was very trendy at the time and very inexpensive and also, crucially, very much in stock. Just a few months after I risked my life perilously carrying the boxes it shipped in—which were my exact height and weight—up my steep walk-up steps, I realized that it was not the wisest idea to buy furniture off the internet. I remembered that the inexpensive shortcut always ends up feeling cheap.

And today, I have had enough. I am tired of waiting for my platonic ideal of a couch to go on sale, or waiting for it to show up in stock, or waiting to feel confident that if I order it custom made I won’t somehow end up stuck in customer service hell regretting all that money I spent. I long ago accepted the fact that my fear of bed bugs means I can never buy furniture off Marketplace or Craigslist, and I don’t want to wait weeks for something to ship, so if I want something NOW, I have to drag my ass to New Jersey. I am taking a New Jersey Transit bus to The Mills at Jersey Gardens and I am throwing my credit card down for the first floor model couch that even remotely fits the bill.

In Pottery Barn I spot my prey: It’s a denim color of blue—I wanted something light, but it fits the decor—with square arms—I wanted round but I can compromise—and firm cushions—okay, at least there’s one thing I really wanted. I sit down. It’s fine. I look at the price tag and look at the tag that shows the extra discount to take off the price tag. I decide I’d be a fool not to take it. When I Facetime my mom for confirmation that I’m not being rash, not making a stupid decision after doing years of research just because I’m now feeling sick and I’m tired and desperate, I can hear my dad in the background: “Why is she asking your opinion when we all know she’s going to hem and haw about it until she gets paralyzed by indecision and leaves empty handed?” Okay, drag. I did not come all the way to New Jersey on a bus (it was 30 minutes) to leave with nothing. I go to the register and make arrangements to have it delivered the next morning.

I’m in and out so fast that I sprint through the mall—dodging families and teens and groups of European tourists in Armani Exchange—to make the departing bus home so I don’t have to wait an hour for the next one. I smell someone’s Auntie Anne’s the entire ride back and feel a deep sense of yearning and regret that I did not stay long enough to get one for myself. But then I remind myself that it would not agree with my sore throat, and that I get anxious in malls now (I think I’ll get shot) and that I spent enough money today that I must be grown-up enough to give myself the whole “We have Auntie Anne’s at home” spiel. (We don’t.)

Sunday
My throat is no longer sore—it was, in fact, the yapping—but in its place is a feeling of not good in a classic kind of Covid way. I say “classic kind of Covid way” as in “the one and only time I actually tested positive for Covid.” When people hear that I’ve only had it once, they’re shocked, but it’s truer for me than most because I always test for confirmation; I never think “it’s just a cold!” I always jump to the worst possible conclusion, always convince myself that this is it, that I’ll have the worst case of the worst disease or that I’ll have all the worst kind of after effects. For weeks after I had Covid last summer, I practiced smiling and raising my arms in the mirror any time I felt even slightly off. I had convinced myself, based on something I read (and it’s always something I read) about the correlation between Covid and an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes in otherwise healthy young people, that I was having a stroke.

My test is negative, by the way.

I had planned to go to my friend Dylan’s monthly salon downtown and my friend Emmy’s early Bastille Day party in Astoria. But by the time the couch is delivered and I’m only halfway through deep cleaning it, I decide that I shouldn’t spread whatever it is that I haves to other people, even if I had the energy to do so, which I don’t. I realize that I’m now facing the problem I was fearing would arise all summer, the consequences for my poorly planned actions.

Every summer is the same: My social battery is recharged, my will to leave my apartment renewed. I grow consumed with an overwhelming feeling that time is finite and fleeting and I must stuff my tendency to say no and stay home back into the depths of my coat closet next to my knee-length parka. I sprint ahead with no warm up and poor fueling and by the time the season’s halfway gone, I inevitably crash. I look at the shared list of summer to dos in my notes app and only three of the 32 items are checked off. My friends and I are in our 30s with full time jobs, not 12 year olds scampering about with unlimited free days. When will we find the time to go tomato picking or upstate to the Borscht Belt Museum or to Diggerland in New Jersey or the pie place in Long Island or the soft serve place in the Catskills? When will we find time to swim in lakes and pools and the ocean, and try to be outdoorsy before getting icked out by all the bugs? I feel depressed and hopeless in an it’s all over sort of sense. Another summer halfway over with nothing to show for it besides the faintest idea of a start of a tan. The warm weather lasts so much longer these days, but I can smell the looming threat of August just around the corner and it makes me nauseous. But that could also just be my cold.

Monday
It was the influencer party, I deduce. The one last Wednesday night for some slow fashion brand in the back room of Jac’s on Bond with no airflow on one of the hottest nights of the summer that I went to and stayed at for all but 25 minutes. It was one of those downtown 24 year old TikTokers who all had the same face, dressed in the same brand-loaned outfits, drinking the same free cocktails that they waited in the same impossibly long line for. That’s who got me sick, I decide this morning when I wake up at 4 a.m. so stuffed up I’m unable to breathe. Every time I cough my chest rattles and I curse them. God forbid a girl try to have a little fun, decide immediately it’s not the vibe, and leave in one piece.

At least I have this new couch to flop on.

Tuesday
When my grandmother was a young girl, she, her sister, and her mother all got tuberculosis and were sent away to separate sanatoriums to recover. Her mother died, and when she and her sister finally recovered, they bounced around to separate relatives before eventually returning home to their father and new stepmother. I remember meeting my step-great-grandmother once when I was little. In my memory, she lives in a Victorian house full of dark wood and she’s equally as menacing, the Disney idea of an evil stepmother: a prim and polite exterior that masks an unbearably cold and cruel soul. At least, that’s how I remember it.

My running theory is that my grandmother’s childhood illness created a cascading effect of generational trauma; “she’s the reason all the Courogens are hypochondriac anxiety freaks” I explain to my sister. “It’s in our DNA to be fucking weird about illness.”

I’m thinking about my grandmother because I’m coughing so violently that even though the act is familiar to me by now—it is, unfortunately, my lot in life as a deviated septum girl who is too scared to schedule the recommended septoplasty to have any head congestion travel to my chest almost immediately because there’s simply not enough room in my face for all that gunk—I’m still scared it’s something worse. I make a joke about consumption—

—and then I find myself thinking “wait, what was consumption again?” which leads me down a rabbit hole to TB, which leads me to my grandmother, which leads me back to me. I discover that TB isn’t one of the bad seemingly old-timey-but-now-on-the-rise-because-of-idiots diseases they vaccinate kids for like I always thought. I panic. What do you mean I wasn’t actually vaccinated for TB because they don’t do that in America? What do you mean I could just get TB? Today? In 2025? When doctors at CityMD are so quick to say “it’s just a cold” and send you on your way? Would I ever even know I had TB if I had it or would I just be dismissed and sent home to my studio apartment to die?

(I do not have TB.)

Wednesday
I haven’t exercised since Saturday, but as I’m doubled over in my bathroom trying to exorcise vile shit from the depths of my lungs, clutching my poor sore core for support, I think to myself, “great ab workout, I guess.” I’ve had little more than supplements and green juices and popsicles all week—if it’s a solid, it repulses me at the moment—and when I pull up my shirt in my mirror, it shows. Crazy what an almost all-liquid diet and probably 2 cumulative hours a day of deep core work can do for your body in such a short amount of time. I have a headache, but at least I look kind of good. I think I’m finally turning the corner on this thing.

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