Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual THE WORRIED WELL I went to a high school with perhaps fifty different extracurricular clubs that, whatever their other shortcomings, at least let one know one's exact social standing....
...We take various—and, no doubt, counter-acting—vitamins...
...When was the last time you felt really good...
...With no children at home, I suppose I am an empty nester, but there's not a lot of distinction in that...
...A study at Stanford finds that all allergies will be conquered by mid-century...
...Except that there are so many of us worried well that I'm not sure the word hypochondriac quite applies...
...I speak of those wretched jaspers whose job it is to scour each issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) - and every National Institutes of Health report for news of fresh disease, depressing health trends, and rising rates of one or another kind of human decomposition...
...I'm certain that I am (pace William H. Whyte) no Organization Man...
...Like the Dow and the Nasdaq, up one day, down the next...
...We'd like just one more salad, please, and perhaps a cup of green tea before we go...
...But then, wouldn't you know it, the diabetes rate has risen nationwide...
...But then Peter Jennings tells us that there is altogether too much lead in the atmosphere...
...Where everyone is mad, after all, the word psychotic loses some of its punch...
...I don't yearn to return to my adolescence, even though mine—luck of the draw—was an amusing one, but I have until recently suffered some confusion about what group or category I belong to today...
...None of us feels, as did Noel Coward, that "life and love and fame and fortune can all be disappointing, but not dear old oblivion...
...Many of us jog...
...We're well, thank you for asking, but worried, very worried...
...Except when the endorphins kick in, we tend to seem mildly depressed...
...New hope, new options for breast cancer," Tom Brokaw reports...
...We don't, ever, feel quite right...
...others regularly go off on lengthy walks, arms swinging vigorously, looks of grim determination on our faces...
...What's new, pussycat...
...The worried well, I grasped at once, that's me and my fellow closet hypochondriacs...
...I haven't a kitchen or bath-rooms—or bankroll—big enough to qualify as one of David Brooks's Bobos...
...And of course we are right, for the mortality rate in this country, when last checked, was still rounding off neatly at 100 percent...
...Flash: Floodlights went on everywhere, and I felt I had found my place at last...
...We go for weeks at a time without eating red meat...
...unfortunately, another study at Penn State has found that allergies generally are on the rise...
...We worried well, bounced around by all the conflicting medical news, have peculiar habits...
...nor (pace David Reis-man) inner- or other- or tradition-directed...
...New medicine is available to lower the incidence of strokes...
...a radio commercial for a local health club asks...
...We, the worried well, thumbing through our daily papers or tuned in to local and national news channels, read and listen to it all, and tensely sit, waiting for the other flu to fall...
...We sleep tonight, badly— medical journalism stands guard...
...What has swelled the ranks of the worried well in recent decades has been that nasty little endeavor known as health or medical journalism...
...Bumps, blemishes, bruises slow to heal, the least deviation from perfection—worrisome all to the worried well...
...As the line from the song says, "I just don't see me anywhere...
...1950," I answer, "when I was thirteen...
...We go to physicians the way other people go to an IRS audit, sure that we aren't going to come out smiling...
...Athletes, good guys, ladies' men, genial screw-offs, the quietly out of it, even the hopelessly déclassé, each had a club of their own...
...We're the worried well, for whom life is hell...
...During the supposedly greedy 1980s, I managed to show a loss...
...I'm too young to have been formed by the Depression, and too old to be a Baby Boomer...
...Status under this arrangement was as finely calibrated as any I have since encountered...
...What sort of hepatitis, arthritis, meningitis lurks within our cells, bones, genes...
...We follow the health news the way others follow the stock market...
...Hurray for eternity...
...I'm not even sure of my social class, except to say that it's somewhere in the large and squishy middle...
...Which does not mean we are ready to depart it...
...Three new miracle drugs have been developed whose side effects are just slightly more horrendous than the diseases they set out to cure...
...The worried well constitute those vast numbers who are, from the standpoint of health, just fine but don't believe it is going to last...
...During the Me Decade, I lived chiefly for others...
...I've never been the man in the grey flannel suit...
...Or at least I didn't until the other day, when I first heard the phrase "the worried well...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...A new strain of leukemia has been discovered, previous cholesterol numbers need to be adjusted downward, osteoporosis isn't a serious problem only for small, light-boned women...
Vol. 6 • June 2001 • No. 36
