Hypochondriac's Guide to Life: A Slightly Hysterical Guide to Life and Death

First Chapter

Chapter Seven: Hiccups Can Mean Cancer In many ways the human body is like a car. Both are complex machines. Both require regular maintenance. Both will stop working if you fill them with barbiturates and applesauce.

Having a car and having a body both require adherence to a rigid servicing schedule. Let's say you own a car and you never, ever replace the oil; and when you use jumper cables, you get them mixed up and there is a spark the size of the Crab nebula, draining all the juice out of the good battery; and once, you poured windshield wiper fluid into the power steering reservoir because they really should label these things better. My point is, if you are that much of a half-wit about your car, your car is the least of your problems, because you probably also use a hair dryer in the bathtub.

The fact is, both cars and humans are designed with idiot lights, things that alert the reasonably careful person that something serious is awry. If your car's Oil light goes on, unless you are my wife, you probably know to stop driving and see a mechanic at once. Similarly, if you experience serious chest pains, then you probably will see a doctor. The fact is, certain symptoms are by their nature scary. Lumps. High fever. Blood in the stool. Mental confusion.

This chapter is not about those common "warning signals." This chapter is about things no sane person would ever associate with serious illness, until this very moment.

Hiccups. The precise cause (or "etiology") of hiccups remains a matter of some dispute among medical scientists, who have studied the phenomenon incessantly and come away with only obvious clinical observations, such as that men hiccup, on the average, five times as frequently as women. (As far as I can see, this tends to suggest, in sophisticated medical terms, an "etiology" related to beer.) There is no reliable cure for hiccups, but there is no shortage of nostrums available, each with its adherents. The rule of thumb is that the more unpleasant the remedy, the more august is the medical authority recommending it. Grandma told you to hold your breath. Primary Care Medicine, a text for doctors, proposes inserting a catheter down your nose into your stomach. I recommend hyperventilating into a colostomy bag.

Hiccups are harmless, except when they aren't. No other commonly reported symptom has quite so many potentially dire explanations. Persistent hiccups cross into virtually every medical specialty. Neurologists know hiccups can accompany the onset of a deadly stroke or an inoperable tumor in the medulla of the brain. Cardiologists will not rule out an oncoming heart attack or an aortic aneurysm. Nephrologists will suspect kidney failure. Gastroenterologists know hiccups can indicate an "irritation" of the diaphragm or of some other organ, particularly one that touches the vagus or phrenic nerves, which control the swallowing and breathing reflexes.

On the outside of the body, an irritation is often a minor matter. On the inside, it often isn't. On the inside, it is often a tumor. Hiccups have been associated with tumors in or around the lung, in the diaphragm, the liver, the pancreas, the stomach, and even the sigmoid colon, which is down near the butt and should not, by the grace of God, have anything to do with breathing.

Insomnia. In the absence of other symptoms, excessive fatigue or excessive sleep can be an indication of many serious diseases, but insufficient sleep generally isn't. Most of the time, the insomniac knows or suspects why he can't sleep: He is worried or depressed, or he has a toothache, or asthma, or a goiter the size of a microwave oven. Insomnia seldom stands alone, but when it does, it is out there in the hellish regions of Things You Wouldn't Wish on Your Worst Enemy Even If He Ate Garbo, Your Dachshund.

The most dramatic of these is fatal familial insomnia. This is a disease caused by prions, which are proteins that act exactly like ice-nine, the instrument of the apocalypse in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Ice-nine was a molecular template. If it mixed with water, it would turn the water molecules into ice-nine molecules, rock hard and useless for sustaining life. This was not good when it spread across the oceans of the world. That's how prions work. They get into your body and take other proteins and reorder their structure to resemble themselves. In fatal familial insomnia, prions take up residence in the sleep center of your brain and slowly destroy it. You start out being unable to sleep well. Then you cannot sleep at all. In desperation, you see a top neurologist like Dr. Anthony Reder of the University of Chicago.

A few years ago, a man came to see Dr. Reder. The patient was tired and grouchy -- not tired and grouchy like a bus driver at the end of his route, but tired and grouchy like the people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers immediately before the dull-eyed pods took them over. This patient looked disheveled. His hair was askew, like Beethoven's after a night of carousing. Reder had seen this before; he is a research scientist and had seen it in laboratory rats with sleep deprivation. He diagnosed fatal familial insomnia. There is no treatment. There was nothing that could be done. Within weeks, the patient was hallucinating, making up grandiose stories about himself. His appearance deteriorated. Beethoven lost a lot of his charm. He gave way to Dr. Irwin Corey. Then he died.

Laughing So Hard You Pee in Your Pants. There is actually a medical term for this. Urologists call it "giggle incontinence." It can mean nothing, or it can be a very early indication of neurologic disease, in particular multiple sclerosis.

The Sniffles. Sometimes a cold is nothing to sneeze at. It could be the first sign of Wegener's granulomatosis, a rare, fulminant, whole-system body breakdown that often starts with coughing, congestion, and blood-streaked nasal discharge. Looks just like a cold! Then, when it doesn't go away, it looks like chronic bronchitis, maybe with an ear infection. Small wonder that Wegener's granulomatosis is sometimes not properly diagnosed until it is too late to treat. By that time it has progressed to kidney failure, lung damage, and body deformities, including "saddle nose," in which the nose cartilage collapses like a rotted jack-o'-lantern.

Or your "cold" might mean you have anthrax. Anthrax is a bacillus carried by livestock; an airborne, inhaled form of it starts just like a cold. This is relatively rare, though terrorist states like Iraq are experimenting with it as a biological weapon. They are planning to use it against citizens of decadent Western regimes, in cities and towns very much like yours. A doomsday scenario? Yes. Far-fetched? Hardly. The armed services have begun a program to inoculate soldiers against airborne anthrax. When inhaled, anthrax resembles the flu for a day or two, and then you feel pretty good, as if your cold has waned. Three days pass. Then you start hacking uncontrollably, you perspire like a federal witness against the mob, and finally you turn as blue as Cookie Monster. It is nearly 100 percent fatal.

Ringing in the Ears. This is called "tinnitus." Most people experience tinnitus at one time or another, usually as a highpitched whine, but sometimes as a buzzing, whooshing, or clanging. Usually it is harmless. Sometimes the sounds can be heard by the doctor when she places a stethoscope to your ear, and this generally means it is no cause for alarm. It is when you are hearing the sounds and she is not that she begins to get concerned. Other possibilities open up, some harmless, some worrisome. It can mean Ménière's disease, a disorder of the inner ear. That would be comparatively good news; Ménière's disease is usually controllable by medication. Tinnitus can also sometimes signal multiple sclerosis, or it can accompany the first appearance of a growth on the brain stem or auditory nerve known as a "schwannoma." A schwannoma is not usually malignant, but it is not entirely harmless, either; sometimes, when it is surgically removed, facial nerves are damaged and you wind up with a perpetual snotty look on your face, like a French wine connoisseur who has been asked to evaluate Yoo-Hoo. A schwannoma also presents the practitioner with a diagnostic dilemma: How do you deliver the news to a patient that he has a tumor with a name that sounds as if you are calling him a penis-head? Come to think of it, perhaps that is why it is named a schwannoma. Maybe doctors are learning to give silly-sounding names to terrifying things to ease the tension of the diagnosis. Maybe soon they will rename a heart attack a "spankadoodle."

Cold Sores and Fever Blisters. That eruption on your lip or gums probably means a minor attack from the herpes simplex virus. No big deal. Keep it clean. Use a mouthwash. It will go away, unless it is the initial presentation of pemphigus vulgaris, a disease that is even worse than it sounds. Pemphigus begins as mouth blisters -- weeping, bleeding, painful, funky-smelling sores that spread to the skin of your scalp and elsewhere. Pemphigus can be treated and controlled but seldom is cured outright. One of the better experimental treatments involves injections of gold. It is expensive.

Pins and Needles. You say, "My foot fell asleep." Your doctor says, "You have experienced a transient episode of paresthesia." Either way, you are standing there on two feet, but one feels like a shillelagh being nibbled by carpenter ants. The usual explanation is that you sat wrong, compressing a nerve. And that's probably what happened, unless your pins and needles are the deceptively lilting overture of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a mysterious, terrifying disorder of the peripheral nerves. It starts in the foot, with sensations indistinguishable from ordinary pins and needles. Then it rapidly distinguishes itself, in the sense that a letter from the Unabomber rapidly distinguishes itself from the rest of the mail. The pins and needles will give way to profound muscle weakness. You can't lift an arm; sometimes you can't even breathe without the help of a respirator. Your brain is fine but your body is a dull lump of useless protoplasm -- sort of the opposite of Vanna White. Most people eventually recover. From then on, whenever their foot falls asleep, they do not take it lightly. They worry, waiting for the next development, on pins and needles.

Itching. Doctors call this "pruritus," which makes it sound vaguely dirty and exciting. Alas, it is just itching. When itching is localized, the diagnosis is relatively simple. Seborrhea, psoriasis, dermatitis, athlete's foot, ringworm, scabies, lice. It is when itching is generalized that all sorts of possibilities arise. If it is centered in the feet or the lower half of the body, it can be one of the first signs of Hodgkin's disease, a potentially fatal cancer of the lymphatic system. Generalized itching can signal a form of leukemia. It can be the very first symptom of lung cancer, ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, or prostate cancer. It is almost always the first symptom of Hanot's cirrhosis, a life-threatening liver disease of middle-aged women. And then there is mycosis fungoides, the final ring of itching hell.

Mycosis fungoides is a rare, galloping skin tumor. It starts with itching; you ignore it. Then, sometimes, years go by symptom-free. Then the itching returns with a vengeance. Then your body erupts into patchy discolorations. You resemble a dalmatian. Then the discolorations spread. You resemble a guernsey cow. Then the tumors become what the medical books describe as "tomatolike." Then things start getting really ugly...

Déjà Vu. We are all familiar with this peculiar existential phenomenon. Suddenly, irrationally, we feel we are experiencing an event, or hearing a conversation, that we have experienced before. There is another, similar condition, called "Jamais vu," in which the opposite occurs: You suddenly feel that familiar surroundings are foreign to you; you might not even recognize your spouse. Cool. Weird. Potentially deadly. Neurologists have discovered that déjà vu and jamais vu can be early signs of a tumor or hemorrhage in the temporal lobe of the cerebral cortex.

Troubled by these mental hiccups? Look for additional subtle signs of temporal lobe abnormalities. One would be seizures. If you frequently find yourself waking up on the floor at work in a pool of urine, with a gnawed pencil in your teeth, and people standing around trying to look calm, you may have a problem here.

Flushed Face. People sometimes get red in the face. This can be caused by exertion or emotion, or by profound embarrassment, such as when you are at a podium to address a national group of educators and you suddenly realize that the big exuberant German shepherd you were petting a few minutes before has nosed you in the lap so enthusiastically that you have an enormous frothy wet spot on the portion of your beige silk dress roughly corresponding to your own personal groin, not that this ever happened to anyone I know. Flushing can also be caused by drinking alcohol. Sometimes this is normal, but sometimes flushing after drinking alcohol is an early warning sign of carcinoid syndrome, in which tumors invade the lining of the stomach; this alcohol-induced facial flushing can precede the diagnosis by fifteen years! By that time, tumors have often spread to the liver or bone or another system. You have fire-hose diarrhea. Your heart walls thicken. You get short of breath. Then short of time.

Hoarseness. This is how lung cancer sometimes shows up for the first time; the tumor invades the laryngeal nerve and you suddenly sound like Vito Corleone.

Lipstick on Your Teeth. Yes, this is potentially serious. The canny internist will not discount this symptom. It suggests dry mucous membranes. If it tends to happen on one side of your mouth only, it could be due to a tumor of cranial nerve VII, which supplies the salivary glands. But the same eye would probably also be dry. If your entire mouth is dry and you are not taking any drugs that dry you out, this could be an early indication of Sjogren's syndrome, an autoimmune disease that generally affects menopausal or postmenopausal Caucasian women.

Doctors will sometimes ask a patient to eat two saltines without water; Sjogren's victims cannot do it.

Copyright © 1998 by Gene Weingarten