You’re lying on your back and a group of strangers has sliced a dime-sized hole in your chest.  You’re fully conscious when they tell you to relax as they shove a suction tube into your lungs.  You scream in agony as the tube pokes at and sucks on the organs you rely on for life.  Despite your frantic pleading to stop the pain, they grab your arms and tell you to stick with it.  This ordeal lasts four excruciating minutes, after which they tell you that it yielded no results.  Now, they want to snake the tube down your throat and into your lungs.  You lie back and close your eyes.

This story was relayed to me recently by a relative of mine in who is in the hospital following some intensive surgery.  One of the after-effects of the surgery was fluid in or around their lungs.  The doctors weren’t sure which, so they opted for the external option first.  They were wrong.  I winced and shuddered in my chair as my relative told me that she once thought that having a car’s hood slam down on her middle finger and permanently deforming it was painful.  That was until she had this artificial leach inserted.  She told me she’d take the memory of that pain to her grave.  It was unforgettable.

Though it didn’t happen directly to me, the story serves as a strong reminder that anything can go wrong with your body at anytime.  And sometimes doctors don’t have the answers.  Sure, it’s a morbid thought, but a vast majority of us will have to endure comparable pain sometime before we die.  What amazed me about the story was that the doctors couldn’t even tell whether or not the fluid was outside or inside the lungs.  Shouldn’t that be a no-brainer?  Isn’t there some kind of scan that can clear that one up?

We have no idea what's wrong, but don't we look badass?

This isn’t some diatribe about the healthcare system.  You don’t care about my thoughts on that.  I’m not even interested enough (or politically-minded enough) to share them.  What does interest me though is how many bizarre, uncommon, and often incurable ailments that occur for seemingly no reason.  Of course, I’m not stumbling upon some brilliant revelation here.  You need look no further than television shows like Mystery Diagnosis to see that these things happen all of the time.

Basically, at any given moment your body could start to display symptoms of a dormant ailment that you’ve had for years.  That scares the crap out of me.  Your body is essentially a time bomb.  Here are some interesting and commonly misdiagnosed illnesses (props to Wikipedia, Wrongdiagnosis.com, and others):

• Micropsia – Also known as “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome”.  A malfunction in the brain where normal sized things appear very small in a person’s field of vision.  If a rhino starts appearing like a German Shepard, seek help my friend.
• Hemochromatosis – A buildup of iron in a person’s bloodstream that often has no early symptoms.  The concentration of iron can lead to liver, kidney, and heart disease before you even suspect anything is wrong.
• Polymyositis – a neuromuscular disease where your muscle fibers stop functioning, resulting in extreme fatigue.  Most times, sufferers (and doctors) think a simple cold is the root of the problem.  Your muscles can degenerate to the point where you can’t swallow.  There’s treatment, but no cure.  Creepy.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but hearing this story impacted me and made me pause to examine my own mortality for a moment.  No need to dwell on it.  Maybe I’ll post something a bit more uplifting next time