My son’s Covid test stoicism put my fear of discomfort to shame

At the age of 28 I discovered a cure for hypochondria: I married a nurse.

It turns out that for the most part, all I needed was a withering look from a medical professional every now and again to reassure me that I wasn’t dying. Better to get it at home than to trouble the GP.

I trace my hypochondriac tendencies back to a hernia operation at the age of 10. I had been a nervous child even before then, but being sent to the local hospital for urgent surgery put my anxiety levels through the roof.

Even now the episode is vivid in my memory. I’d gone to the GP in the afternoon, after telling my parents I thought there was a problem. The doctor agreed, and suggested she would refer me onwards the next day. Shortly after we arrived home, the GP phoned to say she had reflected on it and thought I probably ought to be taken in immediately.

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At that point I don’t think I was especially panicked. On the way in to A&E I hurdled a bollard, which was unwise in the circumstances.

I spent the evening being prodded and examined by what seemed to be every student doctor in the hospital. At about 9pm the consultant said he hoped to operate that night, but that he wouldn’t if it got beyond 11 o’clock: “I’m past my best when it gets towards midnight!” he joked.

At 11.10pm the consultant decided the op couldn’t wait, so I was wheeled in to be aneasthetised, reaching the count of nine before going under. I woke some hours later, woozy and in pain, on a children’s ward on which I was the only boy. The next day, the girls chose to watch Dirty Dancing on the ward TV: I was not impressed (nor, I suspect, was my mother).

Still, I was discharged within 24 hours, delivered by wheelchair to our car and thankful to be home. Never mind that the recurring night terrors I had experienced as a much younger child made a horrifying return for a week or so; I knew I would soon be up and running again. Sure enough, I was back at school within a fortnight.

Yet for at least the next two years I obsessed about the possibility of the same thing happening again. I would feel paralysed with worry, convinced that I could feel a pain or a see a swelling. I must have visited the GP half a dozen times until my particular conviction about another hernia subsided.

Even when I had moved on from the hernia infatuation, any number of other health worries persisted. Long headaches became imagined brain tumours, growing pains seemed potentially life-threatening.

I don’t want to overstate the case. Most of the time I was fine; a period of panic attacks was relatively short-lived and eventually I got used to the hypochondria as a foible. Still, at the age of 17 I experienced discomfort in my leg over a prolonged period and decided to see the GP once again. He asked what I thought the problem might be and I explained it could be a deep-vein thrombosis. “Yes,” he said, “you would think that wouldn’t you.” It was perhaps at this point that I knew I had to change. And with the assistance of my wife, I’ve made a reasonable fist of it.

That said, my latent health anxiety came to mind this week, when I took a coronavirus test: a lateral flow job that I thought it would be good to do in preparation for potentially seeing my parents next week.

Truthfully, I had been putting it off for a while. When the kids went back to school, I knew that it made sense for me to do one every now and again; but I didn’t fancy it. I’d last done a test 10 months ago, when I had Covid symptoms, and I’d hated it. I’d found it almost impossible to reach my tonsils without being sick, and had then given myself a nose bleed. What’s more, when the test came back negative, I refused to believe it.

This time round I avoided a bloodbath, but otherwise it was equally grim. And negative again, though no surprise now.

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By coincidence, however, my son came home from school later that day coughing and sniffing like a 60-a-day smoker. A cold, no doubt, but we knew we shouldn’t take any chances so the next morning we drove to a test site and nervously unwrapped the swab stick.

We had warned him of the discomfort, without going into the graphic detail of squirmy pain and potentially blood loss. I sat in the front, clenching my teeth, while my wife was her usual perfect nursing self, performing the procedure quickly and efficiently while sitting in the back seat. My son was cool, calm and didn’t flinch once.

I used to think hypochondria ran in the family. Perhaps it was just my imagination.