Ever since I started going to the chiropractor on a regular basis my fingers have been numb. At first, I didn’t say anything – you know what they say about us Canadians and our legendary friendliness / politeness, right? Well, I’m pretty much like that even when it comes to what might be a fatal disease slight malaise of some sort (oops, getting ahead of myself here) – because well I figured it might be caused by the fact that my back used to be so misaligned that when moving things around back there it might be normal to experience some temporary discomfort in other parts of my body, and quite frankly I won’t be caught dead going to the hospital unless I carry something in an iced-filled plastic bag or because I just wake up already there. Please don’t view this as a critique on the Canadian health system; it’s just a guy thing. It turns out that being “polite” and a possible hypochondriac goes together about as much as trying to hook up you electrical service while kayaking down the Red River: If you don’t kill yourself, you’ll at least be shocked.

If you think you’re sick, please don’t Google your symptoms.

This is what I should’ve told myself. I mean, looking back on this, I could’ve guessed that I’d have some hypochondriac tendencies, because my brother is one and most of what he thinks he has runs in hereditary, fatal or contagious (or a combination of the three).

I should Google my symptoms.

This is what I told myself instead, and I’m pretty sure it was a huge mistake. Within seconds, I had 29 possible diagnosises (diagnosii? Diagnosis?) for “numbness of the fingers” from wrongdiagnosis.com, but how good is this site if it’s called wrong diagnosis? The danger of that website comes in the form of a “multiple symptoms checker”. I started going down the list of other symptoms, thinking that I possibly had all of them. That was no help. Back to the list of 29. Oh look: diabetic neuropathy, multiple sclerosis, alcoholic neuropathy, Guillaine-Barre syndrome and (drumroll) leprosy. I left frostbite out, because it only rarely happens in Canada in May.

Armed with that new knowledge (har!), I casually mentioned to my chiropractor that my fingers had been numb ever since mid March. He looked at my file and went “Oops” and said he totally forgot to work on my finger numbness since the beginning of April. He told me he was going to fix me and not to worry about anything.

So of course, I started worrying about everything.

(to be continued… hopefully)