"HYPOCHONDRI-ITIS"

Our younger daughter when she was in the fifth grade had to stay home from school due to Pneumonia. We had her in a steam tent and she kept up with her school work at home. She was home about a month until she was better. This was in the spring of that year.

In the fall, we decided to take her to the doctor for a thorough examination, before the flu/cold season began. All checked out well at the doctors office.

One day I found her up in her room reading. She was reading the "World Book Encyclopedia". I thought this was a strange book to be reading. I checked what particular subject she was reading. Well, of all things, she was reading about cancer. She thought she had cancer. She had complained about this and that hurting her. It was never the same place that she was complaining about. She wanted to go to the doctor to see if that is what she had. I had told her that we had just had a thorough check-up and she checked out fine. She wanted a 2ND opinion!

I asked her, "If we go to get a 2ND opinion, and they don't find anything wrong, would she be OK with that?" She said she would. I had told her that I thought she had a good case of "Hypochondri-itis". She said, "Oh my, what is that?" I told her to look it up, since she was so adept with the World Book, I knew she would be able to locate this in the dictionary.

She looked it up and I asked her what it was. She said, "It is when you imagine you have something and it become so real you develop symptoms."

We had kept our promise to her, and took her to a well known Clinic in an adjoining city. They ran tests on her and one of the tests was checking her out for allergies. Well, she had tested out that she was quite allergic to all kinds of things. We started giving her allergy shots. Our friend Lucile (I wrote about her the other day) would give her weekly shots, since she was a former nurse.

Our older daughter had allergies (See ONE BIG PUFF). Allergies run in families.

Later I was selling Avon to a lady that had acute allergies and she said that allergies sometimes make one part of your body hurt and then another day, something else hurts. Bingo! This is why none of her aches she was describing was in the same spot.

Wisdom--Always be alert and check out things that your children are complaining about. It might be something that is easily controlled.