Who needs doctors when you can study your own diseases on Google? Roy Colbert, no stranger to exotic conditions, becomes embroiled in a teeming subculture.
Shingles never seemed like a very classy disease to me.
It sounded like something from the rat-infested below decks of a 17th-century galleon. Like scurvy. You wouldn't pick it up from ducking into a car door.
But this car door belonged to a 1990 Rover Vitesse, a sturdy beast, its bodywork often recycled for spacecraft.
And when I whanged my head into the door frame, I thought my diagnosis would merely be a head wound, perhaps with a drizzle of concussion.
"Did you have chicken pox as a child?" they asked at Urgent Doctors.
Well of course I did, I had everything as a child. It's a miracle I made it into double figures.
"Then it could possibly be shingles," she said.
As well as cellulitus, which Google had already told me was highly likely. Shingles to me sounded like a very wild punt. I raced home to Google.
Alas, shingles made a lot of sense.
The virus Rip Van Winkles quietly in a nerve for years and then leaps out at you when you crack it on the door of a 1990 Rover Vitesse.
The days went by, the head pain increased.
Pam's Paracetamol just wasn't doing the business.
As a kidney transplantee with the immune system of one-ply tissue, I can normally go straight to hospital, but hospital was locked down with the norovirus, and my GP was hopelessly busy, so it was back to Urgent Doctors.
They suggested codeine phosphate might have the edge over Paracetamol.
And I went back to Google and the teeming subculture that is disease discussion there.
A man could go half-crazy reading all this stuff.
Fortunately, I am well educated enough to know that a leaf from the Wommo Dommo tree in central Lima soaked in Jerusalem artichoke soup will not bring back an amputated limb.
But if you want to really wallow in your pain, this is the place.
Before going to Cure and Complications I went to the glass-half-empty area that was Shingles Can Last For.
I was hoping for days, as in, say, "up to 14 days".
I had had shingles for 12 days, and any more would just about do me in.
Unfortunately, the words "months" and even "years" kept coming up, as did the worrying "re-occur".
Neither of these words should be allowed in Google if the software has any ethical base at all, any sense of humanity.
Next, I needed an adjective, so I typed in Shingles Can Be.
I was hoping for "mild" and "overrated", but instead I got "horrendous" and "excruciating". Perhaps only hypochondriacs submit their medical experiences to Google. I asked around.
It's amazing how many people you know have either had shingles or are just one degree of separation away from it.
Face to face is different from Google. A healthy face cannot fool a sick face. And so I got a clinging far-too-long hug from the women, and "you poor bastard" from the men.
Diagnosis by Google must be the bane of all doctors. It must go on for years, it must reoccur.
Patients sitting there gabbling mispronounced septosyllables and interrupting the medical wisdom they have come to hear with their own half-baked witless word salad.
And yet . . . I went to Urgent Doctors five times in nine days and saw a different doctor each time.
I should mention in passing they were all wonderful.
Doctor Four tapped into her computer when I was trying to apportion headache among cellulitus, concussion, shingles and the 1990 Rover Vitesse.
"Look here," she said. I leaned over the desk.
She was on Google.
- By Roy Colbert.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
