Patraque

Internet, c’est génial quand on est malade et qu’on ne sait pas trop ce qu’on a. Hier soir, au terme de quelques investigations sur divers portails médicaux ayant pignon sur rue (sur toile ?), j’en ai conclu avec un flair infaillible que j’étais vraisemblablement en pleine phase initiale de la dengue (ou « petit palu », une maladie infectieuse des pays tropicaux), au vu des symptômes que je traîne depuis quatre jours.

La bonne nouvelle, c’est que je vais chez le toubib cet après-midi. Et comme il y a finalement peu de chances pour que j’aie réellement la dengue, je serai fixée sur mon sort.

Cette peu réjouissante recherche médicale a tout de même eu un effet positif : elle m’a rappelé le début de Trois hommes dans un bateau, un livre lu avec grand plaisir en colonie de vacances il y a très longtemps (20 ans ?), dans une édition colorée, vieillotte et passablement abîmée (pas celle-ci, puisque c’était en français, mais un volume pour enfants dans ce goût-là). Je n’y avais vraiment plus repensé depuis des lustres, mais tout bien considéré, le premier chapitre, dont voici un extrait (traduction française partielle ici), préfigure joliment avec un bon siècle d’avance les internautes hypocondriaques que nous sommes devenus.

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of « premonitory symptoms, » it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years.

Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. »

Jerome K. Jerome,
Three Men In A Boat, To Say Nothing Of The Dog